File picture of Surendra Gupta (left) with Rajesh Khanna in Mumbai in 1985

Hazaribagh, July 20: Girls no longer wrote him letters in blood or married his photographs in 1985. But a youth from Hazaribagh travelled 1,420km to Mumbai to meet the man with eyes that crinkled when he smiled even when he had faced on-screen death in Anand.

“Even as a boy, I loved Rajesh Khanna in films like Haathi Mere Saathi, Anand, Kati Patang. In my early twenties, I and six of my friends just boarded a train to Mumbai on a whim to meet Rajesh Khanna. We learnt he was shooting Alag Alag in Film City and we waited for two hours outside,” said Surendra Gupta, 52, a Hazaribagh businessman, who can’t get over the death of India’s first superstar in Mumbai on Wednesday at age 69.

Alag Alag starred Khanna and Tina Munim, who were an ‘it’ couple of the early 1980s. Did he meet them both? “No, we were allowed inside the studio after pack-up. When we saw him, we told him we had come all the way from Hazaribagh, which was then in Bihar,” recalled the diehard fan.

For Gupta, the defining moment was when the superstar asked him what Hazaribagh meant. “I told him it meant a thousand gardens. He mused that it must have been very beautiful,” Gupta said. “And then he asked, ‘do you still have a thousand gardens in your city’?”

The superstar shook hands with all the seven youths and got a member of his retinue to serve them tea.

“My friends Jai Prakash, Sanjay Kumar, Pradeep Kumar, Umesh Gope, Prahlad Singh and Sunil Kumar and I were overwhelmed by his courtesy,” he said. Then, the youths requested for a group photograph. “He readily agreed. It remains one of my prized possessions,” said Gupta.

“He told us that he would go to the town of a thousand gardens for shooting. That never happened, but five years later, I went again with industrialist Braj Kishore Jaiswal, who is now the zilla parishad chairman to catch the Khanna magic.” The second time round, Khanna was shooting for Ghar Parivar at Mehboob Studio. And because Jaiswal was related to the film’s director Mohanji Prasad, they could catch the action.