Parveen Babi and Amitabh Bachchan

On 30 July 1983, Parveen Babi left India and the film industry at the height of her career and travelled to various countries for a spiritual journey with U. G. Krishnamurti and her friend Valentine and spent most of the time in California, United States. On 7 April 1984, She was suspected at John F. Kennedy International Airport after she failed to submit her identification papers and as she behaved to be difficult, the authorities handcuffed her and kept her in a general ward with thirty other mentally disturbed patients. The Indian Consul General, who had been informed of the unfortunate incident, had personally come to visit her at the hospital. During U.G.'s visit, Parveen smiled and chatted with the Consul as though nothing had happened.^[23][24][25]

When asked about how she felt about experiences of people and countries that she lived in, she replied, "my experience of people is that human beings are very good people. However, the powerful, to serve their vested power interests manipulate pressure and use ordinary human beings and their power ploy and force them into negative act. However, I believe, eventually, the human spirit of positive will triumph and as far as other attributes of people are considered I find Americans to be extremely progressive and ingenious race. And I identify a great deal with Americans."^[26]

She returned to Mumbai in November 1989 where she was unrecognizable as her former self after having put on a considerable amount of weight. She was rumoured to have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a mental illness although she regularly denied this, stating that her being labelled as such was a conspiracy by the film industry and the media to malign her image and make her appear as insane, so that they can cover up their crimes.^[25] Some sources^[who?] indicate that it could have been a situation of acute depression, but not confirmed since she had many failed relationships with one of her former lovers openly humiliating her. This led Parveen to break relationships with most of her close dear ones including her own blood relations, having few contacts with known people and had become reclusive as she distrusted everyone.^[27]

She accused many foreign dignitaries as well as Indian film personalities including Amitabh Bachchan, Bill Clinton, Robert Redford, Prince Charles😆, Al Gore, US government, British government, French government, BJP government, Roman Catholic Church, CIA, CBI, KGB, Mossad^[28][29] 😕 of conspiring to kill her but her petition in court was dismissed for lack of evidence and when she was asked to show her evidences by the press, it was some sort of scribblings on notepad^[25] In an Interview to a film magazine dated 1989, she said "Amitabh Bachchan is a super international gangster. He is after my life. His goons kidnapped me and I was kept on an Island where they performed a surgery on me and planted one transmitter/chip/electronic bug right under my ear." There was a photograph of Babi showing a scar below her ears.

During the early 1990s, whenever journalists or members of the press would come to her then Kalumal estate apartment in Juhu for an interview, she would often ask them to eat her food and drink her water, so that she might be assured her food is not poisoned and assume her makeup was contaminated, so that her skin should peel off and according to her, the International Mafia had cut off her electricity to harass her.^{[citation needed]} Even before starting an interview, She would keep her dictaphone on, announcing the day, date, time and the name of journalists and publication into the microphone and would record before the conversation began.^{[citation needed]} Many Journalists found her to be very intelligent, vivid, convivial person and one who spoke fluent English. She would later refer to them as "agents of Amitabh Bachchan".^[30] One of her neighbours said that when Bachchan's film was shown on cable television, the actress reacted violently and had to be calmed.

Nevertheless, she started a career as an interior decorator in 1991.^[31] In 2002, she again hit the headlines when she filed an affidavit in the special court hearing the 1993 serial bomb blasts case, claiming that she had gathered clinching evidence against actor Sanjay Dutt showing his involvement in the case, but she did not turn up in court after being summoned saying that she was afraid of being killed.^[25] In the last four years of her life, Babi recorded every phone call, always punctiliously informing the caller about surveillance.

I owe it all to Parveen

Time magazine's first Indian cover girl, Parveen Babi, falls in love with a flop and worse, married filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt. Naturally, it was an affair consumed by the tabloids. An affair fuelled by flower power, poetry and punk philosophy. A revolt of a romance symbolising the free spirited '70s! And one day like all unbridled highs it hit a cracking low'. Parveen became a victim of a genetic biochemical disorder - paranoid schizophrenia! While the soft entertainment news' was busy crucifying Mahesh for being the catalyst to the catastrophe, he was obsessed with keeping her away from the callousness of electric shocks' and a heartless vocation. But nothing helped. Not even his philosopher friend UG Krishnamurthy who tried in vain to navigate the actress to calmer shores and anonymity. Eventually, Parveen succumbed to psychosis. Mahesh, on the other hand, exorcised the trauma of a ravaged love in his works again and again... right from the semi-autobiographical Arth to the recent Woh Lamhe, films that watermarked his identity as a filmmaker and as a person! Because from the rubble of the relationship he discovered life truths. "Through her I saw the stark face of sorrow and the inevitable end of everything," confides Mahesh about the woman he lost to insanity decades before he lost to her death... In his words...




THE CRACK-UP
My relationship with Parveen began around 1977. She had returned to India from Italy (after she broke up with Kabir Bedi subsequent to his becoming a sensation in Italy with the TV show Sandokan). She was a top star and was filming for Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and Kala Pathar (1979) those days, while I was a flop filmmaker. I left my wife Lorraine Bright and my daughter Pooja, who was a kid then, to live in with Parveen. At home she was a traditional girl, who loved to oil her hair and cook - a Gujaratan from Junagadh, albeit with Western influences in her formative years. She was generous and unassuming unlike her diva persona. But she found it stressful to allow the world into her home. She put up a performance when she spoke to producers even on the phone.

Then one day as all bad stories begin... she had a crack-up. It was an evening in 1979. I walked into her Juhu apartment to find her aging mother (Jamal Babi) in the corridor. She said in a whisper, "Look, what's happened to Parveen!" I walked into that bedroom lined up with innumerable perfumes (the fragrance still lingers in my mind) on the dressing table, to see a sight that sent a chill down my spine. Parveen was dressed in film costume and sat curled up in the corner between the wall and the bed. Her gait was beast like. She had a kitchen knife in her hand. "What are you doing?" I asked. She said, "Shhsssh...! Don't talk! This room is bugged (installed with a spying device). They're trying to kill me; they're going to drop a chandelier on me." She held my hand and led me outside. I saw her mother look helplessly at me. Her gaze revealed that this episode had happened before; it was not the first time.

From then on began a long night... of fear and trauma. I had to first come to terms with what was happening to her. Several theories floated. One being the ill-informed one that being so successful, she had become a victim of black magic and that an evil spirit had invaded her! I got in touch with well-known psychiatrists, who diagnosed her condition as paranoid schizophrenia (where a person suffers from delusions of fear and persecution), a genetic biochemical disorder. Drug therapy was suggested to keep it on leash. But they warned that if drug therapy didn't work she'd have to be given electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) (shock therapy in common parlance).

Now began the dance to hide the fact that the diva was down with a mental ailment. At first jaundice' was used to barricade her from people. I called up Kabir Bedi informing him of her condition. His voice indicated that it was something he was familiar with. He suggested a few hospitals in the UK, which could help her. Danny (Dengzongpa, Parveen's ex-boyfriend and neighbour) was also helpful. I'd take her to his house to calm her during her panic attacks.

FEAR FACTOR

But the fears hounded her. She was like a storm in a room. Sometimes she'd say the air conditioner had a bug. We had to dismantle it and show it to her. At other times there was a bug' in the fan or in the perfume... Once we were driving back after meeting my friend, philosopher and guide UG Krishnamurthy, when she said, "There's a bomb in the car. I can hear it tick!" She threw open the door of the moving car, saying the bomb would burst and ran out on the road with me trying to hold her. People thought Parveen Babi' was having a fight with her boyfriend. Somehow, I huddled her into a taxi and brought her home.

She also feared that Mr Amitabh Bachchan was out to kill her. Once she accompanied me to Mehboob Studio, saying she wanted to apologize to him. She believed she had harmed him and so had incurred his wrath. Her hallucinations were real for her. At another time, she even confided how during the riots in Ahmedabad (1969), the nuns in her school hid her in a tempo in between mattresses to be taken to a safe zone. She recalled that experience of her body trembling with fear albeit matter-of-factly. Once in the throes of her attack she even told her mother, "Hum nikaah kar lete hain!" She said that thinking marriage would be a safe haven. But I was a married man. There was no way I was going to leave Lorraine. And she was doing too well to give up a career for a nobody like me. Also, it was a nightmare to give her medicines. She'd refuse to have the pills. We'd mix it with the food and drink. But she'd insist, You eat it first!' At times I did.

Drugs vs Electric shock

She had stayed away from work for too long. So the pressures began for her to return. A huge set had been put up for Shaan (1980) and the foreign technicians were waiting. Some producers wanted to directly talk to the doctors and rightfully so. Loans had been taken on huge interests. Her secretary Ved Sharma, a good man, found it difficult to keep producers away. That's when doctors suggested electric shocks to make her fall into line. I was opposed to ECT because it doesn't treat the patient; it caters to society.
When I told her producers that by drawing her into films they were pushing themselves and her towards doom, they dubbed me a user'. Even the media, particularly tabloid journalism, wanted to give the villain a face. They looked for immediate demons citing drugs and a sexually permissive lifestyle as reasons and trivialised her condition. They wanted to prove, Look how the mighty sin and suffer'. I had no legal status in her life or the authority to intervene and say, I'll not let her be given electric shocks and do irreversible damage to her'. So I ran away with Parveen to UG in Bangalore in September 1979.



UG & we

I believed the quiet life there would give her solace even as the drug therapy was on. If she had to heal it would be there under the veil of anonymity. UG saw little chance of complete recovery. He suggested an alternative life, free from the pressures of stardom. In October 1979, I left Bangalore and Parveen in charge of UG because he believed I was part of the problem and that I'd have to move away. My presence, he said, was accelerating her end. "She'll drown you with her. Take hold of your life!" he said. After some time Parveen followed UG to Gstaad, Switzerland. A concerned UG wrote me a letter dated June 6, 1980 from there where he stated, "If it were not for a fear of a crack up again, she'd have certainly gone back... A new way of life is hard for her... I should leave her to her inevitable fate, which is, insanity!" Meanwhile, I had moved back with Lorraine to pick up the threads of life. Lahu Ke Do Rang (1979) had failedI began to write Arth to exorcise the burning charcoals. But the same year Parveen returned to India and into my life once again...

The walkout

... And I went back to her even though I had returned to my wife. Parveen knew I was in touch with UG, who was against her returning to films. He was the voice of sanity, which she didn't want to hear. So she played the last card... I remember it was the same bedroom. We were about to retire. You may call me an exhibitionist but yes, she wanted to make love. 😳 We were close to each other when she said, "Mahesh it's either me or UG." I froze and stared at her. She stared back. I didn't answer. She understood my answer. I saw a tear trickle down her face. I got up and dressed. She said, "Put off the AC it's cold!" Silence exploded in the room. It was raining outside. I walked through the dark passage. I heard her call, "Mahesh, Mahesh!" I didn't turn back. Neither did I wait for the lift, fearing she'd come and take me back. I took the stairs instead. I heard her run behind me... stark, bare... I heard her even take a few steps down the stairs... I wanted to run back and tell her, Look, you can't come out in this state!' But instead I walked on and out... into the rain.
I understood that the relationship was doomed and that I was deluding myself in hoping for a happy ending. The only person who had cushioned her from ECT, who had nursed her and had suggested a way out; she didn't want to hear his truth! UG had fathered me and mothered her. There was no way the party would continue. We broke up in 1980.

LAST MEETING
(In 1983, Parveen left for the USA abandoning her projects. She returned in 1989 having put on a lot of weight and was unrecognisable)
I met her again in 1991. It was the days of the Gulf War (August 1990 - February 1991). Saddam Hussain had invaded Kuwait. The CNN channel had started airing the war. Holiday Inn had a TV set where the war was aired round the clock. I'd visit the coffee shop to watch it. There was a book shop there too. One day I was leafing through some books there when I heard a voice, Excuse me!" It sounded intimate. I turned around and saw Parveen up close. But there was no intimacy in her eyes. There was child-like anger instead. She went ahead and asked for the latest issue of the Architectural Digest. They said it was not yet out. She moved past me again and left. For over 11 years, she had ceased to live within me. But this chance encounter stirred those feelings. Nevertheless, we had become intimate strangers'.

THE CLOSURE
(Fourteen years later...)
It was January 22, 2005, I was at the airport, having returned from Hyderabad, when my phone was flooded with SMSes, "Parveen Babi is dead. She was found dead in her apartment (due to diabetic complications)." It seemed unreal. I learnt that her body was lying unclaimed at the Cooper Hospital. I thought if none of her relatives came forward I'd bury her. She was the springboard of my success. Arth (based on his relationship with Parveen) became the lifeblood of my resurrection. You take away this defining watershed tragedy and my narrative ceases to exist. I owe it all to her. By offering to bury her I felt a sense of closure. As they were laying her to rest on January 23, 2005, I wondered what I'd have been without this woman. She had brought some arth' to my existence!

Source: Filmfare.

By: Mahesh Bhatt

I was watching the last scene of Woh Lamhe in my editing room when it dawned on me. I know why human beings have always tried to keep their dead alive: We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

When my mother died, I had to descend into her grave to turn her face towards the sacred Kaba. So overwhelmed was I, at the thought of leaving her in that cold grave that I was seized by this overpowering longing to stay there with her forever'. It was there, in that moment of finality, that I learned that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must let go of the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let their bodies disintegrate into dust and fuel the never ending flow of life. Let them become a picture by our bedside. Let them become a melody which people can hum, and let their lives and their dreams flicker on movie screens and fill the living with some hope. Woh Lamhe is my last good bye to the memories of Parveen Babi. A woman whom I loved and lost.

The morning I left Parveen's house before it all began, comes back to haunt me. She was off to her shoot for Prakash Mehra, and I was off to fill up my long empty days with talk of cinema with my struggling out-of-work contemporaries in Mehboob Studios. In retrospect, I remember that there was a strange feeling of dread in the air. She kissed me good-bye making sure that the kiss would not spoil her makeup. Little did I know that that was the last time I would see her as the Parveen that I knew.

How can I ever forget that heartbreaking image of her, when I walked in to the house that evening, and found Parveen, in make up and a filmy song costume, cowering in a corner of the room, with a knife in her hand, shivering with fear? She looked like an animal, one that I had never seen before. Close the door Mahesh,' she whispered. They are coming to kill us. Close the door quickly!'

And with those words, ended my days of love and splendor, sin and passion with Parveen. I was looking into the eyes of madness and the face of death. Because, the person that I knew had died, and with that our relationship as we had known it, died too. Parveen started to break up into little pieces in front of my eyes, and I was helpless in the face of the fury of her madness. And all the kings' horses and all the kings' men could not put her together again.

Parveen's illness was genetic. The chances of her recovery were slim to none. The doctors who treated her knew this but were not decorous enough to tell us this bitter truth, because if they did they would be out of business. It was in those terrible times that I discovered for myself that it is we who push the so called mentally disturbed' to commit suicide. That is the reason why I have no hesitation in saying that the psychiatrist is one of the worst enemies of our culture. Because it is he who is forcing all those people who have thrown in the towel to fit into this brutal value system.

Parveen's madness, the threat from the mighties of the film industry to put her before the camera at any cost, the psychiatrists throwing up their hands, and her ignorant' mother yielding to the pressure for electric shock treatment, climaxing with me running away with her to the jungles of Kodai where we spent the best' moments of our life is fictionalised' brilliantly by Mohit Suri and Shagufta Rafique in the second half of Woh Lamhe. Our attempt in this film is not just to make you grieve or uplift the viewer, but to leave an indelible memory of the essence and truth of an exceptional woman who lived in another time and place.

Why are you using the tragedy of Parveen Babi and marketing it for profit?' asked a self righteous priest to me recently. I answered with a smile, I must say I'm staggered by your unblinking arrogance. Don't you see the absurdity of you of all people asking me this question? You and those before you have only made the suffering of a man called Jesus into a multi billion dollar industry today! And will continue to do so... I am at least marketing the memories of a friend which are mine and mine alone. Are you going to claim copyright over those memories too now? In that case you should be crossing swords with every media person. After all, the marketing of tragedy is something the media does every day!' The priest froze, not having expected this kind of outburst.

The power of grief deranges the human mind. Writing and making movies is my way of dealing with my life burns. Who Lamhe has erupted from the deepest part of my being. And that part of me was triggered suddenly one day by Parveen's death and the subsequent discovery of a tape which my daughter Pooja found in my first wife's house and brought over to me. The tape contained a letter that Parveen had recorded and sent me, in which she talked about her approaching illness, her overpowering loneliness and her need to get out of the entertainment business. The silences between her words spoke to me more eloquently than her words did. I remember these silences as being a defining part of our relationship. The only regret I have is that I couldn't see her illness coming. Looking back, I realise now that there were so many signs that I just failed to read.

On a silent moonlit night long before Parveen's actual breakdown, I woke up in her house to the sounds of someone whining. I discovered that the side of the bed on which she slept was empty. Her zebra - striped bed quilt without which she never slept was gone. When I rushed out of the bedroom I found Parveen seated under a lamp made of shells, weeping inconsolably. Worried, I inched closer to her to find out what had triggered this sudden upsurge of emotions. I remember that she recoiled from me and covered herself with her quilt. At dawn, when darkness began to recede from her drawing room and the air started to resonate with the chants of Hare Rama, Hare Krishna' from the adjoining ISKON centre, in a heartbeat, her mood changed. Suddenly, she went into the bathroom and having bathed, dressed herself in immaculate white kurta pyjama. Rolling a small mat onto the red carpet, she did something I had never seen her do in my three and a half year association with her. She began her namaaz.' The sight was mesmerising. Her silhouette against the glow of the morning sky, her trembling lips reciting the Arabic prayers, her tears of grief metamorphosing into fervent tears of devotion, still play on the screen of my memory. Then, having concluded her prayer, she began to lay the table and light the candles, even as a beam of sunlight fell upon her, after which she went into the kitchen and immersed herself in the domestic activity of preparing breakfast for herself and me. Parveen loved the domestic chores from which ordinary women seek respite.

As the day deepened, our silence was punctuated by the occasional flicker of a smile which would play on her lips, and just as suddenly, tears would start to brim in her eyes. I did not know what had happened to her in the night that made her do what she did, or what was going on in her mind now. As she sat down staring at her palm, and puffing on a cigarette, she finally spoke to me. If you shut this window and save me from this deafening roar of the ocean, I'll tell you what happened to me last night' she said. And then she opened the doors to a traumatic incident in her life, which she had kept shut from the world for a very long time.

She spoke about the riots in Ahemdabad. If my memory doesn't fail me, I think it was the carnage of 1969 that she was referring to, where 4000 people are rumoured to have died, most of them Muslims. Tales of Muslim girls being raped and killed were flying thick and fast around the city, and the nuns in her school, fearing for Parveen's life and safety, hid her under a pile of thick mattresses, in a truck, and smuggled her out of the campus to a safe zone. You do not know,' she said in a matter of fact tone that itself sent a shiver down my spine,' what it is to lie curled up under a pile of mattresses, knowing and fearing that any moment, the mob could stop the vehicle that I was in, and pull me out and rape me and tear me to shreds. What still stays with me is the manner in which she said what she said. My wife today wonders whether it was this trauma which scarred her psyche and contributed to her breakdown. Frankly, if you ask me, I don't know.

When I first started to write and make movies, I felt that everything could be explained. Now that I have grown older, I can see how untrue it would be, if I claim that I have been able to tell you the story of my life with Parveen Babi. Not knowing is not resignation. It is an opening to amazement.

Life does not end. But films do, and with them the lives and thoughts and dreams we have shared for so short and magical a time. We leave the characters of a movie at the zenith of their lives or in the hours of their deaths, and there they remain frozen in time

In a village somewhere in Africa, when a storyteller comes to end of his tale, he places the palm of his hand on the ground and says, "I put down my story here." Then he adds, "So that someone else may take it up another day."