An excerpt from a new biography on Sanjay Dutt revisits the time when the troubled actor struggled with substance abuse, even as his mother, Nargis, lay in coma at a hospital in New York
MID-DAY (March 18, 2018)

Nargis Dutt fighting for life, Sunil Dutt shatters' screamed the headline of film weekly Screen India. "We were in a state of panic," said Sanjay [Dutt]. "We couldn't believe that this was actually happening to us. It was a crazy nightmare. Something that happened in films or in novels or to someone else... When dad signed the papers giving the doctors permission to operate [on] Mom, I dreaded the fact that it could mean he was signing her death certificate. It was horrible!"

As Nargis's severe internal bleeding continued, the doctors had to open her up to stop the haemorrhaging. But her body couldn't take it and Nargis went into a coma. The doctors suggested more surgery but feared Nargis might die on the operating table. Sunil [Dutt] felt helpless. He was all alone and didn't want to take these decisions unilaterally. He asked all three children to come to New York immediately.

Knowing how critical his mother's condition was, Sanjay had tried to drop his drug habit for a few days. But the withdrawal symptoms were too painful to bear. So while the Dutt family was going through hell, Sanjay was resorting to substance abuse every now and then. The drugs had complete control over him and made him do reckless things. When he had to go to the US with his sisters, he wondered how he would keep his supply going. He didn't want to go into withdrawal again. What Sanjay did next still makes him sick to the stomach. "When I think about it I can't believe it. I carried something like thirty grams of heroin in my shoes, and my sisters were with me," he recalled in a TV interview.

Sanjay has no memory of how he walked through immigration and customs and got out. What if he was caught? It would have been catastrophic for the Dutts at an already precarious time. The three siblings went straight to the hospital. Nargis was on life support, hooked to numerous tubes and machines. Sanjay was speechless seeing his mother like that. His eyes brimmed with tears. "The only thing left for us to do was to pray," says Sanjay. "We found a gurdwara, a masjid and a mandir in New York City. All the doctors used to laugh at us. Dr Fortner even told us that if Mom survived, he would convert himself into a Hindu."

Sunil Dutt prayed constantly. He would circle the hospital building, doing endless parikramas in prayer. Every morning Sunil Dutt and the kids used to go to the hospital from their rented apartment in the city hoping for some good news. But Nargis did not come out of coma. There was nothing the Dutts could do. Days would pass in a blur of hospital duties. If someone made a valiant attempt to rally the others, a stray tear would slip and pull everyone back down. "All of us were crying. Dad had gone berserk... At that moment I wanted nothing in the world - no money, no films, no stardom, no glamour, no guns, no friends - only my mother... How could I sit there and watch her go away? I was so helpless, I felt impotent," said Sanjay.

The trauma was too much to bear and Sanjay would try to retreat into his drug-induced cocoon. "I used to hide the heroin under the bed in the apartment in New York, and one day I couldn't find it. I came to know that dad had it. And I had the guts to go up to him and say, 'Give me my drugs back.'" Sanjay's behaviour shook Sunil to his core. Sanjay later recalled with deep regret that he was even disallowed from donating blood for his mother because of his addiction.

The family was in New York City for months, but Sanjay had to return to Mumbai to finish Rocky. "I couldn't believe I had to come back and finish Rocky, sing a song and do all that stuff when my mother was in coma. But the show has to go on," he later said. Gulshan Rai, the producer of Rocky, was jittery that the project was stuck and the dates that the actors had earmarked for the film were going to waste. Sunil had to ask his film-maker friend Raj Khosla to step in as director of the film. Patiently, over several phone calls, he explained all the scenes to Raj, shot by shot, and requested him to take on the film where he had left it.

As the months passed, Nargis underwent seven surgeries in total. The doctors would frequently tell the family to "let her go away in peace". But Sunil and the children refused to give up on Nargis. And then a miracle happened. Sunil used to lovingly hold Nargis's hand for hours on end. One day he felt her pressing his hand. Almost three months after she went into coma, Nargis opened her eyes. Everyone in the hospital started calling her "the miracle lady of Sloan Kettering".

When she came out of coma, the first thing she asked was, "Where is Sanju?" Sunil proffered an excuse and phoned Sanjay to take the first flight out of Mumbai. When Sanjay finally arrived, Sunil told Nargis he had a surprise for her. "She closed her eyes and I walked in and I just said 'Ma?'" Sanjay said. "Her face just changed. She was so happy - she was crying and she held me. Her hands were shaking. She just wanted to come back home." Nargis was desperate to catch up and wanted to know everything about what was going on in Sanjay's life and career. Most of all, she was really looking forward to finally seeing Rocky.

Excerpted with permission from Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood's Bad Boy by Yasser Usman, published by Juggernaut Books

For a man who sometimes appears lost, Sanjay Dutt is remarkably self-aware about how to succeed with the ladies: Let them mother you
Yasser Usman (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 18, 2018)

It was 1985 when Sanjay Dutt first met his future wife Richa Sharma, a desi girl who had been brought up in New York and ‘discovered’ by Dev Anand. Richa had moved to Mumbai to act in Bollywood films just the year before. “I met Richa for the first time at the muhurat of one of my films at Hotel Sea Rock,” Dutt remembers. “She was wearing jeans and a multi-coloured top. I inquired as to who she was. A few days later, I called her and asked her to go out with me.” He was hooked. “I soon realised that Richa was different from the girls I had known before,” Dutt adds. “She was not calculating, manipulative or chasing after money. She was a simple girl, a fantastic person to trust. I could no longer live without her.”

Sharma was not the only woman in Sanjay’s life. But if there was something common to all of them, it was this: They were all strong, independent women who offered his roller-coater life some sort of stability. And Dutt leaned on them. In fact, whether it was his mother Nargis, whose loss Sanjay took very hard, or various co-stars through the years, from Tina Munim to Madhuri Dixit, one could say that the women took care of him, rather than the other way around.

Indeed, there are even some women whom Dutt had flings with and somehow managed to keep those affairs out of the media. He was clearly aware of his vulnerable, lost-boy charm. Once, when asked how to impress a woman, Sanjay told his audience: “If you like a woman, make her feel like your mother … become a little boy. [If you] let her feel protective about you, you are scoring, buddy!”

Sanjay’s life, after he burst onto the Bollywood stage with his debut in Rocky, has had tremendous ups and downs. By 26, he had already lost his mother, been to rehab for substance abuse, and staged a successful comeback to films after his recovery. His love life, too, was far from settled; in the years after his rehab, there had been a Filipina flight attendant named Sha and actress Kimi Katkar of Tarzan fame in his life. In contrast, a life with Richa promised him stability, and by October 1987, they were married. Richa gave up her career in films, as Sanjay’s mother Nargis had, for the sake of his father Sunil, three decades before, and kept a comfortable home for Dutt.

But the happy story unraveled dramatically after that. A little over a year after they were married, Richa was diagnosed with cancer and was taken to the US for treatment. Sanjay returned to India, reportedly due to his film commitments, while Richa and their baby daughter Trishala stayed on in New York with her parents.

Once back in India, rumours of Sanjay’s hard-partying ways and affairs started doing the rounds. Reports of his closeness with actresses Amrita Singh, Ekta and Anu Aggarwal were widespread, and he was portrayed as a Casanova by the media.

Cancer or no cancer, the truth was that Sanjay was used to the women in his life taking care of him. It all began with his doting mother, Nargis. She pampered him endlessly as did the other women of the Dutt household — Sanjay’s sisters, and his Nani. Sanjay became so spoilt that he ultimately had to be sent away to boarding school to inculcate some discipline in him. But for his protective mother, Sanjay always came first.

Even when she was on her deathbed, it was Sanjay’s well being and his terrible addiction to drugs, that was uppermost on her mind. “She was being eaten up inside. ‘Zaheeda, woh drugs peeta hai [Zaheeda, he takes drugs]’ she would tell me,” said Nargis’ niece about her beloved aunt’s final days.

After Nargis died in 1981, Sanjay’s then-girlfriend Tina Munim, stepped in and tried to help him through his addiction, even going to Germany with him for therapy. After they broke up, Sanjay went to the US for treatment on his own. Here, too, he charmed and befriended some of the women in his de-addiction group and persuaded them to help him out with his chores. He recalled, “All my life I’ve always been dependent on someone. First it was my mother, then my girlfriends, then my sisters … I did not know how to survive without leaning against someone.” And so when Richa wasn’t around to lean on, Sanjay sought support elsewhere. Allegedly he would find comfort in Madhuri Dixit’s friendship. As one magazine cover story from 1993 put it, ‘Sanjay’s desperate need for an emotional anchor took him into the arms of the Ek Do Teen actress’.



When Madhuri reportedly cut off all contact with Sanjay after he was embroiled in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case, Dutt was once again at sea. According to a story in Stardust entitled ‘Madhuri Dumps Sanjay’, she refused to take his calls and told his sister, “Please tell Sanju not to call me up ever. Tell him that it’s all over”. Richa, then still married to Dutt, summed it up quite accurately when she said: “At every point in his life, he needs someone he can lean on emotionally. Like he was dependent on Madhuri. Now that she has ditched him, he is going to be a shattered man.”

And so the pattern continued. Next, it was Rhea Pillai — who would eventually marry Sanjay and become his second wife — who picked up the pieces. (They met at his lawyer, Mahesh Jethmalani’s office, while Sanjay was out on bail.) Today, Dutt is married to his third wife Manyata, and perhaps his search for an emotional anchor is finally over. Manyata understood that the secret to Sanjay’s heart was to mother him and take care of him. According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, every time Nadia [Durrani, Sanjay’s then-girlfriend] was out of town, Manyata would stay over. She implemented the adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and took over his kitchen. Sanjay didn’t know what to do: On the one hand he had Nadia, who used to take his credit card and go shopping, and on the other he had Manyata, who never even asked him if he had a credit card, but was, in fact, busy feeding him his favourite cuisine.

Needless to say, Manyata won. Today, she reportedly takes care of every aspect of Sanjay’s life — from his diet to the interior design of their home; from his clothes to vetting his friends and managing his career and his finances. Throughout his association with the many women in his life, Sanjay has been brutally honest, consistent and remarkably self-aware about his role in the relationships. “If you just want to call me a chauvi [chauvinist], I’m just one,” he says. That’s Dutt for you.

YASSER USMAN IS THE AUTHOR OF SANJAY DUTT: THE CRAZY, UNTOLD STORY OF BOLLYWOOD’S BAD BOY, PUBLISHED BY JUGGERNAUT BOOKS