Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; November 22, 2019)

I don’t claim to know her well. The only thing I remember from our one meeting at a suburban hotel when I had tagged along with my editor, was of her firing the waiter when he brought the tea because the milk was cold. By then, she had moved out of the spotlight, but Zeenat Aman was still every inch the diva.

The actress, who turned 68 on November 19, will be seen next in Ashutosh Gowariker’s period drama, Panipat, and still remains an enigma. To understand her better, I turned to Manoj Kumar saab because a plaintive Mukesh-Lata Mangeshkar duet from his film, Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, “Main Na Bhoolunga”, still resonates with me.

She played Sheetal, who’s in love with his character Bharat, but marries her rich employer, Shashi Kapoor, for the life of luxury he offers her. “It was a different role for her, with its saris and shades of grey. But right from day one, Zeenat was determined to perform better than what people were expecting from her,” shares the writer-producer-director-actor of the highest grossing Hindi film of 1974.

Interestingly, while he was scripting, Manoj Kumar saab had Sharmila Tagore in mind for the role. His publicist friend Gopal Pandey, whom he had narrated the script to, had narrated some scenes to Sharmila whose work he was handling. So,when he approached her, she told him she wanted to play the deglam Tulsi, the construction worker Bharat is drawn to after Sheetal ditches him. He left her apartment without committing and soon after, left for Delhi with his family. There, while at his farm, he wrote a four-page story about a father and son, which he made as Shor, with Nanda and Jaya Bachchan, in 1972. Roti Kapda Aur Makaan came along two years later, with Zeenat as Sheetal and Moushumi Chatterjee as Tulsi.

He recalls that for the film’s climax, he had taken four days from his artistes. “It eventually took 14 days to wrap, but Zeenat, who was a busy actress then, quietly juggled schedules and dates, giving me the time I needed. She had to hold back her tears and following instructions, impressed with her performance,” he raves.

During the shooting of the film, he ran into Raj Kapoor at composer Laxmikant’s music room. When asked him, “How’s the girl?” he praised Zeenat, saying she was hard-working and determined to do good work. “Wonderful!” Raj ji exulted. Five years later, she was his Roopa in Satyam Shivam Sundaram. “I can’t say I got her the film,” Manoj Kumar saab shrugs.

However, there is one other film that he can claim to have got Zeenat. Nariman Irani, the cinematographer of Shor and Roti Kapda Aur Makaan, had suffered a financial setback and came to him for help. “I told him to get Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar to write a script for him. He could produce the film with my assistant Chandra Barot as the director. I spoke to Amitabh (Bachchan) and Zeenat who were working in my film and they agreed to act in it,” shares the veteran actor-filmmaker.

The film was Don. After watching a trial show, he suggested they incorporate two songs. “They added one, but even Amitabh agrees 'Khaike Paan Banaraswala' was my suggestion. The film was a blockbuster,” he says.

Zeenat also owes her make-up man to Manoj Kumar saab, who, after watching the first day’s rush print, instructed his make-up man, Krishna Dada, to do her make-up, before reshooting the scenes. “Zeenat liked her look so much she asked me if she could keep Krishna dada. She was shooting four shifts a day and I knew I would lose him. But I let him go, knowing he’d make good money with her and she would gain from his expertise,” he smiles, adding fondly, “Zeenat was a dedicated actress, I wish her all the best.”

Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; May 17, 2018)

“Don ka intezaar to gyrah mulkon ki police kar rahi hai lekin Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin namumkin hai...” Four decades later, this iconic dialogue in Amitabh Bachchan’s distinctive baritone still resonates. Yes, the line has been reiterated by Shah Rukh Khan in Farhan Akhtar’s 2006 remake, Don: The Chase Begins Again, but for me Don will always be the Big B.

Chandra Barot, who directed the 1978 crime thriller with Bachchan in the double role of Don and Vijay, has fond memories of Farhan as a boy of four when he’d drop by their place for the script, which was co-written by his father Javed Akhtar and his erstwhile partner Salim Khan. “My film is still remembered for its brilliant lines, including 'Mujhe jungli billiyan bahut pasand hai'. I was surprised when I found some of them repeated in the new Don. I always gave the credit for the film’s success to Salim-Javed’s fantastic script,” says Barot who turned director to bail out his cinematographer-friend Nariman Irani.

Irani was in the red after his 1972 film, Zindagi Zindagi, flopped. He was the cinematographer for Manoj Kumar’s Roti Kapda Aur Makaan and Barot who was the assistant director on the social drama, along with its actors, Bachchan, Zeenat Aman and Pran, decided to collaborate with Irani on his second production that would help him pay off his debts. Don opened in 1978 which boasted of several other Bachchan starrers, including Deven Verma’s Besharam, Sultan Ahmed’s Ganga Ki Saugandh, Ramesh Behl’s Kasme Vaade, Yash Chopra’s Trishul and Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. He had also given the voiceover for Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari which released the previous year.

“Raj Kapoor saab’s Satyam Shivam Sundaram also arrived in 1978 and it seems incredible that Don put me in the league of these ace directors,” says Barot. He recalls how Dilip Kumar had raved about the film to Ramesh Sippy and Manoj Kumar after seeing it at a special trial and the latter had groused that he had yet to see it. Barot had assisted Manoj Kumar for nine years and admits that on the first day of the shoot, he was influenced by his mentor-director while taking his first shot. It had Bachchan as Don, using Helen with a gun to her head as a human shield to get away from the cops, telling her, “Yeh tum jaanti ho ki yeh revolver khali hai, main jaanta hoon ki yeh revolver khaali hai, lekin police nahin jaanti ki yeh revolver khali hai.” After the take, Irani groused that Barot’s long shots were taking the focus away from Helen’s beautifully lit face. “After that, though I still thought like Manoj Kumar, I’d execute the shot like Chandra Barot that gave Don its distinctive stamp,” he reasons.

The above mentioned scene was preceded by Helen’s seductive “Yeh Mera Dil”. They’d booked Mehboob Studio for two days, till 10 pm, but wrapped up early on the second afternoon. Barot decided to shoot a small scene of DSP D’Silva (Iftekhar), approaching Vijay with a picture of his lookalike asking him if he had seen the man before. “The studio’s canteen was turned into Vijay’s home in the slums, his two foster children visible through the wire mesh. We had no idea what Don would look like, so we used a picture of Amitabh from Premji’s Majboor, suave in a jacket. Vijay was dressed in a lungi from Hill Road and a red shirt,” he informs.

Before the film was completed, Irani died in an accident while working on another film. Barot plodded on. On Manoj Kumar’s suggestion “Khaike Paan Banaraswala” penned by Anjaan for Dev Anand’s Banarasi Babu but not used, was incorporated. “Anand ji (of Kalyanji-Anandji, the film’s composers) was my neighbour and I’d often bump into him late at night when he returned home, his lips stained with the red of beetal juice from chewing paan all day. So I ordered 30-40 paans and made Amitabh eat them all before the shoot. The next morning he was cursing me because his mouth was corroded from the chuna,” Barot laughs.

The film was released without any promotion and he remembers going with Bachchan to check out the hand-painted, life-size posters as they went up. “Critic Devyani Chaubal wrote it off as a flop but one of my photographer friends, Rahul, sent me a picture of crowds snaking around Tardeo’s Ganga Jamuna, as also Excelsior theatre, when the advance booking opened. After it opened, bandwallas would play 'Khaike Paan Banaraswala' and 'Yeh Mera Dil' at weddings,” he says, adding that at musical shows abroad, Bachchan would enter to the tunes of “Main Hoon Don” and bring the curtains down with “Khaike Paan Banaraswala.”

Barot who attended one such show in New York, after Bachchan recovered from the near-fatal blow delivered on the sets of Coolie, remembers the rush of Indians at Madison Square Garden and policemen patrolling on horseback. “A surprised local admitted he had never seen such crowds even for a Michael Jackson concert and so many Indians thronging the venue,” he laughs, asserting that the Don lives on going by all the compliments showered on him when his directorial debut turned 40, not just from strangers across the world, some who wanted to make a documentary on the film, but also friends like Manmohan Shetty, Sanjay Gadhvi, Jaya Bachchan and Helen whom he would call Helenski on the set.