Siblings Urmi, Raj, Shammi and Shashi. Pic: The KapoorsThe Yahoo! man who first unleashed adolescent sexuality on the Indian screen and hurled that still-resounding lustful cry was a long time in the making.

Born prematurely and worryingly thin on 21 October 1931 in Ajinkya Hospital on Charni Road in Bombay, Shamsher Raj Kapoor (Shammi is his pet name) didnt exactly get an auspicious start in life: his mother was pregnant with him when his two brothers Bindi and Devi died within a fortnight of each other.

Did this tragic double death in the family affect his mothers pregnancy? Was there some guilt on his mothers part? Losing two of her children in quick succession must have weighed on her conscience. The tragedy was no doubt like a shroud over the Kapoor household, a family secret both Raj and Shammi Kapoor had to bear like an albatross.

Their mother was twenty-three at the time, and insisted they not tell anybody. My mother said we dont share our happiness with anyone, so why should we share our sorrow? says Shammi Kapoor. She actually told me, When we are in the bedroom we dont share our happiness with others. You have to bear this.

Perhaps the burden was too heavy for his frail young shoulders. Shammi Kapoor may have been asked to erase the family secret from his mind but he could not block out the sense of foreboding that overwhelmed him.

I was in my mothers womb when the two children died, so death has always weighed heavy on my mind. I have always had a fear of death and thoughts of rebirth kept coming to my mind. There has been so much death in my family, says Shammi.

Ironically, the hunkiest Kapoor who emulated Elvis Presleys swivel-hipped dance movements on screen was so scrawny as a baby that his family feared he would not survive.

He looked like a little chooha (mouse), we thought he might not live, recalls Mrs Jagat Singh Ahuja, Rama Kapoors friend. Born with a patch on his lungs, Shammi Kapoor was a sickly child for most of his childhood. Prayag Raaj remembers him as an exceptionally thin child.

We all made fun of him. We used to play jal tarang on his ribs, he recalls. The dancing stars early teens must have been trying: a frail Pathan is something of an oxymoron.

Shammi Kapoor says that he was inhibited until he was about fourteen. I was four foot something and very thin. But then in 1946 I went to say with Bhabhiji (Krishna Kapoor).

She took me to her maike (maternal home) in Rewa. There I learned to swim. I shot up four or five inches. I was in the right place at the right time. I didnt stop after that. I grew to over six feet. Shashi stopped at 511, Raj Kapoor was a little over 57, and Prithviraj Kapoor was 510 .

The one who turned out to be the tallest of them all did not like being short or the weakling when growing up. He was like a shrinking violet at home until he suddenly grew up, like Popeye after swallowing his can of spinach. While the chubby-cheeked Raj was ebullient, ever the prankster hogging all the attention, Shammi remained withdrawn and quiet at home. I was an introvert growing up, I was very shy at home, says he.

Slinking into the shadows in their home bursting at its seams with people, outside the home he found an outlet in sports for his irrepressible energy. I was an outgoing person on the sports field, recalls Shammi. Table-tennis, cricket, football and hockey there was a hardly a sport this spindly Kapoor didnt take up, and with a vengeance. In fact, when he was about eleven, he broke a few bones in his hands while roller-skating: he had actually tried to jump over a manhole.

The accident, however, did not prevent him from taking part in a table-tennis tournament a few days later: he just put his arm in a sling and played. Breaking bones became a habit with him through much of his acting career, dancing wildly as he did in most of his films.

The neighbourhood of Matunga was perfect for the sporting life. There was enough space for this Kapoor to work off his excess energy. Matunga had two playgrounds one belonged to Khalsa College, the other to the VJT Institute. Shammi Kapoor also prowled the Five Gardens behind the Customs Quarters and the playgrounds of his school, Don Bosco.

The Kapoors were probably the first filmi family to move to this middle-class area situated a few kilometres from the tree-lined Parsi Colony in Dadar. Civil engineers, customs officials, doctors and bank employees had made Hollywood Lane (as College Back Road where the Kapoors lived came to be called) their home; many of the families had moved here from West Punjab after Partition.

It was, according to Shammi Kapoors childhood friends, a life most ordinary. Shammis childhood was amazingly normal for a family in the movies, says Parminder Sandilya, whose family lived on Hollywood Lane from 1938 to 1952.

Mr Sandilya still marvels at the fact that there were no incipient traits of a movie star in Shammi Kapoor. He never talked about films to them: the focus was on sports and on pranks. The gang of friends may have gone to different schools but they played together each afternoon.

They had a coded, bird-like whistle; it served as the signal to gulp down a glass of milk and come down to play. When they were not playing, they used to sit on the railing of Five Gardens or on the Khalsa College wall and chat.

Talk at home amongst the elders centred on the freedom struggle: there was always somebody from the IPTA, and Prithviraj Kapoor alluded in his plays to the politically volatile times the country was going through in the early forties.

However, for Shammi and his Hollywood Lane friends the struggle for Independence and Partition seemed to have been nothing more than a backdrop, not impinging on their conscience in any significant way.

We never talked about homework or serious things, remembers Parminder Sandilya. Afsal Sharif, whose family moved to Pakistan eventually, stood tall at 53, and talked about wanting to become a heavyweight boxing champ like Joe Louis. Shammi was more reticent. However, his actions spoke louder.

Glimmers of the prankster person of his later films were already there: he was not averse to flicking somebodys car when he felt like going for a spin. His pranks were never less than imaginative, and certainly indicated early entrepreneurial skills.

For pre-teen schoolboys the boundary between borrowing and stealing can be quite blurred. Shammi Kapoor often hitched rides. Once, a doctor generously offered to drop him somewhere.

He quietly flicked a syringe out of his bag and later sold it. But these little borrowings were not always only for his benefit. While touring with Prithvi Theatres in Hyderabad, he entered a shop and slipped a small shoe into his pocket. The shoe was for his nephew Randhir Kapoor. But the exercise was in vain: he had forgotten to steal a pair.

There was something of the daredevil about him for the beginning. Perhaps, it had to do with his fascination with Errol Flynn movies. The actor was an early idol of his, and Parminder Sandilya remembers his friend speaking fondly about the film Captain Blood.

But he was not obsessed about films, as his elder brother was. Shammi Kapoor enjoyed seeing them, but he liked emulating screen heroics on the streets of his neighbourhood even more.

Unlike Raj Kapoor who was forever falling in love as an adolescent, Shammi was more diffident. The actor who was later to incarnate the Playboy of the Eastern World was quite shy in school. I had to sing in a play when I was thirteen. I had to kiss a girl.

I remember I came home and washed and washed my face, Shammi reminisces. Hollywood Lane bristled with pretty young girls but they would come to his house generally during rakhi and he had to give them presents.

Like his elder brother, Shammi too changed schools quite often. He attended St Josephs Convent, a co-educational school, in Wadala until the fifth standard, before moving to Don Bosco School, behind Khalsa College, in Matunga. However, the bohemian lifestyle of the Kapoors resulted in his being made to leave the school after a year.

Shammi used to act as Bharat in Shakuntala on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at the Royal Opera House, for which he had to leave school early on these days. One day, the principal of Don Bosco finally put his foot down. Prithviraj Kapoor asked his eldest son to handle the matter.

Raj Kapoor went to Shammis school, picked up his books, took his brother by the hand and walked out of the school. This is how Shammi Kapoor started attending the more elite New Era School on Hughes Road, where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was also a student at the time. This was the school of the rich and the elite. I was the only poor guy there, recalls Shammi.

This Kapoor was in a hurry to grow up, and to grow up manly. To be macho was a Pathan thing. Akharas were ubiquitous then, as gyms are today. Young men from middle-class backgrounds were into muscle building, as his father had been.

So when nature let him down, Shammi Kapoor turned to artifice. His fair complexion and large hazel-green eyes made him look almost pretty, all the more since his upper lip remained unadorned by hair until his early teens.

But he soon found a remedy. Before going to a party Shammi used to light a match, let it cool and then draw a thin moustache on his face with the black deposit on the tip of the matchstick. Lekh Tandon observed him doing this quite often. The moustache was his ticket to an adult world he was keen to gatecrash into.

Excerpted with permission from:
The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema by Madhu Jain, Penguin Books India, 371 pages, Rs 595