Sharmila Tagore on Cannes Jury in 2009, inset, a still from her film Aranyer Din Ratri

Mahesh Bhatt on how he got drawn into an affair with Parveen Babi after she left Kabir Bedi and returned from Italy and then, finding her with a knife, cowering in terror
MUMBAI MIRROR (August 21, 2020)

On the night the couple (Kabir Bedi and Parveen Babi) finally flew out to Europe, Kabir’s friend Mahesh Bhatt was at Bombay airport to see them off. ‘I remember they were moving away, lock, stock and barrel,’ he says. ‘It was a late night flight and she was there. They were both already dressed for Europe. There was a kind of sadness about her, plucking herself from here and going away. But she was Kabir’s girlfriend and they were in love. He was a star in Italy and there was a glorious future; so she went…’ As luck would have it, a manager from Air India, who knew Parveen and Kabir, organized a dinner for them with La Lollo (Gina Lollobrigida). It was going to be a private affair—just the four of them at a swanky Roman restaurant. It promised to be a memorable night. And it was, but for the wrong reasons.

At the dinner, a newly single (Gina) Lollobrigida had eyes only for Kabir. All evening, she showered her attention on him, completely ignoring Parveen… ‘It was almost the end of dinner when Gina turned to Parveen and said, “And you, my dear? What are you doing? Following the star?”,’ Kabir says, recalling the details of that evening. ‘Parveen was no pushover. She was very bright and quick-witted. So she replied, “No, my dear. I am with my man, because I have a man.”’ Before Lollobrigida could retort, Parveen turned to Kabir and suggested, ‘Let’s dance.’ On the dance floor, she told him quite clearly that she didn’t want to spend another moment watching the Italian star fawn all over him. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ says Kabir. ‘Gina was one of the biggest names in international cinema, but Parveen wanted to leave. She said to me, “I’m leaving. The rest is up to you, whether you want to stay or you want to leave.” I told her that she was putting me in a very difficult situation, but she said, “That’s your problem. I’m leaving. I don’t like this woman.” Parveen wasn’t wrong; Gina had snubbed and disparaged her.’ When they returned to their table at the end of the song, Kabir told Lollobrigida, ‘I’m terribly sorry. We’ve got to leave.’

When Parveen began rebuilding her career after her return from London, she had started reaching out to old friends and acquaintances. Mahesh Bhatt was one of them. She invited him over to her Kalumal Estate home to ‘catch up with life’, as she put it.

‘I was a married man in my twenties,’ Mahesh recalls. ‘I was struggling and my movies weren’t doing well; travelling from Mahim to Juhu was an expensive affair.’ Yet, there was something that compelled him to visit Parveen. That evening, Mahesh began seeing her in a new light. ‘There was this gloom around her,’ he recalls. ‘This was a woman that truly belonged to the space where she lived; that space where she was solitary. She was beautiful and she was desolate.’ The last time he had met her, Parveen was living with Kabir. They were a couple and she was following him to greener pastures. Like everyone else who had known them as a couple, Mahesh was curious about what had gone wrong with their relationship, but he refrained from probing… Mahesh’s visit to Parveen’s home was meant to be a casual one. They were just two acquaintances spending time with each other for the first time without distractions coming in the way. With every turn of the conversation, they got to know each other better. They discovered commonalities, exchanged stories and shared secrets. Sunset was followed by the glow of twilight… At some point during the evening, Parveen placed a vinyl of Farida Khanum’s ‘Aaj jaane ki zid na karo’ on the turntable. As the ghazal played on a loop in the background, Mahesh felt the shift in mood.

‘That evening started off [with] two friends catching up,’ he acknowledges, ‘but the conversation kept getting deeper and the silences got comfortable. The attraction between us was palpable.’ At the back of his mind, Mahesh kept reminding himself that he had a wife and a daughter waiting for him at home. He might well have been a follower of the free-thinking spiritual guru Rajneesh for some time and influenced by his unconventional views, but he realized that releasing himself from the stranglehold of the value system he had grown up with was not easy.

‘I might have parroted the whole narrative of free love, but I was held back by morality,’ he confesses.

Reluctant to test his resolve further, Mahesh got up to leave. Parveen stood up as well. But she didn’t follow him to the door. ‘It was a long corridor from the living room to the main door,’ he remembers. ‘I was almost at the door when I realized that Parveen hadn’t come to see me off. Just as I opened the main door, I heard her call my name.’

He turned around and walked down the corridor for the last time that night. The door to Parveen’s bedroom was open. ‘She was lying there on the bed, waiting for me. There was complete silence, because there was no need for words anymore.’

One overcast July morning in 1979, Parveen woke up as usual and stepped out to get ready for a day of shooting for director Prakash Mehra’s Jwalamukhi, in which she had been cast opposite Shatrughan Sinha. Mahesh (Bhatt) was still in bed, drifting in and out of sleep. When Parveen tiptoed back into their bedroom, he was expecting his daily peck. Instead, she whispered that they should not have any conversation outside their room. Before he could react to her words, she had left...

When he came home that evening, Parveen’s mother, who was visiting, answered the door with an anxious looking Ved Sharma (her secretary) standing in the background...

He walked into the house and headed straight for their bedroom. ‘Here she was, curled up on the floor like a beast in one corner of the room,’ he says. ‘She was still in her film costume. She was holding a knife; it was the knife she used at the breakfast table.’ Mahesh slowly walked towards her. Before he could sit down next to her, Parveen whispered to him, ‘Shut the door.’ When he sat down close to her on the floor, her delusions came tumbling out and the source of her fear was revealed.

‘They tried to kill me,’ she told him. He asked who was trying to kill her. ‘Amitabh Bachchan,’ she replied, urging him to lower his voice, lest he be overheard. ‘The room is bugged,’ she went on.

‘You don’t know; you are an innocent man. They are going to drop a chandelier on me.’ Though he had had no past experience of dealing with someone in the middle of a psychotic episode, Mahesh was the only one in Parveen’s life who recognized that evening that there was something seriously wrong with her.

‘As a child, I had seen a south Indian actor named Ranjan in our neighbourhood,’ he recalls. ‘He was said to be a victim of schizophrenia and that was my only reference.’

Excerpted from a forthcoming biography on Parveen Babi by Karishma Upadhyay