They say that bouquets and wreaths don’t go together but Yash Chopra received both in heaps with a well-feted 80th birthday, followed within weeks by a widely-covered last journey.

The chautha (prayer meeting) on Thursday at YRF Studio was proof that Yash Chopra had passed on the baton to extremely competent hands (his sons, Aditya and Uday) since the unimaginably huge turnout was well-handled by polite cops and security men who stood at attention all over the place. With Rani Mukerji’s parents sitting in the front row with the extended family and Rani herself standing firmly by Aditya Chopra’s side while receiving condolences, the actress’ position in the Yash Chopra parivar became official beyond doubt. It is a curious situation since Adi’s first wife Payal was her former mother-in-law Pamela’s biggest support all through her heartbreaking moments after Yash Chopra passed away abruptly last Sunday. It is also paradoxical that Yash went away so quickly while it was Pam who was battling a virulent cancer for many years. She survived it, he succumbed to dengue.

“When my father died, Yash Uncle called me over and said, ‘If I ever hear you say that you’ve lost your father, I will slap you. Because I am here for you, I am your father.’ And he called me every day, sometimes just to say, I love you, beta,” recalled Karan Johar with a lump in his throat. “But I always say, when you lose a parent, you gain a God,” Karan continued, the tears never too far from his eye. Today he feels he has two Gods up there watching out for him.

For Shah Rukh Khan it was like losing his father for the third time because after the death of his own father, he had found a father in both the Yashs — Johar and Chopra. At the chautha for Chopra, Shah Rukh spoke eloquently about the legendary filmmaker’s love for good food, especially Punjabi parathas. With Yash Chopra making his exit quickly and painlessly in his sleep, parathas won’t taste so good anymore and women in films won’t look as beautiful, observed SRK. By the time he wound up, Shah Rukh was teary too.

Anupam Kher who had breakfast with Yash and Pam at least three times a week for the last 12 years, got into a verbal twist with emotions jumbling up his thought process. The final speaker was Amitabh Bachchan (in trademark shawl) who kept it short and sedate, and chose to speak in fluent Hindi in contrast to the English-speaking SRK, Karan and Kher.

Many at the chautha missed Raakhee, the Bengal beauty who returned to films after marriage and motherhood with Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, before she went on to do many more films for him like Trishul and Kala Patthar. Strangely, it is her estranged husband, Gulzar, who is today a part of YRF as the lyricist of many of their films, and he was very much around along with other mourners.

After Chopra’s death, most people close to him have talked of how sudden and unexpected it was, especially since he was in good health and great spirits before the dengue felled him. Yash was indeed very fit for his age. Sure, he liked his food (“Especially Indian food,” as he once told me) and those who either worked or holidayed with him, always came back with tales of how Yash would organise a huge breakfast for everybody with his favourite parathas topping the menu. Barely would that be over than he would start planning the menu for lunch!

But he was an early riser. He told me that he woke up at 6.30 every morning and a walk followed by yoga was his way of greeting the day. So when he went under so fast to a bout of dengue with high speed deterioration of all his vital organs, many wondered how such a robust man could have gone away in this manner.

However, a long conversation with Yash Chopra I once had while we sat in his huge personal office at the studio a couple of years ago offers a possible explanation to why he succumbed.

“Shooting (for a director) is very strenuous,” he had said during that chat. He was referring to his older brother B.R. Chopra’s inability to personally helm Baghban, a subject he had held close to him. Yash realised that age had caught up with B.R. (Baghban was made when he was well into his eighties) who could no longer cope with the stress of directing a film.

Yash was no sprightly youngster when he began Jab Tak Hain Jaan at age 79, with a song to be shot in Switzerland after he turned 80. He knew it would be a strain at his age but he went ahead, almost living up to the title of his film, like he was saying, jab tak hain jaan, I’ll make movies. He went the way he would have liked to — still calling the shots, still weaving romance on celluloid. RIP Yash Chopra.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is the editor, The Film Street Journal