The soundtrack of our lives

A seven-year-old boy returned to India in 1971, the first time in six years that he was back at his birthplace — Muzaffarpur, Bihar — and among the first things his relatives did was drag him to Shekhar talkies where he sat in the balcony with a row of aunts to watch Haathi mere Saathi, starring Rajesh Khanna. The film is basically of the genre of buddy-movies, a rollercoaster of emotions capped by an elephant making the ultimate sacrifice for his friend (who was ready to run off with some chick). The novelty of a foreign-returned young nephew meant that several relatives dragged him off for an evening on the town, and so he got to see Haathi Mere Saathi thrice (he also got to see Mera Gaon Mera Desh four times).

Most striking about Rajesh Khanna was his singing. The boy’s maternal uncle (who died of cancer last month) had a stack of 45 rpm records. One single, “Zindagi ek safar hai suhana”, played over and over at the large house filled with a joint family. The boy was surprised to learn that the singer was none other than Rajesh Khanna. Also, there were several weddings going on that season and one song was regularly played: “Meri pyaari beheniya banegi dulhaniya”. (This song became a staple for brass bands at wedding processions for decades.) The singer was, lo and behold… Rajesh Khanna! The seven-year-old was impressed.

One day, the boy wondered aloud that Rajesh Khanna must have gotten tired singing in all the movies all the time. The uncle explained the concept of playback singing by mimicking an actor mouthing the lyrics. He looked like a fish opening and closing its mouth in an aquarium, so the boy was skeptical. But then he found Rajesh Khanna’s voice singing songs in movies that did not star Rajesh Khanna. Hmm. Something was definitely fishy.

For the next three years that the boy lived in Muzaffarpur, he often holidayed in Topchanchi, a tiny town about 40 kilometres from Dhanbad. (Topchanchi figures in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur as the place where Sardar Khan installs his Bengali mistress, and it figures in Part One’s climax.) The boy’s paternal grandfather was a sanitary inspector for the coal mines and he stayed in a government bungalow in Topchanchi, at the foot of a hill which was off-limits to the boy and his cousins after dusk since wild animals including leopards roamed. Topchanchi is where the boy learned to crap in an open field. Instead of a record player there was a transistor radio, so a lot of time was also spent listening to Rajesh Khanna singing all those ridiculous songs from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Once the boy was distracted from the radio; a servant was suddenly on the floor and shaking violently, causing great commotion in the house. It was the first time the boy had seen an epileptic fit. No one could explain mirgi, and for a while the boy connected it with Rajesh Khanna songs.

During those three years in Bihar, Rajesh Khanna was the reigning movie-star and so the boy was dragged along with the row of aunts to see the films that were churned out including Amar Prem, which bored the boy to tears. Dushman was more exciting (since it ended with a conclusive fight) though no one in the row of aunts could explain why the criminal was punished by being confined in his victim’s own village. This was puzzling as one night the boy had seen in his mohalla a mob that had caught a thief and was dragging the man to the sadar thana. The thief had been beaten badly and indeed was still being hit by a palm or a chappal or a punch as he was dragged along. The thief was on the ground as he was dragged, so it looked to the boy as if he had been beaten so viciously that all his bones had broken and his body had literally collapsed. If the mohalla could to that to a thief, then why didn’t the village do worse to the dushman?

At age ten, the boy left for America. One of the last films he saw was at his missionary school, Prabhat Tara, called Anand. He had sung Anand’s songs on the roof with his cousins, but it was a sad film because in the end Rajesh Khanna died. Oddly enough, the other fellow in the film later became cinema’s main hero. In America, the boy couldn’t escape the feeling that Anand actually had something to do with Rajesh Khanna’s decline. Now, of course, he knows better.

So when Rajesh Khanna died last week, this columnist did not think of matters such as the period when the actor was his ineffectual MP; or when he watched Mehboob ki Mehndi with a Pakistani friend’s family in High Wycombe, UK; or when his parents forced him to watch Avtaar. He thought of the time when, as a seven-year-old, he first visited India; and of how music, movies and matinee idols can magically unlock hidden memories.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai