Like Dara Singh, this week too, an ailing celebrity was taken home from hospital in the nick of time for him to pass away peacefully at a place he had built with his own well-earned fortune. For wife Dimple, who was estranged from him but not divorced, nursing Rajesh Khanna for the last one year was like déjà vu. A few years ago, she had similarly fought for younger sister Simple’s life and lost the battle to cancer. Apart from the fact that Simple went away in her 40s while Rajesh Khanna was pushing 70, there was one more glaring difference in the two fatal cases — while everybody knew that Simple was fighting cancer, for some inexplicable reason the people around Rajesh Khanna chose to lie through their teeth about his terminal disease. From one-time live-in partner Anju Mahendru to son-in-law Akshay Kumar, all of them expended far too much energy in pretending that all was well.

I distinctly recall Anju telling me in December that Rajesh Khanna was not battling cancer. “He’s absolutely fine now. In fact, he’s spending his birthday with Twinkle and family in Goa.” Rajesh Khanna shared his birthday (December 29) with his first-born daughter. Just a few days ago, Akshay Kumar too had tweeted much about his father-in-law being all right and not to believe rumours of his death. Strange that all of them went through such subterfuge when Akshay never hid his own father’s losing battle to cancer a few years ago. I mean anybody who saw R. Balki’s Havell fans commercial featuring Rajesh Khanna could tell that this man looked like the living dead. The ad showed such a pathetic Rajesh Khanna that it did him no favour at all.

It was all very strange especially because Rajesh Khanna was not an intensely private person at all. Kareena-Saif and other liberated souls of this century were actually eons behind Rajesh Khanna who dared to live with Anju in the early 1970s and later, with another actress. He married neither but never hid them either. In fact, after he dumped Anju and married Dimple in 1973, he had generously gifted the former the sprawling Juhu bungalow she still lives in. Although adopted, Rajesh Khanna hailed from a well-to-do business family and not counting his pennies came naturally to him.

Anyway, I guess every person is entitled to his space and if Rajesh Khanna didn’t want the world to know that his zindagi ek safar hai suhana was ending, it had to be respected — that is, if it was his decision in the first place and not of estranged elements around him. To be fair to the immensely likeable Rajesh Khanna who made journalism a pleasure in the 1970s and 1980s, he was not harming anybody else’s interests by keeping his disease private. Unlike Amrish Puri who was holding on to his acting career and still not admitting that he was dying. In fact, when Stardust had first broken the story of Amrish Puri’s terminal disease (the magazine had it straight from the doctor’s mouth as a Magna staffer’s own parent was in the same boat in the same hospital), the Puris had cried foul, insisted that it was untrue and the magazine had drawn flak from filmland colleagues (like Om Puri’s then wife, Nandita) for irresponsible, unchecked reporting. When Amrish Puri soon succumbed to the disease, Nandita and a lot of others were left feeling very sheepish.

Handling a serious medical issue often brings out an unknown side to a well-known personality. Although Shatrughan Sinha’s case is far less serious, even something as common as his bypass surgery was very strangely handled by his people. Shatru spoke to me enthusiastically from the ICU on Monday morning and went in for a bypass the same day. But for over 24 hours, the people around him lied that it was untrue until Shatru himself must have stepped in and stopped it. A senior reporter from The Times Of India had the inside story but even producer Pehlaj Nihalani (who was keeping vigil outside the ICU) fobbed her off by claiming that her news was unfounded. He went to the extent of making strange noises about Sinha holding a press conference later in the week to update everybody on his health. Finally, late on Tuesday night, Shatru’s wife Punam called back the reporter and confirmed the bypass surgery before becoming incommunicado again. Why the Sinhas chose to keep a bypass surgery under wraps beats me, especially when Shatrughan Sinha has always been a champion of telling it like it is.

Having said that, it’s wonderful Sinha is healing well and, as he promised from the ICU, will soon be fighting fit again.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is editor, The Film Street Journal