Mah-i-Meer and
Zindagi Kitni Haseen Hai) wants him to perform with a free-flowing, instinctive, promptness he says. I was already pre-warned by Anjum a night before to expect a dramatic change.
“With Anjum I’ve learned to let things go,” he explains. “But only because it is also a part of the character I am playing,” he says as I pick up a cup of tea. I notice that that his mug has PHL’s Sheheryar the actor’s namesake character printed on it.
PHL’s Sheheryar’s was a different extension of the person I knew; in fact, the actor shifts and appends parts of his personality on to his characters, he told me once…but doesn’t every actor?
Photos by the writer
At the corner of a bus-stand near Allah-wala Chowrangi, Sheheryar Munawar Siddiqui chases after a girl and her best friend. Like most young ne’er-do-wells, he gets a good piece of her mind. Dejected and shot down like his ilk, the stubborn roadside Romeos he persists.
A brief lunch-break and a quick zuhr prayer later, Sheheryar is at it again: this time, replacing his cool-denim jacket and jeans is a shalwar, a gaudy T-shirt and bitingly bright, coloured sunglasses. He runs out of a corner house a few blocks away from our last location on Sharae Faisal, gets on a heavy bike and chases the girl again. This time, she’s in a van, returning from college, and his expression is different; he is smiling from ear to ear.