By Mayank Chhaya-
I first met Dev Anand in 1984, when he was 61, which in Dev Anand years would be early 20s.
He wore a blue gabardine shirt and black corduroy trousers. A flaming orange scarf was wrapped around his neck. He stood in the doorway to his Navketan Films’ office in Khira Estate, Santa Cruz, with hands akimbo, mouth breaking into his signature toothless smile, and said, “You are young, Mayank.” For the record I was 23. It sounded as if he was relieved that I was young.
Before that first meeting I had spoken to him a couple of times on the phone, one of which had such a refreshing Dev Anand whimsy attached to it. The Sikh separatist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had just been killed in Operation Blue Star and I was seeking reactions from prominent figures of Bombay. Dev Anand was one of them.
I called his residence Iris Park in Juhu. The first call was answered by an aide of his who said something which could mean any number of things in the context of a Hindi movie star except what it really means. The aide said, “Sahab, abhi bathroom mein hein aur ready ho rahen hein.” (He is in the bathroom and getting ready).
Since I was on a deadline, I called again five minutes later. This time another man answered with a distinctively stretched hello that sounded like “haloooo.” Perhaps half of India would have recognized that voice instantly. It was Dev Anand and my first ever conversation with him. I could hear some water flowing in the background. I told him who I was and explained the purpose of my call.
“Mayank, can I call you back in 15 minutes? I am in my shower,” he said and actually held the phone close to the showerhead to prove that he was telling me the truth. He told me to leave my number with his aide. That is another thing with movie stars. They generally do not return your calls. That’s just their way of saying that they would never call you back.
Some 20 minutes later I received a call from Dev Anand. He gave me a brief reaction and ended the call saying, “Let’s meet sometime.”
We met several times over the next quarter century or so, the last being on my last visit to Mumbai last year. I would just narrate a few vignettes from a friendship that began in 1984 and ended with his passing in 2011.
During my very first interview with him. We spent nearly two hours together in his rather charmingly unkempt office, but he did not sit down even for a moment. Barely third year into my career as a journalist, I considered it very becoming of me to ask insolent questions, one of which was, “Mr. Anand, what do you have more—talent or enthusiasm?”
The impudence of the question was not lost on someone who had already been an iconic movie star for close to four decades by the time I posed it. The only sign that this otherwise remarkably classy gentleman was discomfited by my effrontery was evident in the way he took two brisk rounds of his desk and said, “I am as talented as anybody else.”
It is entirely a measure of Anand’s character that he did not let my first encounter with him stand in the way of what turned out to be a long friendship.
The first interview also tried to dwell on themes that I thought other journalists, mostly specializing in Hindi movies (I have always been a hard news journalist), were not at all curious about. Flamboyance was Dev Anand’s default temperament and I saw an opening there. Since by that time it was more a conversation than an interview, I said something to this effect. “It would seem that you use your flamboyance as a shield to keep most of the world out. They are so taken in by your flamboyance and charisma that they do not bother to look beyond it.”
He had a fountain pen in his mouth as he looked at me and then through me. He then drummed his desk with the pen as if harmonizing what he was about to say and then said, “That is an unusual question and unusual theory. But I am not going to discuss that.”
Another question I remember distinctly was about his views on friendship. His reply, “Everybody is a buddy but then nobody is.”
Many of you might know that Dev Anand and his gifted writer director actor younger brother Vijay Anand made several hits together. In fact, Dev Anand did some of his best work with Vijay Anand, whom he called Goldie. However, after a period of time they just stopped working together which incidentally marked a distinct decline in the quality of Dev Anand’s films for the better part of the last three decades of his career.
I had asked him once why he would not consider doing a project with his brother. His response was both affectionate and facetious. “Goldie mota ho gaya hai” meaning Goldie has gained weight as if that affected his gifts as a writer and director.
There are several by-the-way conversations that I had had with Anand over the years. One of them was about how a houndstooth pattern cap that he wore in the 1967 heist movie ‘Jewel Thief’ directed by his brother Goldie and how it became a rage. I remember shops in Ahmedabad in perhaps 1969 or 1970 offering poor imitations of the cap that men who could not remotely carry it off tried to carry it off.
Anand writes about his visit to the famous Tivoli Gardens in Denmark. In his autobiography, he says “I had been to Tivoli earlier, holding Saira Bano’s hand, romancing with her in Pyar Mohabbat, directed by Shankar Mukherjee. While shop-gazing on the streets there, I had come across a cap that went on to create a cult for itself.”
“My Jewel Thief cap was bought in Copenhagen.”
In 2001 November when he and I talked about ‘Jewel Thief’ in Franscisco, he told me that he still had that cap. I am not sure if it still exists.
I told Anand ‘Jewel Thief’, which captured his cool very well courtesy of his brother also had some of Sachin Dev Burman’s best songs.
Look at the contrast between the absolute foot tapper ‘Baithen Hain Kya Uske Paas’ and the melancholic ‘Rula Ke Gaya Sapna.’
Anand told me something rather striking. He said he loved “Rula Ke Gaya Sapna.” “In a different avatar, I would have liked to sing it. It is a favorite of mine,” he told me.
One of my favorite Dev Anand stories involves my brother Manoj and I. Sometime in 1977, Manoj was overcome with the wish to write a fan letter to Anand in order obtain an autographed photograph of the star. I drafted the letter. That was the easy part. The difficult part was finding Dev Anand’s address, which we managed with great effort.
In those days the Indian Post had a service called “Registered A.D.” letters which meant that the postal service not only made sure such mail was delivered but that even the receipt of the letter was signed by the recipient or someone authorized. If I remember it right, Registered A.D. mail was mainly used to send legal or other such important documents which required proof of delivery.
People were not randomly sent Registered A.D. mail and those receiving it were careful so as not to commit to a potential legal liability. We, of course, did not know any of this as teenagers. We thought of it only as a special delivery which perhaps the postmaster general himself personally delivered to the recipient.
After posting the letter from a local post office of Sharda Nagar in Ahmedabad where we lived, Manoj and I walked back triumphantly as if we had already met and spoken to Dev Anand. After about a month or so of agonizing wait, we received a response. Sure enough, it was from Dev Anand’s office but not from him. It was not even a letter from his office, but the same Registered A.D. envelop that we had sent. On it was inscribed rather forcefully “Refused” as in the recipient had refused to accept it.
That was the end of Manoj’s quest for Dev Anand’s autograph. Five years later as it so happened, I ended up choosing a profession that opened many doors, including that of Dev Anand’s. I became a journalist. I moved to San Francisco Bay Area as a journalist in 1998 and founded a media company in 2000. Among its many activities was a publishing house called Literate World.
Anand called me sometime in July or August of 2001 to seek my help in media outreach during his upcoming visit to San Francisco to shoot a movie called ‘Love at Times Square’. I explained to him candidly that as a journalist I would not do that. However, I could entrust my secretary the task without playing any role whatsoever. He said that worked for him and added he would like to compensate my company for the work. I told him it was not necessary. My secretary carried out the task effectively and I thought that was that.
On the last day of his shoot, he invited me to a celebratory dinner with him in a restaurant in the city. He was set to leave the next morning. After the usual bonhomie of a lifelong teetotaler that I was and he seemed to have become, I said my goodbyes to him. Just as I was leaving, he grabbed my hand and said, “Wait, Mayank. I need to give you something.” He raised his jersey and reached for the shirt pocket. He took out a bunch of signed traveler’s cheques and gave them to me.
“What are these for?” I asked.
He said, “For your company’s help in reaching out to the media.”
“I couldn’t take these,” I said.
“They are not made out to you but your company,” he said.
He stuffed them in my coat pocket and said, “Let’s not argue about it.”
It was then that I told him the 1977 story of the Registered A.D. mail and how it was refused by his office.
“The irony, Mr. Anand, is that in 1977 we could not secure even one autograph of yours and this evening you just handed me a bunch of traveler’s cheques with a hundred autographs by you without my asking,” I said.
He looked at me, smiled and said, “What a story!”
I noticed he had welled up a bit.
