Open Book: Not Quite a Memoir

By Kubbra Sait

At five, she took the stage by storm as Indira Gandhi. At eight, she was bullied. At ten, she hit rock bottom. At thirteen, she discovered a personality development programme that changed her life forever...

From being an awkward teen in braces to becoming a sought-after master of ceremonies to successfully portraying the transgender Cuckoo on the hit Netflix series Sacred Games, Kubbra Sait has broken boundaries and made a name for herself. Her ordinary upbringing notwithstanding, Kubbra is an extraordinary woman who quickly learnt how to deal with the harsh ways of the world and shape her life successfully despite them. The bullying she encountered in school as a child helped her face nepotism in Bollywood, an industry known to favour its own, often at the cost of talented 'outsiders'.

Part memoir, part inspirational treatise, Open Book lays bare the struggles, achievements, joys and failures, and the many reinventions of a shy and anxious Bangalore girl who dreamt of making it in the competitive world of cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jun 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9789354893841

Kubbra Sait

Kubbra Sait is an Indian actress best known for her performance in Netflix's Sacred Games. The other web series she has been part of include Illegal: Justice, Out of Order and The Verdict: State vs Nanavati. She has also starred in films like Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, Jawaani Jaaneman, Sultan and Ready, among others.

Book preview

Prologue

Teething Troubles

Ilearnt about pain—both physical and emotional—much before I learnt about other things in life. My story begins with an issue of a serial extraction. The extraction of my teeth, that is.

The first pain I experienced as a child was purely physical. I had been abandoned both by the architecture of my teeth and by the tooth fairy about whom I learnt only when I had grown up substantially, after years of doctor visits, and after I had a set of colourful braces attached to my teeth. And I realized that although the tooth fairy had been busy, collecting loose teeth from under the pillows of slumbering children in return for some money, she, or he, had completely skipped my address. That was why, when I was thirteen years old, I would find myself at a dentist’s clinic on Commercial Street, Bangalore, twice a month, my tiny legs swinging from his swanky new imported chair while he tried to chisel the rogue geography of my teeth into submission.

The doctor was pretty sure that I would have the braces on for just one year, post which I’d have an enviable smile. He had lied. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, because I wore braces pretty much throughout my entire adolescence, and my teeth, well, they just got weirder with every consultation.

However, I was unique.

When a young person needs to wear braces, they need to get four teeth extracted to create space for the wisdom teeth that will one day make an appearance. So, I was packed off to get an X-ray of my mouth for this. The results were truly surprising.

It appeared that I didn’t even have the root for wisdom teeth in my mouth. Like nada, none, zilch … no indication of wisdom ever in this creature to live and walk this earth for an indefinite time.

It was a joke, and also, perhaps, a sign for all those unwise situations in which I would find myself, and about which you’ll read in this book.

1

The Ground beneath My Feet

‘Cobra!’ they called out and giggled. ‘Green eyes like a snake. If she bites you, you will die!’

I walked past the voices—my gaze pinned on my feet—as I made my way to class.

I read on a trusted wellness website that, as per the World Atlas, only 2 per cent of the world’s population has green eyes. One would think green eyes were coveted. But here, in my new school, green eyes were snake eyes; they couldn’t be trusted.

The teasing had become a daily affair, and I was learning to build a wall around myself. But even then, the irony did not escape me. My name, Kubra (spelt with a single ‘b’ back then), meant ‘big one’ in Arabic. My identity, my name, was chosen by Mumma. God alone knows how many names she went through with a fine-tooth comb to pick one that would represent my personality, one which I would continue to inhabit for as long as I walked this planet. She didn’t want my name to be ordinary or usual; it had to be special and powerful. A name that would reflect the person I was to become. It had to be impactful. She was the only one who understood the depth of this name. I didn’t get it then because, at that moment, in school, I felt invisible.

However, this was not always the case.

At home, as a toddler, before I went to school, I was special. I had the best clothes; Mumma would scour through fashion catalogues—not the fancy ones you see on Pinterest, but the OG books that looked and felt hefty. She would pick a collar from this design and a button piping from another and choose a separate bow—sometimes a sailor blue—from a random picture and request Balaji tailor in Vannarpet to stitch it for me. Proper couture in a part of the city where no one remembers me or my name, but I was the child who strutted and walked the walk.

I was a very happy, spritely child. When I smiled, the world smiled back at me. From pre-nursery to third grade, I was the kid who didn’t care about the world, a child who didn’t give a damn. I loved to scribble with chalk on a blackboard, a habit I have to this day … just that now I use a black marker on a whiteboard. For pre-nursery, I attended the Army school, nestled in the heart of Bangalore. I remember the good old GM Motors car servicing workshop on the corner and all those fancy cars we crossed as we rode past them on Mumma’s TVS moped. We had to pedal-start it back then; it was only much later, when I was in college, that we upgraded to the self-start model. Funnily, I wasn’t embarrassed about the TVS in school, but I did park it far—very, very far—away when I was in college. I loved this school, with its humongous playground, manual carousels and my teacher Prema Miss. She saw me with the most loving eyes. I was her pet.

When I was five years old, my mother dressed me up as Indira Gandhi for the yearly fancy dress competition at the Army school we went to in Victoria Layout. On stage, I walked up to the microphone, yanked it towards me, and said self-assuredly, ‘Saare desh ke bachchon bolo: Jai Hind.’ I still remember that moment as if it were only yesterday. It was the first time I had been on stage, and I loved every moment of it.

Once, Mumma told me that Prema Miss had said to her, ‘You must change Kubra’s school. Your daughter is very smart, and this isn’t the place to hone her personality.’ Mumma took Prema Miss’s advice, and I soon left the Army school. In retrospect, I have come to believe big and grand may not be the best prescription for everyone. For some, the gradual and familiar can prove to be more nurturing, helping people discover their personalities. I found a voice in Army school and lost it in the big institution.

The brain is a funny thing. With time, it learns the art of self-depreciation. It evolves, changes and absorbs every second of its life. And so did I. But not in the way you think. I evolved into a timid person, into someone my family didn’t recognize. I absorbed the fear that was laid out in front of me, and I shed my brimming, unselfconscious confidence.

When we started looking for admission into a big school, Mumma and Papa were turned down by many institutions because there were no seats.

At the dinner table, I’d often hear my parents talk to each other. ‘What to do … seat nahin mil rahi hai…’ I heard this phrase so many times that, one day, I dragged my little chair up to my parents at the table and said, ‘Main meri seat leke jaaoon? [Can I take my chair?]’ This confidence didn’t last for quite a few years after that, though.

When I was four years old, I joined a public school. In the first few weeks, I was excited about school. I was an easy-going child with an outgoing personality. I wasn’t shy to do things other children stayed away from. My report cards from those early years are glowing with praise. But two phrases stick out even then. She’s ‘distracted’ and ‘lacks concentration’. These phrases came from the fact that I had a gregarious personality.

Yes, by the time I was in Grade 3, I was still ‘distracted’. I didn’t sit still; sometimes I scribbled on the blackboard. But as the days wore on, my outgoing nature came to be frowned upon by the formal educational system. God help us if a child should possibly be happy and uninhibited. In rigid systems, it is common practice to stunt the growth of an individual who comes from a different mould. But are we really born to fit every shoe we try to wear? At school, I found myself being schooled in ‘correct’ behaviour, trained in docility instead of self-discovery, in preparation for the proverbial successful life. I mean, who can possibly be happy, spontaneous, and eventually make something worthy of their life someday? Right?

Gah! I am not a princess to draw references from fairy tales, but this story does have a happy end after all. It helped me realize that I was born to be a warrior.

So, anyway … I had to be ‘fixed’, and treatment came in the form of Mrs Naidu. ‘She will set you right. She will twist your curls back into place,’ I was told by a few teachers. This warning, this message of doom, rankled within me, and even before I had met her, I felt the first stirrings of fear, rising from the pit of my stomach, burning up my throat to heat up my cheeks, leaving an acrid taste on my tongue and making my eyes swim.

The gloomy image I had formed of Mrs Naidu in my mind did injustice to the flesh-and-bone person when I finally met her. She was worse, much scarier. The day Mrs Naidu strode into the classroom, I knew she would destroy whatever little of the child I had in me.

Mrs Naidu would stalk into class, agile like a panther, scanning the room with her sharp eyes. She had the distinct ability to spot that one thing (or person) that was out of place. She’d stare down children until we were reduced to a puddle of sweat. I think she secretly enjoyed watching us choke on our fears. She knew she possessed the perfect amount of terror to manoeuvre those who strayed, back onto the path of obedience. God! I never liked a single interaction with this fortress of a woman.

When she settled down, she would release her severe gaze across the room, and when it would find me, it would stop. She would then walk to where I was sitting, and bend so that her face levelled with mine. Suddenly, she would slam her hand on my table, making my blood freeze. She’d leave me there, either paralysed or punished. So common was this occurrence that I, too, would be ready with my own strategy. Before classes began, I’d sit down and keep my eyes trained on the door like a sniper, so that when Mrs Naidu walked in and decided to make her way towards me, I was ready to duck under my desk to avoid confrontation. I think all this intimidation made me forget what it was to be a child. I was convinced I was terrible. I was made to believe that if I fell, I would never rise.

At this school, discipline was valued above all else, and although I tried, maybe, I didn’t try hard enough. I turned into a child who was petrified to do or say anything out of turn. I would never ask or answer if I wasn’t directly addressed in our busy class of forty-two children.

Thereafter, the punishments came in thick and fast.

Not a day went by when I would not have to kneel in a corner of the classroom, or eat lunch alone, or be teased by my classmates. And as time passed, I began to stick out like a sore thumb. Anything that went wrong in class was attributed to me.

The daily humiliations and punishment began to change me. It would be an understatement to say that school became hell. Every day spent there fattened the ball of fear I was carrying inside me, growing like a virus, gnawing away at the happy, carefree child until there was nothing left of her but a memory. All that was left was a dark, hollow shell in which fear echoed and amplified itself. These changes began to seep outwards into tangible aspects too.

‘She is distracted.’

‘Low concentration.’

‘Slow.’

My official school diary was the first item of its evidence, the colour of ink on those pages changing from pleasant blues to reds. Every remark on those pages cut through me like a knife. Not only were they humiliating, but they were also vindicating this new lack that I had begun to feel those days: a lack of self-worth. I was wound up as tight as a spring. I was raw, like an open wound.

These remarks would’ve stayed in my heart for a very long time if Mumma hadn’t noticed something had shifted inside me. The shift in my essence, the difference. She saw that I was no longer the child who stood up from a fall. I was no longer her ‘big one’.

One day, when I was in Class 4, I returned from school, dropped my bag on the floor and whimpered, ‘I won’t go to school again.’ I cried, rolling myself into a ball of lifeless flesh. Mumma didn’t react to my pain. She stood there, calmly, willing to listen. She held me in her arms and allowed me to sob for what felt like hours.

I had not seen this version of my mother; from what I knew, she was a disciplinarian too. I was terrified of telling her what was happening up until now because I was certain she just wouldn’t get it. Now I found a new kind of strength in Mumma. She saw I was a different child, one who was neither big nor great. This child was meek, she was timid.

Mumma started looking for another school. She knew what was best for me. I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now if she knows what’s best for her. But decisions for her children she’s always known to make. She was, after all, the stand-in monitor of our family. You know, the one who replaces the actual monitor (aka the proxy parent) but doesn’t get the badge?

And when she enrolled me into a new school, after a long time, for just one moment, I felt like I could breathe again.

At this point, my mind travels back to an incident when I was at the public school and living in fear of Mrs Naidu. There was a little boy, let’s call him Karan, in my class. He was round, large, and not quite as clever as the other boys. Yet, he had the most sparkling laughter. Maybe that’s why he, too, was bullied like me.

At the parent–teacher meeting, for which my proxy parent was present, Papa was told, ‘Kubra has potential but is awfully distracted, Mr Sait. She is always punished and made to stand in the corner. She used to mingle, but now she just sits at the back of the class and sulks. I am sure there is room for improvement.’

Without looking at me, Papa agreed with a smile. ‘Oh, distracted is something we’ve heard about Kubra since she first went to school. Academics? How is she doing?’

I stood silently, my head hung in shame, while the teacher told Papa I was capable of doing better.

Next up was Karan and his father, who vaguely resembled the actor Kader Khan. Karan’s father had walked in holding his son’s hand.

‘Yes, ma’am, what rank has my son got?’ he chirped.

Karan stood thirty-eighth in a class of forty-two students.

‘Oh, great then!’ Karan’s father said. ‘Last time, he was second from last, now he is fourth. Very proud of you, son.’

The backing he received from his father left little room for failure in Karan’s life. He may have been a target for bullies in school, but he was least afraid of his father, of report cards or of the system.

Some people grow through their trauma and never heal. Unresolved emotions can raise their ugly heads when least expected and become the subtext of one’s life. More often than not, one becomes the canvas for their release.

It is human nature to hoard things that don’t serve us any longer. Why should it be any different with emotions?

Bullying has many forms, but it almost always stems from personal inadequacy. So do meanness and insensitivity towards others. Those who are suffering the most will project themselves onto others who can’t stand up for themselves.

I’ve been bullied inside the classroom when I didn’t know better. Outside the classroom, I’ve learnt how to defend myself.

Years later, during my stint as a master of ceremonies, I received a call. ‘I want you to host my son’s