Eight stories, one for each decade. It was Jaya Bhaduri who introduced me to Amitabh Bachchan. She was shooting for Anamika with Sanjeev Kumar at Filmistan Studio and Amitabh had come to have lunch with her in the make-up room. Looking like he does in the flashback kite scene in his latest film Goodbye, the young, lanky, seemingly bashful actor rushed through the meal, gargled loudly at the washbasin and zoomed off for his shoot elsewhere.
There was nothing clandestine about their date. Jaya, always an open book, didn’t hesitate for a moment before introducing me to him while Amitabh steadfastly referred to her as only “a good friend” right till the evening of June 3, 1973.
Traits both have retained over the years. Whether irritable, irked or ecstatic, Jaya wears it on her face. Amitabh is a master of the poker face.
Many amiable meetings and interviews later, I’d gone to talk to Amit (as we called him) when he was shooting in a cemetery for Zanjeer. “Do you realise you’re sitting on somebody’s stomach?” he asked me in between shots. Chairs had been placed over a grave for us to sit on. He retains that poker-faced humour to this day.
Alia and Ranbir have made the balcony wedding fashionable. But 49 years ago, before they could fly to Europe to celebrate Zanjeer, Jaya-Amit’s hastily arranged marriage was in a friend’s apartment on Little Gibbs Road. Dinner was in the strip of a balcony, a simple Indian menu, no stalls creaking with different cuisines. With barely 20 people on the guest list, PRO Gopal Pandey had escorted me and Ingrid Albuquerque, one of Amit’s favourite journalists from Stardust, to the wedding. Although the news had leaked on June 3 morning, the only sign that we were at the right venue was Amit’s golden car parked unobtrusively outside.
One of the first functions the newlyweds attended was when my colleague at the Free Press Journal invited them to be chief guests at a children’s home. Those were times when there were no managers or agents acting as filters and actors attended functions purely for friendship’s sake. When the children mobbed them, Jaya stepped back and beamed, “This adulation is all for Lambuji.” That’s what she called him then and moving aside to let the spotlight shine on him was one of her characteristics. I’ve never known her to jostle him for attention.
At the press show of Amar Akbar Anthony, someone came from behind and took a wafer off my plate. It was Amit who’d dropped in at Blaze, a little preview theatre in Colaba where we regularly watched films. He’d driven down from Juhu to check out the reaction to the film. “I’ve been hearing good things,” he noted quietly. Amar Akbar Anthony was one of the major rungs that took him to dizzy heights of superstardom.
When Yash Johar took a planeload of us to Calcutta for the premiere of Agneepath, Amit, always particular about details, told each of us that a bus would meet us at the airport and we’d all travel together to the hotel. Jaya and he too were in the bus, which had to stop frequently because the crowds outside wanted a glimpse of their “son-in-law”.
On his 50th birthday on October 11, 1992, he ensured that Krug and pink champagne flowed all night at the Rendezvous. He’d defied a film industry ban on fraternising with the media and invited those he’d known forever
On his 60th, a book on him was launched, he kissed Jaya on the lips on stage, and Karisma Kapoor was introduced as Abhishek’s fiancée.
Equations and circumstances have changed in the intervening decades. Among his innumerable feats, he is the only TV host in the world whose aura makes women contestants weep with disbelief while he gallantly stands by with a box of tissues. Perhaps he should hand out tissues in theatres screening Goodbye too — he brings more than a tear to the eye, his professionalism undiminished.
Happy 80th, tissue master.
I hope I can give you nine stories, this time, 10 years later.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author