Dolly Thakore continues to be her candid best as she discusses a multitudinous career, her loves and heartbreaks in a recent memoir that has been nearly 40 years in the making
Dolly Thakore’s Peddar Road home is brimming with art by legends. Pic/Shadab Khan
In May 1982, when the late maverick adman and theatre personality Alyque Padamsee walked out of Dolly Thakore’s life, he hadn’t just left a void in her heart, but even her home. He took with him a bunch of paintings—prized souvenirs as they were, they had also come to embody his and Thakore’s over decade-long relationship and the life they had built. Akbar Padamsee, Anjali Ela Menon and MF Husain. All gone. “…how to explain to your child why the walls of his home were suddenly bare? That the signs of a family could be expunged so easily?” writes Thakore in her just released memoir Regrets, None (HarperCollins India).
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When she meets this writer on a rain-soaked afternoon in the same Peddar Road apartment that has been her home for over 50 years, those wounds, exacerbated by the bare walls, appear to have long been filled.
During the filming of Gandhi, with Simon Kaye, Michael Stewart, Rani Dubey, Ben Kingsley, Rohini Hattangadi, Saeed Jaffrey, Richard Attenborough, Billy Williams, November 1980
Husain’s faceless Mother Teresa hangs below a drawing of a faceless bearded man. It’s a work by former PM VP Singh. She was inspired to buy it, she tells us, after her son, theatre writer-director Quasar Thakore Padamsee, reminded her that, “I had a thing for men with beards”. On an adjacent wall, there’s an artwork of B Prabha and RK Laxman’s crow, a peaceful-looking one, created again on Quasar’s request, because he didn’t like the threatening crow she had bought for her wall. Behind us is Lalita Lajmi, Imtiaz Dharker, and many more that we confess, will take us some poring over, to identify. “I was probably among the first art auctioneers in the country,” Thakore shares, explaining how her collection grew.
In the last 39 years, these walls have become populated again, crowded even, with legends. It’s also taken all that time for 78-year-old Thakore to pen her tell-all. She admits, she first began thinking about the book, right after Padamsee walked out of her life. But it’s only in the last few years that she started putting all those manuscripts together with the help of Arghya Lahiri, who has written the book along with her.
With Alyque Padamsee and Quasar, 1978. Pics courtesy/Regrets, None, Harpercollins India
“My life has been quite exemplary, so I did want to share it,” says Thakore, a multi-hyphenate, long before the word became fashionable. “Everyone whom I had ever spoken to, told me to write down my thoughts. So, I began to pour my heart out.” She started writing this book, in earnest, on April 27, 1998. “The acceptance I was getting [for my work] prompted me to talk. But, I didn’t realise how much publishing entails and the effort it takes to bring out a book. Back in the day, you wrote your book, sent it to the press, and it got published.”
Thakore’s career was defined by abundance. A theatre actor in school and college, she went on to excel as a sub-editor, copywriter, model coordinator, radio host, television newsreader, casting director and auctioneer. “I never pursued anything. All of this fell into my lap. But I learnt [on the way]. And therefore, my advice to people is to never be scared; take on the challenges. Hard work is never going to fail you,” she adds.
Thakore reading news on television
The glut of celebrity memoirs this writer has read in the recent past, have played very safe, to the point that they start appearing to be nothing, but collation of
newspaper and magazine articles. Thakore’s memoir, however, is a breath of fresh air.
She is brutally honest about herself, her family, her choices, affairs and the people she has learned to love and hate. She was once blacklisted from television after she announced, with a smile, that Indira Gandhi had been defeated in the elections. All her skeletons are out of the closet. “I was the dark one. The other one,” she writes in the book, about the self-doubt she experienced as a child.
“Look, at the age of two, I was sent off to my grandparents. I met my parents only during the holidays. At the time, psychologically, it does play on you. You are not informed or educated enough, but emotionally somewhere it hankers. I presume it did,” she says, of why she felt neglected. “This went on for a long time. I only started living with my parents when I was six. Therefore, I have always craved love. I had very good friends, and then, when youth took over, and the biological instincts kicked in, I naturally began to want a wonderful relationship.”
Born Dolly Rawson into a conservative Protestant Christian family—her father was in the Air Force—she had quite a peripatetic life, moving between cities, before going to Delhi’s Miranda House, where she was able to pursue theatre more seriously. A serendipitous opportunity to work at the BBC, saw her leave for London, where she worked as an editorial assistant in the Overseas Information Service. During this time, she also got to take on Hindi to English translation work for the Central Office of Information. Here, she met and fell in love with Dilip Thakore, with whom she’d marry and settle in Bombay. Just before the wedding, Dilip got her to sign an open marriage contract, a bold move for the time. “Dilip was well read and quite evolved. I think it [the contract] was fantastic. But in real life, we were like any other young couple, making a life together. We had our arguments, too.”
It’s around this time that she fell in love with Padamsee, who was already married to stage veteran Pearl Padamsee. They were theatre’s first couple. When her affair became known, she remembers being shunned by people, with many not wanting to talk to her. The guilt continued to weigh on her. When years later, Padamsee moved in with singer Sharon Prabhakar, she remembers telling herself, “Sharon did to me what I had done to Pearl”. “My career kept me busy. I didn’t have the time to mourn or complain to anybody. My friends Protima Bedi and Valerie Agha stood by me through all of this. While I certainly did hold it against Alyque, and I am still resentful about the fact that it happened, it washed itself away. Today, we are one large family.”
Raising Quasar as a single mother, came naturally to her. They are close, but not in an intimate way, she admits. “He was in boarding school for most of the time. We talk a lot on the phone, but I don’t know half of the things he is doing. I am much closer to my friends. But, some, I no longer have. Most of them are busy playing the harp upstairs,” she quips.
In the lockdown, she has kept herself busy moderating and judging events over Zoom. She misses going to the theatre, but in between reading books and watching Netflix, “I don’t really know where my time goes”. Most evenings, she is busy with the virtual rehearsals of her upcoming digital play, Turning Point by Meher Pestonji, which will premiere on September 5. “I am enjoying it immensely. It’s such a new challenge. And to think I am doing this at my age… it’s fabulous.”
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