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Beginning with the intense summer day of his premature birth and the loss of his older brother, it follows how his parents’ anxieties shaped his upbringing. The narrative then moves into his frail childhood and the decision to train in pehelwani, introducing the mentor Mullah Pehelwan and the demanding wrestling routines that become the foundation of his physical and emotional discipline.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/an-ordinary-life-a-memoir/318051/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/an-ordinary-life-a-memoir/318051.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Lucas Martin","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-09-23","2026-09-20",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":44},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"What makes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s entry into the world especially significant in the memoir?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"The memoir emphasizes the sweltering 19th of May 1974, the intense conditions during Ammi’s labour, and Nawazuddin’s premature birth, contrasted with his brother Shamsuddin’s earlier death.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"Why does the memoir introduce pehelwani training, and who becomes Nawazuddin’s mentor?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"After years of continued weakness, his father puts him into pehelwani wrestling, where he is guided by Mullah Pehelwan, a respected wrestler and trainer running an akhara in Budhana.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What kind of wrestling routine does Mullah Pehelwan prescribe at the start?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"He assigns large numbers of squats (uthak-baithak) and continues with a full daily schedule of demanding exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, dumb-bell weight training, core work, and deep stretching.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},318051,1790023647,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":44,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},8796095360427,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_994ba38a5ba835b3df7d355c54d3ed8d","NAWAZUDDIN SIDDIQUI  \nan ordinary life  \nA Memoir  \nwith Rituparna Chatterjee  \nPENGUIN BOOKS  \nContents  \nPART I: BUDHANA  \n1. Teetar Pehelwan  \n2. Patta Prodigy  \n3. Abbu  \n4. Ammi  \n5. My Colourful Childhood  \n6. Schooldays  \n7. Of Love Letters and Kites  \n8. Nani ka Ghar  \n9. The Chemist Incident  \n10. The Haunting Dream  \nPART II: YOUTH  \n11. Accidental Meanderings into Chemistry, Theatre and BNA  \n12. Adventures at the National School of Drama  \nPART III: MUMBAI  \n13. The Dark Night  \n14. Relationships  \n15. Shamas, My Guardian Angel  \n16. Aaliya  \n17. Shora, My Miracle  \nPART IV: ACTING  \n18. Anurag Kashyap  \n19. ‘The Drama King of India’  \n20. Success  \nIllustrations  \nAcknowledgements  \nFollow Penguin  \nCopyright  \nPART IBUDHANA  \n1 Teetar Pehelwan  \nWhat if the sun caught fire?  \nWould the physical world turn into smoke? Would all the oceans of the galaxy empty themselves to put out this celestial fire? Or would it matter at all, considering that it is a ball of fire in the first place, anyway?  \nIn my village in western Uttar Pradesh, the summer months were often a daze of burning, soul-sucking days. On some of those days, you were almost certain that the sun had caught fire. Its heat was barely any different from a flame’s scalding slap. And the 19th of May 1974 especially was one such epic horror. On that unnaturally smouldering day, our kaccha mud house was only a few degrees shy of becoming a tandoor oven. Abbu nervously hurled buckets after buckets of water on the boiling walls of the bedroom where Ammi battled excruciating labour pains; he was doing the best he could to make her a teeny bit more comfortable. Steam rolled off the searing walls, on to their roasting bodies where it distilled itself into beads of perspiration.  \nThey were anxious, apparently nervous like you would expect any new parents to be. Like trees shaking in a violent storm, in spite of roots that ran deep and strong. They were especially jittery because they had been here before: it was a nerve-rattling déjà vu. Terror wrung their hearts, like a dhobi mercilessly wringing his laundry, squeezing the life out of them. Because they had lived that fine line, which was of the thickness of a strand of hair, between love and loss, between Heaven and Hell, between life and death.  \nBecause, you see, I, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, the oldest of the nine Siddiqui children, was not their firstborn.  \nShamsuddin was. I would hear of him for the first time when I was about two or three years old. My older brother, whom I have known closely, as one knows fictional characters one grows up reading in stories, had been the light of their lives. They had named him the ‘sparkling one’. But soon, after only a few  \nmonths, he, a frail little baby could not cope with this world and left it, abandoning them, leaving them in darkness.  \nAmmi’s fight luckily lasted for only a couple of hours and finally at about two in the afternoon, I wailed my way into this world, about two months before expected. Like my ghost brother, I too was born punctually premature and with red eyes—which remain bloodshot to this day—but unlike him I survived to tell my story. No wonder my parents named me Nawaz in gratitude. It means blessing, uparwale ki rehmat, by the grace of God.  \nI always remained a feeble-looking child. They kept nurturing and nurturing; I remained physically weak. This worry, amplified routinely by Shamsuddin Bhaijaan’s loss, gnawed at my parents’ minds and fired their fears constantly. No matter how many glasses of salubrious buffalo milk I downed, I remained frail, physically puny. Those days there was none of our modern-day squeamishness about milk being unhealthy, bad for the heart, etc. This is all present-day nonsense, which baffles me. Our reaction to milk was the opposite of today’s times: we revered milk. It was organic, pure, natural and wholesome fuel. Buffalo milk was given to build up body and was a favourite amongst bodybuilders, weightlifters and the li","cbCaijk4uf1k4LHv","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijk4uf1k4LHv","pdf",1868691,191,"English","# Contents\n## PART I: BUDHANA\n## PART II: YOUTH\n## PART III: MUMBAI\n## PART IV: ACTING","[{\"question\":\"What makes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s entry into the world especially significant in the memoir?\",\"answer\":\"The memoir emphasizes the sweltering 19th of May 1974, the intense conditions during Ammi’s labour, and Nawazuddin’s premature birth, contrasted with his brother Shamsuddin’s earlier death.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the memoir introduce pehelwani training, and who becomes Nawazuddin’s mentor?\",\"answer\":\"After years of continued weakness, his father puts him into pehelwani wrestling, where he is guided by Mullah Pehelwan, a respected wrestler and trainer running an akhara in Budhana.\"},{\"question\":\"What kind of wrestling routine does Mullah Pehelwan prescribe at the start?\",\"answer\":\"He assigns large numbers of squats (uthak-baithak) and continues with a full daily schedule of demanding exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, dumb-bell weight training, core work, and deep stretching.\"}]","an ordinary life - A Memoir | PDF",1789939401,294]