Javed Akhtar recalls sleeping on footpaths as he gives tour of luxury Khandala mansion; Shabana Azmi reveals their ‘daily fights’ over its scale

Inside Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi’s Khandala home. (Pic: Farah Khan/YT)

Farah then takes viewers inside the couple’s drawing room, which is filled with artefacts collected by Shabana and Javed during their travels around the world. Javed jokingly remarks that some of the artefacts might be as old as Farah Khan herself. The expansive drawing room opens to large doors and windows, seamlessly bringing the outdoors inside. Farah also showed the couple’s massive wooden dining table.

Inside Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi’s Khandala home. (Pic: Farah Khan/YT)

Inside Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi’s Khandala home. (Pic: Farah Khan/YT)

Javed Akhtar slept on footpaths, went hungry for three days

Shabana shared that the couple bought the property 15 years ago and that a 150-year-old tree on the land immediately caught their attention, prompting them to purchase it. However, she revealed that she and Javed had completely different ideas about the kind of home they wanted to build. Talking about the same, she said, “I was thinking of making this into a weekend cottage then I got to know that he is building a lavish bungalow here. We used to fight daily about this. But his best friend told me that ‘Javed Akhtar is Sholay and you are Ankur, you both will never meet and you have to leave Ankur and let him make Sholay.’ I stopped fighting after that.”

Farah Khan also spoke about how, during Javed Akhtar’s struggling days, he would sometimes sleep on footpaths and go hungry for days. She asked him how it feels to now own such a lavish property. Responding to Sam, he said, “Sometimes, I wonder if this is happening to me? Only those people have a fantasy who don’t have anything in life. I wrote the poem Bhook when I did not eat for three days straight.” He added, “You can live in big houses in your life, but there is always that one small room in your life that you always remember.”

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Shabana Azmi on sharing one bathroom with eight families

Not just Akhtar, Shabana Azmi also comes from a modest background before making it big in the film industry. Sharing details about her early life, she said, “I have come from a modest family. I used to live in a commune of communist party. It had eight small rooms and eight families used to live in each of those rooms. And all the eight families shared one bathroom and one toilet between them. I stayed there till I was nine years old, and then we moved to Mumbai.”