Mahesh Bhatt Recalls Affair With Parveen Babi: “Her Bedroom Door Was Open, Kept Reminding Myself Of Wife and Daughter Waiting At Home”

Back in the day, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and actress Parveen Babi's affair stirred up several controversies and continues to be a matter of discussion even today. In an upcoming biography on Parveen Babi by Karishma Upadhyay, Bhatt has recalled his affair with the late actress after her break up with Kabir Bedi and her alleged mental illness.

Mumbai Mirror shared excerpts from the upcoming biography where Mahesh Bhatt recalled that Parveen Babi was his friend Kabir Bedi’s girlfriend, however, their relationship hit the skids and the two separated.

Parveen Babi had called Mahesh Bhatt when she began rebuilding her career. Bhatt recalls that while he was a married man in his twenties and travelling from Mahim to Juhu was an expensive affair, he was still compelled to visit the actress. ‘There was this gloom around her,’ he recalls.

"That evening started off [with] two friends catching up but the conversation kept getting deeper and the silences got comfortable. The attraction between us was palpable” read the excerpt.

At the back of his mind, Mahesh kept reminding himself that he had a wife and a daughter waiting for him at home. He confessed: ‘I might have parroted the whole narrative of free love, but I was held back by morality.’

When Bhatt decided to leave, he realised Parveen Babi had not come to see him off. “The door to Parveen’s bedroom was open. She was lying there on the bed, waiting for me. There was complete silence, because there was no need for words anymore” read an excerpt from the book.

Mahesh Bhatt recalled yet another incident where he witnessed a ‘psychotic episode’ when Parveen Babi told him that Amitabh Bachchan tried to kill her. "Here she was, curled up on the floor like a beast in one corner of the room." Adding  "She was still in her film costume. She was holding a knife; it was the knife she used at the breakfast table," reads an excerpt.

‘They tried to kill me,’ she told him and when Mahesh Bhatt asked her who, Parveen Babi named ‘Amitabh Bachchan.’ “You don’t know; you are an innocent man. They are going to drop the chandelier on me” Bhatt recalled Babi as saying.

Parveen Babi was rumoured to have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was found lying at the door of her terrace flat and died of multiple organ failure on 20 January 2005.