Sushil Poddar explores Khalid Mohamed’s Not Quite Family, an unflinchingly honest journey through Bollywood’s myths, memories, relationships, and contradictions, celebrating a biography that resonates with remarkable candour, emotional depth, and enduring cinematic truth.

Not Quite Family—well, I took some time to finish reading a 70mm, stereophonic magnum opus by Khalid Mohamed. A 70mm, because I could peer through the spectacle of the expanse of Bollywood through the book, and stereophonic because it created an engrossing soundscape of umpteen narratives, mute yet resonating with the reader.

Whatever you call it—drama, melodrama, action-thriller, romance, comedy, or even horror—the book paints a kaleidoscope of multifaceted hues of the characters, on and off the screen, and the events it describes through its assorted 44 chapters in unvarnished truth and reality. Known for the use of allegory, Khalid has unwittingly let the script of the biography unspool with remarkable honesty as I flipped through its pages, cover to cover. And then, I stumbled upon a sentence, somewhere in Chapter 37:  “SHE relishes playing the part of an enigma and an open book simultaneously, and it works for her although she is neither.”

The Candour Behind The Allegories

Having an ear for the scuttlebutt in Bollywood, which any journalist would, this is a specimen of several allegories I just talked about. Despite fostering a sagacious relationship with SHE, Khalid pertinaciously wrote what he felt about her. Not only this, but there is a catena of such “factoids” narrated in the book which vouchsafes the frankness and candour with which he took the cudgel of writing a biography of a family which is just not-quite-a-family.

Twenty-five or twenty-six years back, I literally used to savour his reviews of films in TOI. I would wait for them every Sunday. Though I found it difficult to attune myself to the cadence of his writing style, the review would, most of the time, be a guiding factor in deciding whether to watch a particular movie or not. At that time, I knew Khalid only by his name. I didn’t possess any schema of his personality. Having read this book now, and before that through my few quiet tête-à-têtes with him over the past few years, I now know him as a person. I am so proud that the imagery I had of him 25 years back still holds true now. Actually, it’s better.

The Making Of Khalid Mohamed

I think Khalid was born to do film journalism, which, in his formative career years, he didn’t realise. Did his happenstance interview of the McCartneys (Beatle) at Santacruz Airport while he was still professionally doing crime reporting foretell what he was up to? He didn’t realise it, but his boss, Rao, at TOI, clairvoyantly felt so. Much to his chagrin, Rao convinced him—not convinced, but actually coerced him—to do reporting for the entertainment industry. Having been cornered, Khalid had to give in.

When Bollywood Becomes Family

As Khalid says, TOI has been his womb, nursery, and alma mater. It was. It still is. And the rest is history.

Not Quite Family is testimony to it. On each page of the book, I saw Khalid somewhere here, somewhere there, and somewhere he used to be. He was breathing in a family that’s not-quite-a-family.

As Khalid rightly ruminated, no amount of reading can supplant direct experience. Incidentally, that’s not true in this case, alluding to readers getting direct experience while reading, thanks to his narration being impeccable, unimpeachable, effulgent, and, at several places, bold and barefaced—so much so that, at times, he even bared himself and didn’t mince words in exposing his own follies and vulnerabilities.

Picture this: he painstakingly wrote a biography of a marquee name in the industry, which he later penitently expressed, matter-of-factly, that he was not at all proud of, and said, like all commissioned books, this one was a hagiography.

Here are the two concluding sentences of the book: “The boy-man has conclusively learnt that there is no free lunch in B-town. We aren’t family and can never be.”

A Pinup Calendar Of A Life

A perpetual seeker of surrogacy, which he himself confesses, it is Bollywood which has unstintingly adopted him and has been sustaining him. Though finding himself somewhere at the fringe of its border-scape with growing age, he is still inescapably tethered to it. A sliver of the umbilical bond still holds him to the industry. 

The book chortles quintessentially about the transcendental quietude of Khalid through his own ups and downs, from sunup to sundown, in otherwise Not Quite Family. The book is, surefire, a pinup calendar of Khalid Mohamed.

Consider reading it.