MAXIM REMEMBERED
For reasons I feel the need to explore, I’ve been remembering Maxim Mazumdar. I was fifteen when I first saw him on the stage of Loyola’s F.C. Smith Auditorium. According to the theatre program, he was eighteen and with his widowed mother and older brother, had just settled in vibrant post-Expo Montreal, a recent immigrant from what was then Bombay and is now Mumbai.
To have seen Maxim once is to remember him always. He was electric. He was mesmerizing. In my mind’s eye I can still see the little brown man in a white shift and enormous dark eyes, seated on the floor of the stage and delivering a soliloquy from Richard II. I was gobsmacked. I was smitten. No one could’ve imagined, nor foreseen, that at the age of eighteen, Maxim’s life was already half over.
On the weekday evening I first saw Maxim onstage, there were a handful of people in the audience. I returned home and raved about him, gushing to my mother. From then on I went to every production he was in. Within a year, the East Indian immigrant became the darling of the local theatre scene. I orbited him like a satellite orbiting the sun. I never met him personally. I never approached. I was a shy secret admirer. I saw him at theatre lectures and in theatre lobbies. Often I saw him with one of his teachers. I never saw Maxim with a girl. I heard that he held court with a coterie of male sycophants. I said so, to Mum. Which is when one of my teachers broke the news to my mother. “We’d better tell her.” How my teacher knew, I don’t know. But she knew.
I can’t recall whether I heard it from my teacher, or from Mum. Likely from Mum, who was assigned to deliver the message.
Maxim Mazumdar was gay.
That’s when Mum and my brother started teasing me. “Imagine if you brought him home; he’d start up with Michael!”
“Why would he start up with Michael?”
I’d walked into it.
“Because!” My generally laconic younger brother swished through the kitchen. “I’m a man’s man!” (In fairness to my brother, who matured into a pediatrician, he now wears rainbow socks in solidarity with his gay patients.)
Within the next five years Maxim would found Montreal’s now defunct Phoenix Theatre (where I was engaged for my first acting job), and invited to Stratford by its renowned leading man, William Hutt (another member of The Sisterhood. In the 1960s and 1970s, the festival at Stratford, Ontario WAS a sisterhood) to perform the one-man show he wrote, self-directed and starred in, called Oscar Remembered. (The story of Oscar Wilde seen through the eyes of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.)
Because of Quebec’s political climate, within the first decade of his arrival Maxim moved to Toronto and then on to Newfoundland, where he founded and became artistic director of a theatre. Amidst this activity, he performed in New York and married a New York actress. It was a lavender marriage contracted in order to acquire a Green Card. Maxim’s male lover served as best man at his wedding. The trio entered into a menage a trois. In his will, Maxim left all his worldly goods to his male lover. It seemed he left his legal wife nothing.
Professionally, the Indo-Canadian actor and director sprinted from strength to strength. He couldn’t seem to fail. He seemed unstoppable until, in 1988, my mother spied a brief article in a Montreal newspaper, announcing that this human dynamo had died of a heart attack.
At the
time, my brother was a newly minted physician.
Upon hearing the news, he scoffed, “A thirty-five-year-old homosexual
(precisely, at the time of his death, Maxim was thirty six), doesn’t die of a
heart attack.”
My brother was right. Of course, Maxim was killed by AIDS.
About the Author
. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. She has published the story collections Bent Branches and The Memory Keeper, the memoirs I Want You To Be Free and Daddy's Remains, and the essay collection Between Worlds
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