Zarina, model
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A brief biography
Sugata Srinivasaraju, February 2, 2021: The Times of India
From: Sugata Srinivasaraju, February 2, 2021: The Times of India
It was just another day at the Indian International Centre in New Delhi. People gathered around tables in the lounge and furiously disagreed about how to change the world, or - with pitiable self-importance - deliberated on how they had changed the world. But this woman, with haunting blue eyes that seemed to capture the pale skies of many cities around the world, spoke about how the world chased her, ceaselessly. How it was always behind her. The gracious furrows running across her face, at around 81, looked like souvenirs of paths on which she had journeyed. This image, from a couple of years ago, came back last week with the news of her death, all alone in a Delhi hospital, as she became another statistic on the Covid-19 table.
In 2018, the moment Zarina realised I was from southern India, she began to narrate her ties to that corner of the world. She was related to Indrani Rahman, the classical dancer from Madras and a Miss India in 1952. Indrani had married her father’s younger brother, Habibur Rahman, a well-known architect in Nehruvian India. Indrani’s mother, an American (Ragini Devi nee Esther Luella Sherman), had been inspired to take up classical dance after she had met Jetti Tayamma, a pioneer of the Mysore style of Bharata Natya, in the 1920s. Tayamma, who had the patronage of the Mysore kings, came from a family of wrestlers.
Just as Indrani’s father had married an American woman, Zarina’s father, Obaidur Rahman, from a prominent Bengali family, had married an Estonian, Leida Semmel. Obaidur met Leida, whose family had been massacred by the Stalinist regime, as a law student in England. Obaidur’s family, like Mughal emperor Babur’s, had come from a place that is somewhere in Uzbekistan today, and had become Bengalis over the centuries. Syed Mujtaba Ali and Abu Syeed Ayyub, the two well-known Bengali litterateurs, were his cousins. There were family connections to the Bengali political elite as well. If your head spins knowing about these intricate linkages of Zarina with the world, this is only the start. Her father’s job took her to various cities across the globe. He was in the foreign service and served as India’s press attaché in Egypt, and also later in Washington. As a young girl, Zarina had apparently fallen in love with an Iraqi student whom she met in London. But when she realised it was not working, she escaped to Paris and spread the word through her network of friends that she had passed away. She returned to London only after he had gone back to Baghdad. There were many such fascinating encounters to happen later in her life, but not as adventurous as this debut.
Zarina’s finest moment came under a rainy Paris sky. One day, she was stranded in the rain and took shelter outside an haute couture Paris store. Absolutely smitten by the character of her face, the shop attendant asked her to come in and wait until the rain stopped. It was actually the store of the renowned hat designer, Jean Barthet. The attendant had alerted Barthet to the young lady at their doorstep and he, out of curiosity, came down to see her. He tried a few hats on her, and she instantly became an international hat model. Barthet made hats for French and Hollywood celebrities. He was Sophia Loren’s favourite, and his clients included Jacqueline Kennedy.
As expected, the Paris days were exciting, but one thing Zarina did not forget to underline was that she was never exploited by the people and professionals around her. She was also intrigued that Barthet was not interested in women, in all the beautiful ones he was always surrounded by. The standard practice for models in those days (and perhaps even now) was to soak themselves in hot water and inhale some oxygen before a big event. That was believed to provide an extra glow to their already glowing face.
Hat modelling was just a stint for Zarina who also had a brush with Bengali cinema — though an incomplete one. Filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak cast her in a film called Kumari Mon (‘The soul of an unmarried girl’), which he ended up not making. He had announced the film and had given acting lessons to Zarina. Then there was an opportunity to act with Bengali icon Uttam Kumar. It was a musical called Antony Firingee about a Portuguese poet who had mastered Bengali. Zarina was to play the role of his love interest, but when the shooting was on, she went away to Cairo to take her A-level exams. Her bits in the film had to be reshot with another actor. Later, to compensate for this aborted acting career, Zarina became a stage actress and also a presenter on All India Radio.
It is not difficult to guess that Zarina must have had a tough personal life. Sometimes beauty becomes a curse. As her friend and filmmaker, Partha Chaterjee, describes: “She had a tempestuous private life but survived it because of her ferocious innocence.” Her parents divorced when she was young and her mother became a successful immigration lawyer in the US. Among the many suitors in her long life were a maharaja, a famous jazz musician, and a candidate for the American presidency. However, Zarina decided to settle down with Wilfred Lazarus, a journalist who ran Samachar, the government’s press agency during the Emergency and was with the Press Trust of India. He was also Principal Information Officer during the Indira Gandhi years. Therefore, when Zarina passed away, it was announced that ‘Smt. Zarina Lazarus’ had died.
Very few people, like Zarina, can connect with various corners of the world through their privilege, beauty, charm or destiny. It now appears that as a child of an inter-faith and inter-race marriage, she connected with a world that was far more liberal, carefree and border-less. Covid brought a cruel and lonely end. Our meeting, the only one we ever had, may have lasted just over an hour, but its continuity in the mind was assured that very moment.
Sugata Srinivasaraju writes on chronicles of the south
