Visiting veteran composer Khayyam and his singer-wife Jagjit Kaur, who have been inseparable from 1954 to today, in a suburban hospital’s ICU unit
Khalid Mohamed (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 14, 2019)

Inseparable ever since their romance and marriage circa 1954, music composer Khayyam and his songstress-wife Jagjit Kaur, are now in adjoining cabins, named Lily and Tulip, of a Juhu hospital’s ICU unit.

Padma Bhushan recipient Khayyam was admitted to the hospital following a fall while getting up from his armchair at home 28 days ago. Pneumonia and a lung infection were diagnosed. Four days later, his wife who had gone silent with anguish, registered an alarming drop in her blood sugar count.

When I visited them yesterday, Khayyam, in a semi-conscious state, was being treated by a physio-therapist. The revered composer clutched my hand, nodded slightly but couldn’t open his eyes or speak. Jagjit Kaur asked to be wheelchaired to see her ‘saab’ and held on to his hands till the attendants assured her that he would be “okay, not to worry.”

Brightening up, she secured a nurse’s permission before chatting in staccato sentences: *“How couldn’t I fall in love with saab after hearing his song ‘Sham-e-Gham Ki Kasam’?”

*“Raj Kapoor wanted someone who had read Crime and Punishment to do the songs of Phir Subah Hogi. Saab had read the book (by Fyodor Dostoevsky).”

*“Do you know I even sang for Umrao Jaan? What was the song called? Yes, yes… ‘Kaahe Ko Bihayee Bides’.”

*“Saab could get angry, upset with the producers… never with his singers... especially with Lata, Rafi, Talat… Asha.”

*“After marriage… I was happy being his support…would sing for him whenever he wanted me to.”

*“Waqt ke saath music ka trend changed, saab kept refusing offers. Aaj kal ke music directors are doing good work. But nothing can touch old music which was really paidar (durable).”

The durability of their love story has been one-of-a-kind, too, affirmed by the memorabilia at their seventh-floor home in Dakshina Apartments, overlooking the traffic-clogged Juhu circle. Practically every photograph on the living room’s walls and on the mantelpiece show them together, at music soirees and award functions.

A large laminated photograph of their son, actor Pradeep Khayyam, serves as a grim reminder of his premature death seven years ago following a heart seizure.

Jagjit Kaur’s Chandigarh-based niece, Rinnkie Gill, who has been in the city ever since they were hospitalised, points out that the household helps, Nirmala and Shashi, have been tending to them for over three decades. The couple was self-sufficient, inevitably slowed down by ailments which come with advanced age. He’s 92, she’s 88.

Adds Gill, “They have always enjoyed being together at home and have rarely ever travelled out of the city except perhaps to Delhi and the north. Going abroad didn’t interest them at all. Music has been their life. And one more thing —she relishes the masala chai which Khayyam saab brews personally. That’s the way he has always reached out to her heart, with a chai ki pyaali.”

Born Mohammed Zahoor Khayyam Hashmi in the Jalandhar district of Punjab, the music maestro had first used the pseudonym, Sharmaji, dispensing with it for his first full-fledged assignment, Footpath (1953), litterateur Zia Sarhadi’s slice-of-life film featuring Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari. The soundtrack included the “Sham-e-Gham Ki Kasam” ballad written by Majrooh Sultanpuri and sung by Talat Mehmood.

Around then, Jagjit Kaur, born to an aristocratic family of Punjab, was aspiring to become a film playback singer. One evening, Khayyam followed her on the overbridge of the Dadar railway station. She felt he was stalking her and was about to raise an alarm when he summoned up the nerve to introduce himself as a music composer. Despite her father’s objections, theirs was one of the film industry’s first inter-communal marriages.

The image of the composer and his muse stays with me hours after Eid ul-Adha day—Khayyam-Jagjit Kaur just a breath away from each other in the Lily and Tulip cabins.

The muse has been informed that she would be discharged from hospital by early evening. To that she had smiled, “Really? After so many days?” On second thoughts, her face had fallen, as she said almost to herself, “But what will he do without me—alone?”