Hema Malini lived in a ‘haunted’ house during early days in Mumbai, felt someone was trying to ‘choke’ her: ‘It happened every night’

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Hema Malini’s father surprised her with an apartment

In Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s book Hema Malini: Beyond the Dream Girl, she shared that she once got a call from her father while she was on set and he asked her to come to Walkeshwar, a neighbourhood in South Mumbai. During her break, Hema went over and found out that she was being welcomed into a new apartment. “There I saw a sprawling sea-facing apartment that my father had just bought for me. He asked me if I liked the flat. That was perhaps the first time I told him that I didn’t fancy staying in town (south Bombay) but wanted instead a house with a lot of trees, just like the one we had in Chennai. It was then that he started looking for a bungalow in Juhu,” she shared.

Hema recalled another instance from the time when was still shooting for her Hindi debut film Sapno Ka Saudagar, with Raj Kapoor. She shared during these days, she lived in a small apartment in Bandra, which was primarily used by costume designer Bhanu Athaiya for dress trials. But after this, she managed to move into a bungalow, but that was “haunted.”

Dharmendra and Hema Malini in Seeta Aur Geeta. (Photo: Express Archives)

Hema Malini’s time in a ‘haunted’ house

Hema shared in the same book, “Every night I would feel someone was trying to choke me; I used to have difficulty breathing. I would sleep with my mummy and she noticed how restless I used to be. If this had happened only once or twice we would have ignored it, but it happened every night.” It was after this that Hema decided to put down some roots in the city, and bought her first apartment in Mumbai. “I remember Dharam-ji would drop by for coffee, but back then I had no idea I would fall in love and get married to him,” she shared and added that she bought her first bungalow in 1972 while she was shooting for Seeta Aur Geeta. By then, Hema and Dharmendra were each others’ frequent collaborators and she too, like him, bought a bungalow in Juhu. “It was a five-year-old bungalow that belonged to a Gujarati. We constructed extra rooms in the house later. I loved that house because it had lots of trees around it,” she said.

Hema and Dharmendra’s first wife Prakash Kaur lived minutes away from each other, yet, they never crossed each others’ paths. Her daughter Esha visited Prakash’s home when Dharmendra’s brother Ajit Deol was severely ill. Esha was 30 at the time and this was the first time that she met her father’s first wife. In the same book, Esha shared, “I touched her feet, and she blessed me before leaving.”

Dharmendra passed away in November at 89 at his residence in Mumbai.