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On Parveen Babi’s 68th birth anniversary, remembering the men she loved and lost
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She was the face of freedom and feminism. Someone who blew away convention in smoke rings and held forth on Jean-Paul Sarte’s born-free live-free existentialism. Yet in reality, Parveen Babi remained enslaved to the demons of her mind. A fear that perhaps took root when she escaped from the 1969 Ahmedabad riots- ‘curled up under a pile of mattresses, fearing that any moment the mob could stop the vehicle… and rape her’. The dormant dread, compounded by an alleged genetic biochemical disorder and the uncertainty of her own relationships and career, reduced the gorgeous Parveen Babi into a paranoid mess.
Someone who spelled stardom in Bollywood had to be cuffed and lifted by cops from the JFK Airport in New York to a hospital after she grew hysterical during a routine check; someone who, on her return to Mumbai in November 1989 after years of anonymity in the US, had to hold a placard at the airport, identifying herself as ‘Parveen Babi’, the ‘Coke’ bottle glasses and tousled hair incongruent with her last-recalled image.
Tragically, the first Indian actress to appear in Time magazine was found dead in her apartment in 2005, in ‘discoloured white shorts and a tee-shirt, a stained bandage on her left foot’ two days after she’d passed away due to gangrene and diabetic complications. But her body, tagged as ‘Token No. 62’ in the Cooper Hospital morgue, was eventually given a dignified burial by the three significant men in her life – Danny Denzongpa, Kabir Bedi, and Mahesh Bhatt. It proved that she had given as much as she had received from them. That she was not a past they disclaimed. Rather, a part that added to the larger picture of their lives.
Danny Denzongpa
Newbie Parveen Babi met both Danny Denzongpa and Mahesh Bhatt on the sets of her debut film Charitra (1973). They were part of the bohemian ‘Juhu group’, which included Kabir Bedi, his wife Protima Bedi, and Jalal Agha, among others. Night parties on the seaboard, twilight swims at Sun n’ Sand Hotel, and midnight trips to Mount Mary Church in Bandra, the ‘flower power’ gang painted the suburbs red.
Around 1974, Parveen entered into a relationship with Danny, their choice to live in being an extension of their non-conformist personalities, until familiarity wore off its allure and Parveen was drawn towards the much-married Kabir. Karishma Upadhyay in her memoir, Parveen Babi: A Life, mentions that it was Parveen, who told Danny that Kabir and she had grown attracted to each other. “Danny couldn’t believe his ears not because Parveen and he were technically in a relationship but also because Protima and Kabir were friends of theirs… The end of the relationship with Parveen was free of drama… there were no fireworks or sob fests… and just like that an important chapter in both their lives ended,” writes Upadhyay.
Danny, who remained a friend, always maintained that Parveen was ‘a nice human being, very beautiful’ and that they had parted on a good note. Parveen continued living in the same colony, Kalumal Estate in Juhu, as Danny. “I had a new girlfriend (actor Kim) those days… If your ex keeps walking into your house anytime like a mother hen, it would be difficult for any girl to accept. I’d reach home to find Parveen in my bedroom watching a movie on the VCR. I asked Parveen not to do it,” once recollected Danny good-humouredly while speaking to Filmfare.
Danny recalled the time he first noticed Parveen’s mental shakiness. He was invited for a routine dinner at her home. There were silver conches on the table. When he began blowing one, she got frightened. Through her spiral down in the following years, Danny was always around whenever Parveen needed him. In fact, a desperate Mahesh (she was in a relationship with him in the late ’70s) asked Danny for help one day when Parveen had turned hysterical. Her guru, UG Krishnamurthi, was sent for. Only when he held her hand and reassured her that there was nothing wrong with her, did she calm down.
Danny revealed why Parveen eventually cut off ties with him. “One day she happened to read an interview where Amitji (Bachchan) had mentioned that I was a good friend of his. That was it. When I went to meet her the next time, she saw me through the keyhole and refused to let me in, calling me ‘his agent’. She was frightened of me too,” told Danny, as reported by Filmfare, throwing light on her obsession with Amitabh Bachchan that reportedly took on paranoid proportions later.
Kabir Bedi
Ironically, Parveen was first a close friend of Kabir’s wife/danseuse Protima Bedi. She got into an intense relationship with the actor when their ‘normal marriage’ transformed into an ‘open marriage’. Though Protima was devastated at Kabir’s decision to move in with Parveen, Kabir was consumed by his passion for the actor. Parveen, given her tendency to get possessive and obsessive in love, accompanied Kabir to Italy when he was riding on the Sandokan (1976) wave only to fly down to Bombay one day. Kabir had even got her the lead role in the sequel Sandokan Rises Again. But she discarded the project. Kabir described this as a ’double blow’. “At the personal level, I felt rejected. At the professional level, Parveen abandoned the film at the last moment… So yes, Parveen dumped me and that’s the truth of the matter,” he told Filmfare.
Kabir mentioned that indications of her illness were evident in Europe. “Parveen was an extremely sensitive and intelligent woman. She gave me enormous love, a sense of togetherness and yet the cloud of her deteriorating mental condition hung over us. The tragedy of her mental illness was unfolding when I was going through my greatest success in Europe. It was a difficult period for me,” he shared in a recent interview with Pinkvilla. Years later, the estranged lovers met when she visited London to shoot a film. “I met her at Protima’s funeral service too. It was gracious of her to come… Some years later, I attended Parveen’s funeral,” he said wistfully.
Mahesh Bhatt
Mahesh Bhatt’s relationship with Parveen has been the most controversial. It began around 1977 when she returned from Italy, after her break-up with Kabir. A star in demand, she was filming Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) those days, while Mahesh Bhatt was a flop filmmaker. He left his wife Lorraine Bright and his daughter Pooja (Bhatt) to live with Parveen. “At home, she was a normal, traditional girl, who loved to oil her hair and cook- a Gujaratan from Junagadh, albeit with Western influences,” shared Mahesh in an interview.
It was in 1979 when Mahesh first got a glimpse of Parveen’s crack-up. He walked into Parveen’s apartment one day to find her, still in costume, curled up in the corner. “How can I ever forget that heart-breaking image of her… with a knife in her hand, shivering with fear? She looked like an animal… ‘Close the door Mahesh,’ she whispered. ‘They are coming to kill us!” Bhatt was thus quoted by Indicine. After many such bizarre incidents, her mental illness was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia.
Mahesh called up Kabir informing him of her condition, who suggested a few hospitals in the UK, which treated such cases.
The set for Ramesh Sippy’s Shaan (1980) had been waiting for long for Parveen to recover from her troubled state. Doctors suggested a drastic measure to make her resume work. To protect her from electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) – shock therapy – Mahesh took Parveen to UG Krishnamurthy in Bangalore in September 1979. UG suggested an alternative life, away from the pressures of stardom, as the only cure. In October 1979, Mahesh left Parveen in charge of UG, while Parveen followed UG to Gstaad, Switzerland. For a while, she found peace in the idyllic environs but her heart was in films.
“UG wrote me a letter dated June 6, 1980 where he stated, ‘A new way of life is hard for her… I should leave her to her inevitable fate, which is of course, insanity!”, revealed Mahesh in a throwback interview. Trying to pick up the lost threads of his life, he had moved back with Lorraine. Soon enough, in 1980, Parveen returned to India and into his life once again. Parveen knew that Mahesh held UG in high regard. He’d shown her a path, which she didn’t want to walk – a life away from glamour. One night, her possessiveness resurfacing, she asked Mahesh to choose between UG and her. Mahesh chose to walk away from her life and out of her apartment. “Unwilling to wait for the lift and have her catch up with me, I took the stairs… but she ran down behind me to the floor below. And stopped suddenly. Perhaps, that’s when it dawned on her that she wasn’t dressed,” Mahesh Bhatt is thus quoted in Parveen Babi: A Life, summing up their midnight break-up in 1980.
It was alleged that Mahesh’s semi-autobiographical Arth (1982), made to exorcise his demons, pushed Parveen towards breakdown as disturbing episodes from her private world were reflected in the film. In July 1983, Parveen abruptly flew off to be with UG in the US. Just as abruptly as she had left, she returned six years later in 1989. This time, she was unrecognizable, unreachable, undecipherable.
Sometime later, Mahesh was browsing through some books in a shop in Holiday Inn, when he heard an acquainted voice, ‘Excuse me!” It was Parveen. “There was no intimacy in her eyes. There was child-like anger instead. I stepped aside… she moved past me and left,” Mahesh recalled that moment in 1991 in an interview.
Fourteen years later, on January 22, 2005, Mahesh’s phone was swamped with SMSs, “Parveen Babi is dead.” Her body was lying unclaimed at the Cooper Hospital. Mahesh thought if none of her relatives came forward, he’d bury her. “She was the springboard of my life, my success. I owed everything to her. Arth became the lifeblood of my resurrection… By offering to bury her, I felt a sense of closure,” he reflected while speaking to Filmfare.
On January 30, 2005, when Parveen’s final rites were conducted, among the handful of pallbearers were the three men – Danny, Kabir, and Mahesh – she’d once loved. “She had a great capacity to love. What happened to her was extremely tragic. Parveen deserved that respect. Well, we shared her life and she shared ours. At the heart of it, we deeply cared for her though we couldn’t prevent her breakdown…,” said Kabir Bedi to Pinkvilla.
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