My ego and self-respect at stake, I now understood why young people committed suicide, craving for each other, but not being able to meet. The forbidden apple now seemed to be more desirable and most delicious, being out of my reach. I realized I was no longer welcome at her house, and that Suraiya was a silent prisoner in her family’s hands.
But the granny who controlled the ethical, moral and religious code of the family, as also its purse strings, became the main opponentto our relationship.
There was not a day when Suraiya and I did not meet or talk to each other on the phone. And our love affair became the talk of the town, nay, of the whole country. She pressed mine back.įrom good friends to close friends, and then to lovers. We shook hands, and let the handshake linger. The camera caught the action, the director was happy, and everybody clapped. She plucked it from between my lips, and kissed it.
In between intimate accounts of furtive sex in trains, on plains, and in hotel rooms, Anand also manages to talk movies, which remain his greatest passion-here he is shooting Taxi Driver on no money and in 35 days there he is doing the opening sequence of Kala Bazaar at the premiere of Mother India and here he is again shooting on the last day of the 20th century on New York’s Times Square for yet another ambitious movie. There are travels-beach swims with Frank Capra, a Rome meeting with Gregory Peck, dinners with Shirley MacLaine, and a marathon appointment with Charlie Chaplin. There is a fallout with his elder brother Chetan whom he idolised for his English gentleman ways his great working relationship with younger brother Goldie (they did memorable work together, such as Johnny Mera Naam and Guide), and several indiscreet hints about his wife’s drinking habit. There’s a near-death car accident with Geeta Bali seated next to him in his Chevrolet convertible, a meeting with Jawaharlal Nehru where he, Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor asked about Edwina Mountbatten, a run-in with the government during the Emergency, and several meetings with Indira Gandhi, whom he declares behaved like a gungi gudiya with him. And not only always about sex, though there’s an awful lot of it in the book-and some of it awfully graphic. Still the juicy morsels are fairly substantial. Unrepentant voyeurs would like all the details but Anand doesn’t quite oblige us-there are several affairs he omits, among them a long-standing one with the niece of a famous star, another with an Air-India stewardess, and yet another with a ’60s beauty queen. Mona Singha) an on-off relationship with an Irish student at Cambridge while she was working as a cleaner in his Swiss hotel his sharing a room with Marlon Brando’s assistant in France and his unusual talent for casting nubile nymphets, who almost always seem to assault him in places as varied as New York and London, make compelling reading. His account of how he and Guru Dutt were sleeping with the same woman, sadly left unnamed his almost-affair with a Czech interpreter that enraged his wife, actor Kalpana Kartik (a.k.a. There are not too many tinsel-edged profundities, instead there is an unmistakable enthusiasm for life which sets the adrenaline pumping. In this age of stars kissing but not telling, having relationships but not ratting on them, and putting a holier-than-thou spin on even the most salacious scandal, thank God for one hand-kissing, posh-speaking, beret-doffing romantic, at ease with kings and beauty queens, with corporate czars and saucy 16-year-olds, a man who can still go weak in the knees when he sees a beautiful girl-and be happy to admit to it. The tempestuous Raj Kapoor-Nargis love affair, Dilip Kumar swearing undying love for Madhubala or Guru Dutt’s doomed love for Waheeda Rehman, this is the stuff that legends are made of, their stories acquiring currency by being repeated across bucolic barbershops and bored babu offices. The feeling of being let down is especially acute when it comes to the shining stars of the 1950s, the golden age of Indian cinema.
Readers are rarely allowed a peek into the private hedonism whose delicious tales adorn magazine covers and tabloid front pages. I wanted to commit suicide because of Suraiya! Zeenat Aman broke my heart! I got Sanju Baba his bride! Bollywood autobiographies are sanitised accounts which either deny the star’s love life, like the recent palimpsest by Vyjayanthimala, or are ghost-written gushfests that keep the third person aura alive.