Asha Bhonsle (top) and Sadhana

Mumbai, March 15: Asha Bhonsle once crooned Bahut Shukriya Badi Meherbaani for Sadhana as the actress and the late Joy Mukherjee frolicked in a garden in the 1962 superhit Ek Musafir Ek Hasina.

Sixty years on, the sentiments have changed and the two women are fighting over a piece of garden.

Asha filed a complaint against Sadhana, a tenant who occupies the ground floor of a three-storied bungalow the singer owns. The building in Khar, a leafy western suburb where many current and former Bollywood stars live, is among Asha’s numerous properties in Mumbai.

Asha is livid that 70-year-old Sadhana — who made “the fringe cut” hairstyle a rage in the sixties — not only uses the garden at her doorstep but has also pressed a “claim of tenancy” on the patch of green.

Asha has filed an application with the nearby Santa Cruz police station seeking to have an FIR registered against Sadhana for making the claim.

Asha has said that Sadhana is the tenant only for the ground floor. Builder Yusuf Lakdawala stays on the second floor and yesteryear actress Baby Naaz on the first.

“Sadhana Nayyar is wrongly claiming tenancy in respect of the garden abutting the ground floor premises in Sangeeta Bungalow…also restricting free and unhindered access to the garden to me and my representatives/servants/agents. The garden is in my possession,” Asha’s complaint filed last month says.

Asha, currently in Dubai to oversee her eponymous restaurants in the Gulf, lives in an apartment on Peddar Road, the upscale south Mumbai pocket that is home to the city’s rich and famous, including Lata Mangeshkar.

Asha has said the garden was never let out and that her “uninterrupted lawful possession” is being sought to be disturbed with “malafide intentions” by the actress. The singer has stressed that she was approaching the police after being “left with no other alternative”.

Deputy commissioner Pratap Dighavkar confirmed having received Asha’s application. “We are conducting an inquiry and will decide our further action based on it.”

This is Sadhana’s second brush with the law over the prime property. In 2010, she was arrested and soon given bail over a dispute with Lakdawala. The arrest followed a defamation suit by the builder after he was arrested following the actress’s allegations that he had threatened to kill her. Sadhana had claimed Lakdawala was trying to force her to vacate the house so that he could redevelop the property.

Few from Bollywood had backed the actress but Salman Khan had expressed support on Twitter. “Who is this builder who is making Sadhana aunty’s life miserable, threatening her that he will cut her to bits and nobody is doing anything about it. Can you believe that in this day and age this kind of stuff happens in our country where a living legend's life is hell, janta support needed.”