I feel that people often assume that I will have something more to offer. It certainly isn’t how I perceive myself. It’s just the legacy that I am taking forward.”

Tazeen Hussain shrugs and smiles.

It’s a prodigious legacy to shoulder, but Tazeen is accustomed to it. As the daughter of one of Pakistan’s finest actors, the late Talat Hussain, she is probably used to the expectations directed towards her.

It’s probably all in a day’s work for her: people making observations on her return to TV drama acting with last year’s Yunhi, playing the forlorn phuppo (paternal aunt) with pepper-grey hair and the saddest eyes, and then adding, ‘She’s Talat Hussain’s daughter’; reviewers describing her portrayal of a distraught mother in search for her daughter in the mini-series Jurm and adding in a reference to her father; images of her earlier projects from two decades ago filtering out on social media and the comments below the pictures recalling the work of her father.

Yes, she is Talat Hussain’s daughter and the great thing is, she’s also quite a fine actress.

The talented actor returned to the screen after a 20-year hiatus. But it wasn’t fame or money that motivated Tazeen Hussain’s return, after finding satisfaction in teaching. After all, she is the daughter of the immensely versatile Talat Hussain and she takes things in her stride, much like the way she carries her late father’s legacy…

I meet Tazeen Hussain for a discussion on her professional and personal journey. Her hair is dyed black and she’s barely wearing any make-up, having come to meet me after teaching all morning, and planning to rush off to a drama shoot right after our interview. It’s a hectic routine but it’s borne out of passion. “I derive happiness from acting and, even more so, from teaching. And as long as I enjoy both, I think I will do both,” she says.

Her eyes speak volumes, much like they do on TV — they light up as she talks about work and quips about what a tyrant she is to her three children. There is also sadness. With her father having passed away only recently, a considerable chunk of our interview focuses on her reminiscences of him.

Remembering Talat Hussain

“My father was a star, but we weren’t a ‘star family’,” recounts Tazeen. “We had just one car and, for the longest time, it would be a second-hand one. I think Abba got his first new car around the time I started university.

“He would take his car and we would travel through public transport — rickshaws, taxis, buses. My mother did not know how to drive. And we went and came back from school in vans. It was all pretty normal.”

She continues, “Yes, it would be a pleasure travelling with him or going to restaurants with him because he would get the star treatment. We wouldn’t have to wait at the doctor’s for our turn or at a restaurant for a table!” she laughs. “When I got married, things changed for me and I suddenly had to start waiting like everyone else.

“Abba called acting his gift. He was passionate about it and his driving force was never money. Yes, he made money, but he also had an artistic temperament. He would be doing one role and choose not to do another because he didn’t agree with it. The stability in our home came from my mother, who had a regular job.”

Did she attend star-studded awards nights and dinners as a child? “No, we barely ever went!” she says. “Abba kept his professional life and personal life very separate and, perhaps, one reason for this was that my mother was a working woman. She had to get up in the morning and go to work and so, if Abba had to attend an awards ceremony or an embassy dinner, he would usually go alone.

“What we did get to do a lot with our father was go to the cinema and watch Pakistani and Hollywood movies, see theatre plays and visit art galleries and museums. He would take us but never impose his opinions on us. He just wanted us to get exposure to diverse cultures.

“He even wanted us to learn Persian, because a lot of our cultural heritage is derived from Persian literature. And if we didn’t know the language, all that knowledge would be lost to us.”

Did you learn Persian then, I ask her. She smiles. “I tried, but I am not that great at languages. My sister was much better at learning it.”

Tazeen adds, “The one place that we did not want to go to with Abba was the beach. He wouldn’t let us dip more than our toes because he would be afraid. We would be lamenting over having brought him along and vowing not to bring him with us the next time!”

Did he think that she had talent, back when she first ventured into acting more than two decades ago?

“Yes, he really liked my work,” she says, “and he used to scold me when I put my career on hold. He would tell me that I was wasting my talent and I would tell him that he needed to understand that, at that point, I needed to prioritise my children and manage my home.

“Then, when I started teaching, he became very happy. He was so proud. He would tell everyone that my daughter is now a professor, teaching at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture!”

Life, and priorities

This steers our conversation to Tazeen’s own trajectory. She had been new to the acting field, having acted in a handful of telefilms, short plays and serials, when she decided to take a break that lasted for 20 years. Why?

“It was just … life!” says Tazeen. “After I got married, I worked in about two to three serials and I was mostly dependent on my father-in-law and my mother-in-law for taking care of my baby when I was gone. But then, when my daughter hadn’t even started going to school, my father-in-law fell seriously ill. I didn’t want to go to work leaving my child with a stranger, and my own mother was also a working woman, so I couldn’t leave my daughter with her all the time as well.

“I made a conscious decision to stop acting. My daughter was about to go to school and I wanted to pick her and drop her. Later, I had my other two babies. I feel that it is very important to spend these initial years with your children.

“I did start teaching design around the same time that I left acting, first part-time and later full-time. Acting on television is just a really time-consuming commitment. Imagine shooting at night, leaving your children with someone else and then rushing back to them in the morning!”

Of course, life has changed for her now — her children have grown up and she got widowed about four years ago — and Tazeen has made a return to acting, taking on the long work hours with great gusto. On the day that we meet, she is all set to pull an all-nighter on set, shooting an on-screen wedding for a drama.

“It means that, once we’re done with hair, make-up and wardrobe, we start shooting around nine at night and get done at five in the morning!”

I observe that, while weddings look very festive in TV dramas, they are probably the most tedious to shoot. “Oh, they are very tedious, but it’s all part of the game,” says Tazeen. “There is also a charm to it, because the entire cast is together and you are replicating the festivity of a desi wedding.”

Her schedule now involves balancing her acting commitments with her work as a full-time faculty member at Karachi’s Habib University. Is it difficult balancing two completely disparate fields?

“I do have to choose dramas that I am able to manage with my teaching schedule,” she says. “And because I just don’t have the time to sign on to multiple scripts, I only have the window to sign on to roles that truly appeal to me. It doesn’t matter to me if the character that I am playing is not the main one, but it does need to have a trajectory. It should be a role that I enjoy playing.”

Looking over her brief oeuvre since her comeback, she really has managed to play roles that aren’t right off a cookie-cutter and have shades to them. In a landscape where roles for actors above a certain age tend to be repetitive and unidimensional, how did this motley crew of interesting characters come her way?

“Fate,” she smiles. “I am not big on planning and just go with the flow. If something is meant for me, it will come to me. My return to TV acting started simply through some chance messaging on Instagram. My very first play, back in the day, had been with director Mehreen Jabbar, and she had shared a few clips from it. A friend of mine tagged me on the post and commented that I should return to TV acting, to which I casually replied that I was thinking about it. The next thing I knew, Mehreen had reached out to me and I was working with her in Jurm!

“And then, on the set of Jurm, I was working with actor-director Mohammed Ehteshamuddin and he asked me if I wanted to work more. I told him that I was just testing things out, to which he asked, are you enjoying yourself? I said that I was and, if he had something in the works, could he let me know? Six or seven months later, he reached out to me with the script of a drama that he was working on, Yunhi. Eventually, Yunhi ended up airing before Jurm.”

She continues: “I’ve been lucky to have got to work with some great directors and actors. The energy on set really matters, and I have acted alongside some very positive actors — among them, Maya Ali, Maha Hasan and Tahira [Imam] Apa in Yunhi, Shahzad Sheikh in Zulm, Mawra Hocane in Let’s Try Mohabbat and, now, Yumna Zaidi in my upcoming drama. So many intelligent, professional actors who are also very good human beings!”

At this point in her acting career, what motivates Tazeen to take on a role — how meaty the character is or how good the money is?

“I would only sign on to a role that fulfils me as an actor,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that I’ll work for free. Getting paid fairly for my work is my right. But money would never be my top priority. I think that I got that from my father.”

Talat Hussain, his last days

We broach the topic of her father again: even though there had been talk of him not being well, no one really knew that he was chronically ill until news of his death came through.

“We never really talked much about his illness,” she says, adding, “Abba had dementia for more than four or five years. He was a robust, healthy man — no blood pressure, heart or diabetic issues. He eventually died of a lung infection, but it was truly dementia that was the silent killer in his last years. It just kicked in very quickly. We don’t know what he went through but it was very painful for the people who cared for him.

“It isn’t easy when you are sitting with your father and he suddenly asks you who you are. Or to hear him declare that you are a bad person because he is unable to recognise you. Or when you see that he can’t hold his fork properly or sign his name, or read a book. My father had been the most avid reader. He had a library of about 15,000 books that we are now trying to organise. When he got ill, my mother would say that he kept turning over the same page of a book again and again, unable to process the words.

“It was tough for all of us, but I think it really took its toll on my mother,” she continues. “She had spent her whole life with this man, a man who would always be reading and writing, and to watch him like this was hell for her. She primarily took care of him along with my brother and his family, who live with my parents. Abba could forget the rest of us, but he always recognised my mother, my bhabi [sister-in-law] and her daughter — his granddaughter — who he doted upon!”

She continues, “Sometimes, we would play Abba’s dramas for him on TV and we would ask him who that was on screen. And he would say, ‘Yeh main hoon’ [It’s me]. When we asked him if he wanted to keep watching, he would say no.

“This one time, when he hadn’t yet stopped driving, he took the car and was nowhere to be found. He hadn’t taken his cellphone with him and so we didn’t know how to contact him. For five hours, we searched through the city for him, even going to the Arts Council, which was always very supportive and willing to help out. Eventually, he came back home on his own. I asked him where he had gone. He said that he had forgotten the way and finally someone had told him where his house was.

“I said that he should have asked someone for help earlier, to which he replied, ‘How could I? I am Talat Hussain. How could I tell them that I had forgotten the way?’ So, even though he was losing his memory, he still remembered that he was Talat Hussain.”

Some years before her father’s demise, Tazeen had also lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. She also speaks about that particular episode of her life: “I believe that whatever happens, it’s because God wills it. Having accepted this, the next step for me was to figure out what to do next.

“It helped that I had a career, but my role as a parent changed. I also had a great support system — great family, friends and in-laws. And Zahid, my husband, had been loved by a lot of people. They would all come to me, offering help, support and just speaking about him in a good way. It helped me move forward in life.”

She pauses. “I have lost a husband and I have lost a father. Somehow, the loss of a father is a very different ball game. Perhaps, after Zahid’s death, I had a role to take on, responsibilities to handle. After Abba, I didn’t have any of that.”

Tazeen smiles fondly. “I think Abba realised that I was acting again. Yunhi had just started airing and I played it on TV for him and asked him who he was seeing on-screen? He said, ‘It’s you — you have let your hair go white like an old woman!’”

It’s black now, I observe. “Yes, all through my youth, I let my hair be pepper-grey, and now that all my friends are moving towards greys, I decided to go for a dye!”

This is how you are generally, too, I observe to her. “Yes, I like to do things differently,” she agrees.

And so, while other actors around her may be embroiled in a fast-paced rat race, Tazeen Hussain is treading carefully, going with the flow, letting things happen. Her peers may be lured by a fat pay cheque but she would rather look for a role that fulfils her. Many may be dazzled by the glamour of show business, but she professes to be just as happy, if not more, teaching to a roomful of students. And she tells me that she wants to push herself in new directions, learning how to dance, getting the hang of improv, and taking on new challenges.

The legacy Tazeen is carrying may be a heavy-duty one — but carrying it is second nature to her. And she’s carrying it well.

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 25th, 2024