A new biography on one of India's finest filmmakers explores the torment of a three-way love that may have led to poignant cinema but tragic lives
Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt's love and muse, cut off from him after the Berlin Film Festival screening of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. Dutt, who was married to singer Geeta Dutt, is said to have drunk alcohol on the entire flight back home
Berlin, 1963
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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.
Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman. Shooting still from Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1963)
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. 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. I 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 I had visited him and for the first time he told me not to keep in touch with her any more.’
Geeta Bali (Dutt's first lead actress) and Geeta Dutt
The very next day, Guru Dutt left Berlin.
Legendary filmmaker B.R. Chopra recalled, ‘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 filmmaker 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.
At the Berlin Film Festival for the screening of Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1963), Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman and Abrar Alvi. Pics courtesy/Lalitha Lajmi's personal collection, National Film Archive of India, Pune
Lalitha Lajmi, who witnessed the relationship from the early days of courtship till the end, further recalls, ‘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, ‘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.
‘But what is the real reason for demolishing the bungalow? Bimal Mitra asked him. 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.’ (The pain of having a home sometimes can outweigh the pain of not having one.)
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.’
Excerpted with permission from Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story by Yasser Usman, published by Simon & Schuster India
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