A DISAPPEARING MAN

What Irrfan Khan left behind

- RAHUL BHATIA

Toward the end, when he told friends he now appreciated everything, Irrfan Khan wanted to pay homage to the elements that made him. One day in July 2018, he drove outside London for a private viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s estate. He noticed the masks from Eyes Wide Shut in the hallway, and how Kubrick’s awards were placed on a window ledge in the kitchen. He sat at the table from The Shining and talked about a scene made effective by shaky cameras. As he stood in the library, he was in awe of the range of Kubrick’s reading. By one account, he was like a child. The house was a physical object, like a shrine, and it contained tangible things, like religious ornaments; he was there to take an inventory of inexplicable things.

For Kubrick’s grandson, Khan only had questions about his methods and his work. For Kubrick’s wife, by whose side he sat, he had words of gratitude, and he held her hands and kissed them. He took the books they gave him and walked on outside, to the estate’s bright lawns, and made room for himself beside Kubrick’s grave in the shade of a tree. “I want to feel his essence,” Khan told his companions, and then said nothing for a while. He took a stone from beside the grave. And after he had enough of the grave, and its stones and daisies, he went over to a part of the estate populated with cows. “It was very strange. The cows gravitated towards him and he was standing there, having conversations with them,” a friend, Rajeev Rajam, said. It was a sight: a brown man in a pink jacket, white shirt, white pants, red cap, and dark glasses, communing with cows. When it was time to leave, he hung back. “I’m going to be here a while,” he said.