Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story: An Unfinished Story

PROLOGUE

BERLIN, 1963

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam was India’s official entry at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival. On 26 June 1963, its lead actors, Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, attended the festival along with the film’s director, Abrar Alvi. The screening took place the next day but the film failed to create any flutter as the international audience could not relate to the overt melodrama and the very Indian theme. This, despite the fact that the film had been trimmed specially for the festival. There were hardly twenty-five people in the theatre and their interest in the film could not be sustained. The film was outrightly rejected.

Guru Dutt walked out of his own screening.

On this very same trip, Waheeda Rehman—Guru Dutt’s protégé, and the one and only lead actress in his films for a substantial part of his career—conclusively yet gracefully conveyed the end of her relationship with Guru Dutt.

‘Yes. The last time I saw him must have been in Berlin,’ said Waheeda Rehman.¹ Things had started to unravel towards the close of their last shoot together for Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. Guru Dutt’s younger sister, the eminent artist Lalitha Lajmi, remembers, ‘Waheeda and Guru Dutt had almost parted. She used to invite us both sometimes for dinner and my brother knew she was friendly with me. l heard Guru Dutt went with a bouquet of flowers to her home and the doors were not opened to him. Perhaps it was after this incident l had visited him and for the first time he told me not to keep in touch with her any more.’

The very next day, Guru Dutt left Berlin.

Legendary film maker B.R. Chopra recalled,² ‘That man, Guru Dutt, drank all the way back from Berlin to Bombay while keeping all to himself in a corner seat. We knew all about Waheeda having told him, point-blank that she had made up her mind about him and that was it. She also discreetly left Guru Dutt to find his own way back. Guru Dutt was clearly heading towards turning into a mental and physical wreck…I instinctively knew that it was the beginning of the end.’

Guru Dutt used up all the sleeping pills that he had carried with him to Berlin. He didn’t sleep for the next four nights. ‘He said to me, I think I will go mad’, recalled Bimal Mitra, the writer of Sahib, Biwi aur Ghulam and undoubtedly a giant in the literary world from Bengal.

Bombay, 1963

Back in Bombay, his wife Geeta Dutt—the glorious singer who had broken playback singing traditions to bring a fresh naturalness to Indian film songs—had started blaming their bungalow for all their woes. They shared only a decade old but widely celebrated story—the star singer and the struggling film-maker having found love in tinseltown. Deep down she believed that their relationship had developed an irreparable rift only after they shifted to this bungalow in the very posh locality of Pali Hill.

Lalitha Lajmi, who witnessed the relationship from the early days of courtship till the end, further recalls,³‘She believed that the bungalow was haunted. There was a particular tree in the house and she said there’s a ghost who lives in that tree, who is bringing bad omen and ruining their marriage. She also had something against a Buddha statue that was kept in their huge drawing room.’ According to Lalitha, it was Geeta who had suggested that they must leave.

This prospect was heartbreaking for Guru Dutt.

It had been his dream house—but never the home he had always longed for.

Guru Dutt had twice attempted to kill himself in this house and survived both attempts.

Once, after surviving a suicide attempt, a close friend asked Guru Dutt,⁴‘Why should you have done it? You have fame, you have wealth, you have the adoration of the masses. You possess all that most people crave for! Why are you so dissatisfied with life?’

Guru Dutt replied, ‘I am not dissatisfied with life, I am dissatisfied within myself. True, I have all that people crave for. Still I don’t have that which most people possess—a nook where one can repair [retire] to after the day’s task is done, where one can find some peace and forget one’s cares. If only I could get that, life would be worth living!’

From a house that had been home to the birth of so many great stories on celluloid, it now only birthed insomnia for Guru Dutt. So despite living in one of the most beautiful bungalows in Bombay’s prime real estate, Guru Dutt would leave the house early every morning and reach his studio with sleep-deprived eyes. The studio wouldn’t be open at that hour and silence hung all around it. Guru Dutt’s man Friday, Ratan, would open the lock of the small chamber—a seven feet by seven feet room with a precious small bed. This is where Guru Dutt would lie down quietly and finally find sleep.

‘I always wanted to be happy in my household. My house is the most beautiful among all the buildings in Pali Hill. Sitting in that house, it does not look like you are in Bombay. That garden, that ambience—where else can I find it? Despite this, I could not stay in that house for much longer,’ once shared Guru Dutt.

Away from his luxurious and palatial bungalow, this small room was where he would find peace and sleep.

And then, on the morning of his birthday—ten days after his return from Berlin—he called in workers and told them to demolish his Pali Hill bungalow.

‘I remember it was his birthday. He loved that house and he was heartbroken when it was demolished,’ recalls his sister Lalitha Lajmi.

The next time writer Bimal Mitra came to Bombay, he was taken to a new flat where Guru Dutt was living on rent. He was surprised and asked Guru what happened to the bungalow. Guru didn’t reply.

Mitra recalled, ‘In the car I asked him, Why did you break that house?’

Guru seemed shocked at this direct question. He said, ‘Would you like to go there, to see that house?’

‘Let’s go,’ said Mitra.

Guru turned the car around.

‘We had descended down the steep slope of Pali Hill. We went back towards his bungalow. Taking several turns, our car reached the bungalow.’

The same bungalow number 48 of Pali Hill.

But everything looked different now. Guru Dutt’s old concierge, Lala, was standing in front of the property. Bimal Mitra was stunned. The majestic bungalow where he had been a guest during his multiple script writing visits to Bombay had been razed to the ground. The room where Guru used to sleep now just had rubble in its place. Broken Italian blue marble was lying in place of the exquisite bathroom.

All he could see was splintered timber, chunks of plaster and shattered pieces of a dream.

He looked at Guru Dutt who was silently staring into space, lost in his thoughts. Mitra couldn’t gather the courage to say anything. They walked in silence back to the car when Mitra asked him, ‘But what is the real reason for demolishing the bungalow? That bungalow was…?’

‘Because of Geeta,’ Guru said in a low voice.

‘What does that even mean?’ Mitra asked

Guru took a puff of his cigarette, and gently explained, ‘Ghar na hone ki takleef se, ghar hone ki takleef aur bhayankar hoti hai.’⁵

It seems like sharp reminder of the scene from their film Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam where Guru Dutt, playing a middle-aged architect, goes back to the haveli and asks the workers to pull it down. His life and cinema kept merging with each other like that.

About a year later, the last shot he gave was for the film Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi. Playing a reporter, he hands over his resignation letter to his editor and says, ‘I am leaving.’

Bombay, 1964

Geeta Dutt was really restless that night after another argument with Guru Dutt. She had shifted to her mother’s house leaving Guru alone, who was staying at the rented Pedder Road apartment.

She had a strange premonition. In the early hours of the next morning she called up the house and asked the servant to check on Guru. The servant informed her that the door was locked from inside. Geeta asked the servant to break open the door.

It was 10.30 AM on 10 October 1964. A Saturday.

‘I have such vivid memory of his death. I remember his right arm was stretched out, his eyes half-open as if he was about to get up, about to say something,’ recalls Lalitha, his sister.

Wearing a kurta-pyjama, sprawled on his back, eyes closed, face inclined to the right and relaxed in a serene repose.

On the side table was a glass filled with a pink liquid—sleeping pills crushed and dissolved in water. There was an unfinished Hindi novel by his side and the lights were on. It looked like a thought-out scene straight out of one of his films. He had woven many spells through the poetic glances of his camera, the rhythm in his song sequences and the rebellion in his cinematic language. This was Guru Dutt’s last spell. An unusual frame composition for his real death sequence.

Finally, his melancholy was over.

‘When I met Geeta her first words to me were, Lalli! I know all of you will blame me for his death,’ remembers Lalitha.

Guru Dutt died at the age of thirty-nine leaving behind a revered legacy in the short span of his career. A man of few words, who came to be celebrated for his brilliance only decades after his death.

Like his films, his life was a dream in two parts—the building of the dream and then the destruction of the dream.

We tell it here as it was.

Section One

THE BUILDING OF A DREAM

1925–30: MANGALORE TO CALCUTTA

‘He was obsessed with shadow plays.’

1

THE BEGINNING

‘Bring up your child in a good way, so that he would have the courage and character to face life.’

—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Guru Dutt’s mother Vasanthi and father Shivshankar Rao Padukone belonged to Mangalore’s Saraswat community. The Konkani-speaking Saraswat community of Mangalore boasts of many scholars and artists. Shivshankar Padukone was from a modest background. He was pursuing a B.A. degree and was all of twenty years of age when he married the twelve-year-old Vasanthi in 1920. When Vasanthi reached puberty, the nuptial ceremony was performed. Vasanthi loved going to school but had to quit studies against her wishes.

Shivshankar was often unwell and was advised to see an astrologer. With Vasanthi, he went to meet the man, who also studied Vasanthi’s palm. ‘The astrologer gave me a broad smile when he examined my palm. He predicted that I would get a son within a year. He would be a good person and bring good luck to the family. The child would be world famous. I felt shy at that time; getting children at such a young age was unthinkable, recalled Vasanthi.’⁶

In 1924, the couple moved to Pannambur near Bangalore where Shivshankar Rao Padukone worked as a school headmaster. Mr Padukone was a man with a literary bent of mind and wrote poems in English, a language in which he was proficient. His dream was to write and edit journals. In his personal life, he was aloof, mostly lost in his dreams. He kept silent and there was little communication between him and his very young wife. Vasanthi wanted to learn the English language from her husband. ‘I was longing to learn English. I did translations or made sentences in English, and he would correct them if he was in proper mood. But these occasions were rare. His short temper confused me, and I would stop learning.’

Shivshankar and Vasanthi were not happy together. The social norms in that day and age ruled that if you were married then had to ‘learn to tolerate each other’. Vasanthi followed it too.

On 9 July 1925, exactly at noon, Vasanthi and Shivshankar’s first child, Gurudutt Padukone, was born.

On the twelfth day, the cradle ceremony was performed and two names were suggested for the baby: Vasant Kumar and Gurudutt. The baby was born on a Thursday (Guruvaar) and it was also the birthday of Madhavacharya, the great philosopher and saint of the Vaishnava cult. So Gurudutt it was.⁷

Vasanthi’s world now revolved around her first-born son and her mother came to live with them. The communication between Vasanthi and Shivshankar kept dwindling with time. She recounted, ‘I was not close to my husband. We were poles apart. The wife had neither choice nor voice in any matters. Women had only to be submissive and obey their masters.’

Shivshankar resigned from his job as the school headmaster and shifted to Bangalore for a new job in a bank. But in his heart he wanted to pursue creative writing. Dissatisfied with the lack of creativity in his life and work, very soon Shivshankar resigned from his bank job too and moved to Mangalore. In Mangalore, he joined a printing press that published a weekly magazine. But he couldn’t stay there for long either. Vasanthi was pregnant with her second child when Shivshankar resigned from the printing press too. The constant pressures of life were making him bitter.

During that phase of her life, Vasanthi had become so restless that she wanted to escape. In 1927, Mahatma Gandhi visited Bangalore. Vasanthi attended his prayer meetings and felt so peaceful that she wrote a letter to him describing her life and asking Gandhi ji to let her join the Sabarmati Ashram. Mahatma Gandhi wrote back.⁸

Dear Vasanthi Devi,

Recieved your letter. It was God’s wish. You ought to stay where you are. Duty of a mother and wife is most important. Bring up your child in a good way, so that he would have the courage and character to face life. Serve our Bharatmata. Never give up hope.

Ever yours

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Perhaps Vasanthi followed Mahatma Gandhi’s advice. Guru Dutt became the centre of her universe.The family went through severe financial struggles and lived in Bombay and Ahmedabad for short periods. But fate had its own way. Shivshankar never liked the city of Calcutta but got the job of a salesman in Calcutta.

The family then moved to Calcutta thinking that soon he would lose his job and they would have to go to a new city again. But later, Shivshankar found a job as an administrative clerk at the Burmah Shell Company. This was a job that finally gave the family the economic stability they were looking for. He went on to work with the company for the next thirty years.

Calcutta then became the city where Guru Dutt spent the formative years of his life. It became ‘his city’. A culturally vibrant city that homed into his heart and mind and shaped the man he was to be.

2

A DISTURBED CHILDHOOD

CALCUTTA, 1929

‘We had a disturbed childhood…our father did not believe in success. He believed in poetry which is not enough to survive. We looked upto our elder brother Guru Dutt.’

—Lalitha Lajmi

Guru was four years old when his mother gave birth to her second son. He was named Shashidhar. Little Guru loved his kid brother but Shashidhar passed away due to illness when he was seven months old. He had severe convulsions. His brother’s death traumatised Guru Dutt severely. Too young to understand death, Guru remained unwell for many weeks. For years after that Guru would remember him and weep.

The family lived in rented houses and changed many houses in Calcutta. Given the meagre income, there was hardly a concept of a stable home. Vasanthi had a third son Atmaram, followed by their only daughter Lalitha. Lalitha was seven years younger to Guru Dutt. She later had two more sons, Devidutt and Vijay. Guru Dutt’s sister, Lalitha Lajmi recounts, ‘Financially, it was a difficult life. We lived in a tiny two-bedroom flat in Calcutta. There were our parents, my maternal grandmother and five of us kids. The flat was so small that we kept colliding into one another. Father was always lost in his own world. My grandmother ruled the household. She cooked, cleaned and ran the house. I don’t think my father, who was ten years older than mother, liked this arrangement. We had a disturbed childhood.’

It was a big family and the lack of resources kept flaring up. Guru’s father was struggling to make ends meet. The clerical post at the Burmah Shell Company paid the bills, but his dreams of a creative life were shattered. It left him a bitter and frustrated man.

Lalitha recalls, ‘There were always financial problems. My father’s job was low income. He was a clerk and he never rose to become any senior director [never rose to a senior position]. He was not ambitious. Perhaps he did not believe in success. A very idealistic man. He believed in poetry which is not enough to survive.

‘My parents would often have heated arguments. Mother was very ambitious but my father was quite happy with his Keats, Shakespeare and Shaw. A laidback intellectual, he didn’t talk much,’⁹recalled Lalitha. Guru Dutt and his siblings were scared of their father’s temper and could never get close to him emotionally. As a kid, Guru was stubborn and short tempered like his father.

‘Mother was the driving force. My father was very detached from the kids. He was never ever interested. Never even asked Ammaa how she was running the house. Once our school called him for a meeting but when he went there he had no clue in which class his kids were,’ laughs Lalitha.

So it was Vasanthi who became the guiding light for her kids, especially Guru