Meena Kumari - I'm in Love With A Married Man
YES! I am in love with a married man! I am proud- of it. He is my
very own married man because, you see, he is married to me. In the
words of an English song which was one of the hits a few years ago and
is still very popular around Bombay, "I am in love, yes in love, with a
married man, who is married to me."
I hadn't heard of it at all"I mean the song " not till the "Filmfare"
people came round to ask me to write this article. I refused, of
course. It seemed such a dubious title. But when I heard the song and
realized its delightful and charmingly innocent meaning, I agreed it
could be the theme song of my life, for nothing is more true than that I
am deeply, terribly, frighteningly in love with a married man who is
married to me, my husband.
Love goes deep into a woman's life, striking its roots into her
heart, the very core of her being. Love is terrible in the surrender
which it enforces, complete and unquestioning, the full and permanent
sacrifice which it demands of oneself, and in the fear which is ever
there that one may love and not be loved in return. Love, finally, is
frightening, horribly frightening in the transience and mortality of the
very conditions in which it is born, and by which it flourishes:
individuals change and life passes, inevitably.
And so the ecstasy and the thrill of loving and being loved are never
quite free from the dogging fear of the thousand calamities and
vicissitudes which hourly attend life and the living thereof.
Young as I am, in the brief years of my life, I have gone through it
all: the first fluttering, half-conscious stirring of love in my heart
as recognition dawned of an ideal long cherished in dreams in a man I
had never met but who seemed to me to embody that ideal as nobody else;
the chilling fear that I would never meet him, that if I did he may not
return my love; the joy of meeting and knowing that I was loved as I
loved; the supreme happiness of attainment when we were finally united
in the bond of marriage, and the bliss of knowledge which is beyond all
fear that not even death can part us now.
Like everyone else in the world, I have cherished many dreams in my
life, not all of which have come true. The course of my life was never
smooth. It was not, in the words of the poet, "Roses, roses, all the
way." There were in fact more thorns than roses in it. Most people's
lives are like that. If there is shade to shelter with its grateful
coolth, there are also stretches of burning rock to scorch and torture
with their heat. The beauty of the waterfall alternates with the terror
of the sandstorm. That is Life and that is Nature. Sufficient is it for
me that, having journeyed so far and suffered what had to come because
it was written from the beginning, I have reached the peak of my hope,
achieved my desire from earliest childhood. Looking back from that peak
upon the way I have travelled, it appears only as a faint line fast
losing in the glow of realization the frightening contours of rugged
difficulty which once filled me with dread and apprehension. Looking
ahead, my eyes are filled with a brightness which excludes everything
else from my vision.
From childhood I had an inordinate love of reading and my girlhood
ideal, enshrined in the privacy of my heart and worshipped in my secret
dreams, was the vague figure of a man combining the genius of a great
poet and a great writer of that literary excellence which makes an art
of expression. In the course of my wide and discursive reading I came
across the work of such a man and became acquainted with his name.
Admiring the work, I was drawn strangely towards the man and wondered
what he was like.
Then, one day, I saw a photograph of Kamal Amrohi in a magazine.
Lightning flashed before my eyes, bringing realization with a stunning
shock which left me trembling, sick with a strange apprehension. This
was the man of my dreams, the ideal enshrined in my heart. I did not
want to believe it. I refused to entertain the thought. I tried to
deceive myself. The vague figure I had cherished in my thoughts, hasty
shadow of my dreams, had suddenly taken on the shape and substance of an
individual human creature. It could not be, I kept telling myself. But
always there was a voice which seemed to say, "Do not be afraid to
recognize me. I am really your ideal, not just a figment of your
imagination." And finally I gave up and believed the voice.
But that was a long way from my dream. Everybody around me seemed to
know Kamal Amrohi. After the grand success of "Mahal," his was a famous
name. I alone had never met him. Every artist I knew wished to work
under the great director. So in my heart of hearts did I. It was a
craving with me. But I dared not. I was afraid to yield to the pull of
my heart-strings which were dragging me to him. What if my love was not
returned? The thought was shattering.
One day at Bombay Talkies, during the shooting of "Tamasha," I was
introduced to Kamal Amrohi. At last, I thought, the moment I had so long
dreaded and prayed for has come. Trembling inwardly but making no sign
of it, I gave the man I loved, the beau ideal of my secret heart, polite
greeting. He returned it perfunctorily, barely glancing at me. He is
proud, I thought. I was shaken at the time, eve a little hurt. I loved
him as much as ever, but dreaded more than ever the prospect of meeting
him.
You can imagine, then, my state when Kamal Amrohi came in person and
offered me a role in the picture "Anarkali", which he was going to
direct for Filmkar. Glad as I was and grateful beyond expression at the
auspicious chance which now offered of working under the man I loved, I
was so flustered by the meeting and so fearful of falling short that I
almost collapsed from sheer nervousness and anxiety.
And then accident, or should I say a special dispensation of
Providence, opened the door to me. On the-way from Mahableshwar to
Bombay my car met with an accident which shook me badly and left me with
a hand so severely injured that it seemed doubtful I would have its
use again. I was taken to the Sassoon Hospital at Poona and kept there
for nearly three months.
Sympathizing friends and people filled with pity flocked around me as
I Lay in bed through dark despairing weeks filled with an ever-present
dread which went far beyond the black prospect of a career blighted in
the bud. It was infinitely more bitter to think that the secret hope of
my life so recently strengthened by my engagement to work under the
man of my dreams should also have gone with it. While everybody in the
industry whom I knew came to visit me, the one person I longed most to
see did not come.
My thoughts were at their saddest and my feelings at their lowest ebb
one specially lonely evening when l lay wondering at my fate and what
my future was to be. I looked up to see him there, beside me. Kamal
Amrohi had come to see me. My ideal the man of my heart, who haunted all
my waking hours and filled my sleep witth dreams, stood there in the
flesh asking in his quiet soothing voice after my health, the state of
my hand. I hardly heard him. I was in a haze, utterly lost in a heaven
of my own, uncaring of what was said or done, content merely to look and
to know that Kamal was there at last. That he for whom I had longed
with such yearning and sorrow and despair had come to see me.
He was very sweet that first evening, and before his reassuring
presence all memory of the bitter weeks which had passed fled away never
to return. He came again and again, and each visit was such sweetness
that I prayed fervently to God not to heal my hand so that the
sweetness could continue. That accident was God's blessing in disguise,
for though it broke my hand, which is disfigured to this day, it brought
me my present happiness which was born of those blessed beautiful
meetings when Kamal Amrohi visited me in my hospital bed at Poona. Love
crept into our hearts during those delightful hours of which I can never
lose the memory as long as I am alive.
There came a day when my hand was finally healed, and I had to leave
the hospital and some back to Bombay. In the bustling life and scurry
of the city the halcyon memories of our budding love in Poona were soon
overcast beneath an increasing load of problems connected with our work
and our future which seemed to multiply at every step. Of one thing we
were certain: we could not live without each other. And so, with the
courage of a love which had grown up with my life and which was
returned with a devotion equal to my own, we took the step which bound
us together for life and were married in the presence of our dearest
friends, Kamal's and my own.
A year has passed since then, and I am still the happiest person in
the world because the man I have married is still the ideal man I loved
before I had ever met him. We understand each other completely. Kamal
has lived up to my every thought of him. I have found him exactly as I
had dreamed of him- I hope, indeed I know, he will say the same of me.
Something of this deep understanding and kinship of soul which lies
between us may perhaps be seen in the picture we have just made
together, "Daaera."
It is true that there the relationship was of a director to an
artist. But we are husband and wife, too, and there is between us the
bond of a love which transforms all human activity and invests its most
prosaic manifestation with the beauty of transcendent art, makes poetry
of the ordinary actions of everyday life like fetching your, husband's
slippers or laying the breakfast table or breathing the morning air, or
merely reading the paper together. You don't believe it? Well, maybe you
aren't in love with a married man who is married to you. I am! (This interview was conducted in 1953).
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