Mahesh Bhatt has always liked to bear a cross. But he is going to find it easier to get his ammunition ? now that a small-time mafia don has fired shots in the air at the filmmaker’s office in Mumbai.

To be fair to the director, he has always had the guts to stand up for his beliefs. When his 1998 film Zakhm ? which revolved around the story of his mother and growing communalism during the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party ? came under blue pencil, Mahesh Bhatt stuck to his guns and refused to meet Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray to ease the hurdles in the way of the film’s release. The film finally saw the light of day with an Adults’ certificate.

Bhatt is never out of the news for long. The last time there was so much hoopla over him was when Parveen Babi died. The actress, with whom Bhatt had an affair in the Seventies and early Eighties, died last year, rekindling an interest in the maverick director. Bhatt, after all,was always some kind of a legend in Bollywood. Everything that he did, or was distantly related to ? such as Babi’s subsequent disappearance and drug addiction, his fascination with philosopher U.G. Krishnamoorthy and marriage to Soni Razdan ? made news.

Bhatt did his bit, too ? by dissecting his life before the public, and in cinemascope. He got his daughter to play Babi’s unstable character in Phir Wohi Din Yaad Aaye while his mother was immortalised in Zakhm.

Bhatt has made no bones about the fact that he was born out of wedlock ? “I am a bastard,” he’d often say. However, after the death of his mother, a practicing Shia Muslim, a couple of years ago, his Gujarati Brahmin father, a producer of B-grade movies, claimed that he had married Bhatt’s mother.

There is a memorable passage in Suketu Mehta’s book, The Maximum City, about Bhatt’s mother. She “stopped outside a wedding hall and asked his elder sister to go inside. When the girl returned, his mother interrogated her about the wedding ? How did the bride look? How was the groom? ? and wept all night. It was the wedding of her lover, Mahesh’s father, to a more respectable woman.”

But the relationship between Bhatt’s parents carried on, all through his mother’s life. In the book Mahesh Bhatt tells Mehta about his father. “He never once took his shoes off. He would never take off his shirt like other fathers and put on a singlet and sit down and read the newspaper.”

It was, by all accounts, a mixed upbringing. His mother did her namaaz regularly, but instilled the father’s faith in their children. “Your area is Nagar, your gotra is Bhargava,” she would tell her son when she would bathe him.

Some would have kept this secret locked up in a family cupboard. Bhatt, on the other hand, exorcised his past publicly with Zakhm (The Wound). Since then, he has more or less stopped directing films. The mantle seems to have fallen on his favourite director, Anurag Basu, who has directed a string of films ? Gangster, Murder, Saaya, Kuch To Hai ? from the Bhatt stable in recent times.

“Mahesh Bhatt is one of the few people in the film industry who pours his heart out,” says Basu. “He says what he believes in. He cares and it shows in his films. He is a crafted and a gifted filmmaker.”

Bhatt’s films have indeed left a mark on Bollywood. Some of his better known films ? Arth, Saraansh, Naam, Janaam ? can be described as landmark Hindi cinema.

Critics hold that Mahesh Bhatt’s films cannot be slotted in any genre. Says ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, “I liked the serious films that he’s made such as Arth and Saransh. The recent commercial ones are okay ? but the production aspect isn’t as opulent as it should be.”

There is opulence, but it’s mostly in the way Bhatt, along with those around him, creates stars. His daughter, filmmaker-actress Pooja Bhatt, put Bipasha Basu and John Abraham firmly in the arc lights with her film, Jism. He discovered Anurag Basu, Emraan Hashmi, Kangana and Mohit Suri.

Many believe that he gave Anupam Kher the tag of an actor with his film, Saaransh. And even today, his films are talked about decades after they were made and screened. To this day, people remember Arth (another film that touched on his tumultuous relationship with Parveen Babi) and Saaransh (about an elderly couple who lose their son).

“He is like a mirror to society, who reflects important issues through the medium of cinema. He is a contemporary person, always ahead of his time,” says actor Ashutosh Rana. Adds Basu, “He can talk about anything and everything under the sun.”

Some would say the man speaks too much. He loves controversy, and has a strong opinion on every issue. So much so that in some circles he is known as Mahesh rent-a-quote Bhatt.

But the director himself puts it differently. In Suketu Mehta’s book, Bhatt stresses that though he is sick of the industry and that he has lost his feel for the formula, his purpose in life is just to make movies. “We are distilleries of pleasure,” he says.

Few would disagree with that. Perhaps, not even the man with the gun.