I saw very few films till I was about ten years old. Till then, my
father had been posted in small towns that had rather dreadful cinema
halls. Then, in late 1982, we acquired a TV. And suddenly, though there
wasn’t a spate of films to see (Doordarshan’s Sunday 5:45 PM film was
the highlight of our week), there were some films to see. And, thankfully, I was old enough to understand what was happening onscreen.
One of my earliest recollections of that period is of watching Anand. For me—exposed till then to the usual Hindi film, where the hero always had a love interest, and where there were few (and mostly pretty melodramatic) moments of tragedy—Anand was different.
There was never any doubt that Rajesh Khanna’s character was the hero. He was ebullient, full of life, charming, friendly, yet (in those moments of solitude) sensitive. I kept waiting for a heroine to pop up.
Instead, what came was the deathbed scene.
There was Anand, slipping away from life, falling suddenly silent—and
his friend, the helpless doctor (played by Amitabh Bachchan) breaking
down, begging Anand to speak.
I couldn’t believe it. For me, heroes in Hindi films didn’t die. They
were indestructible; through fire, explosions, crippling illnesses,
armies of attacking villains—whatever. They came through it all. Most of
all, they didn’t die of a disease I could barely pronounce. I was
certain this was a ploy. Somewhere, it would turn out, someone had
messed up. Medical reports had been bungled, and it would emerge that
Anand was perfectly well. Just about now, he would open his eyes and
smile that trademark smile. And all would be well.
And then came Anand’s voice. “Babu moshai, zindagi aur maut
uparwaale ke haath hain, jahanpanah. Use na toh aap badal sakte hain, na
main. Hum sab toh rangmanch ki katputliyaan hain…” (“Life and death are
in the hands of the Almighty, Babu moshai. Neither you can change that,
nor I. We are all merely puppets on a stage…”)
It was the tape spooling, of course. Anand was dead. Irrevocably and
completely dead, and that was one of the first times I remember crying
over a film.
That was what came first to my mind when I learnt that Rajesh Khanna had died, just 69 years old, yesterday, on July 18th,
2012. A life snatched away suddenly and tragically—and it reminded me
of some of my favourite Rajesh Khanna films. For a blog that focuses on
pre-70s films, that might be considered a drawback—because some of
Rajesh Khanna’s most popular films were after 1970. But my favourite
Kaka films—Anand, Khamoshi, Safar, Aradhana, Kati Patang, Ittefaq among them—are from the late 60s, or from 1970.
And if you look closely at these films, there’s an odd thread of life and death running through them. Kati Patang and Ittefaq are more mainstream (though it took guts to work in a film like Ittefaq, bereft of songs and with a very unexpected plot twist)…
…but as for the others, why was it that Rajesh Khanna—always the
embodiment of charm and youth and good looks—ended up playing a man with
tragedy waiting just around the corner? In Khamoshi, he was
the mental patient who’s cured and falls in love with the woman who
heals him—a woman who will never be able to love him because her heart
belongs to the man she can never have.
And in Amar Prem, he played the married lover of a ‘fallen
woman’, a man who, all of a sudden, finds that the one woman he loves
has vanished from his life.
Worst of all, he played men who died.
In Anand, of course. And in a film that echoes—in just the fact that its hero suffers from an incurable disease—Anand: Safar. In Safar
too, Rajesh Khanna’s character, a struggling young artist named
Avinash, is heading inexorably towards death, this time from leukaemia.
Unlike the outwardly cheerful (almost irritatingly cheerful) Anand, Avinash finds it difficult to control his anxieties and his depression.
—and, while Anand resigns himself to the unfathomable puzzle that is life—beautifully expressed in Zindagi kaisi hai paheli haai (“What a riddle is life…”), Avinash’s thoughts are darker. “Zindagi ka safar hai yeh kaisa safar, koi samjhaa nahin, koi jaana nahin (“What a journey is the journey of life; nobody has understood it, nobody has known it”).
Sad words, in both songs, for a man to sing when he knows he will die
without having savoured all that life could have offered.
But both Anand and Safar prepare us for what is
coming (yes, now that I’ve grown up, I don’t expect every dying hero to
suddenly be cured). What came as a bolt out of the blue was the sudden
death—in Aradhana, for example. This was a film that a pre-teen
me watched, swooning rapturously over the ridiculously good-looking
Rajesh Khanna in his uniform. As Flight Lieutenant Arun Verma, he was
the ultimate in irresistibility: I couldn’t wait to see where his love
story with the lovely Vandana would go.
The last thing I expected was to have Arun Verma die.
Yes, Rajesh Khanna was (sort of) resurrected in Aradhana as
Arun Verma’s son, but I still remember the jolt of seeing that
photograph that Sharmila Tagore’s Vandana carried about with her, and
thinking: she’s not going to see him, ever again.
And there was Andaz. Andaz, which was Shammi
Kapoor’s film and in which Rajesh Khanna had a mere cameo—but what a
cameo. With another song of life and death and all that it means. Zindagi ek safar hai suhaana, yahaan kal kya ho kisne jaana (“Life is a wonderful journey; who knows what tomorrow will bring?”)
Not just tomorrow, but the next hour, the next minute. The newspapers
had carried photos, just a few days back, of Rajesh Khanna standing on
the balcony of his home, reassuring fans that he was well. Even I, busy
posting a review yesterday, didn’t realise till well into the afternoon,
that he was gone. Gone, never to return, like Anand and Avinash and
Arun…
Rest in peace, Kaka. Thank you for the films you gave us. Thank you for
your smile and your laughing eyes. Thank you for your life.
PUBLISHED BY :
https://madhulikaliddle.com/2012/07/19/on-rajesh-khanna-and-the-ephemerality-of-life/
