Mahesh Bhatt’s father didn’t abandon either of his two wives, his claims about being illegitimate are ‘dishonest’: Nephew Dharmesh Darshan

Denying that his grandfather, Nanabhai Bhatt, was absent from their lives because he had another family, Dharmesh implied that both his wives lived in harmony. “I had an extraordinary other grandmother. They were both legitimate, because I saw both of them… My grandmother had six children and the other grandmother had three children,” he said, adding that his grandmother, Shirin, lived in accordance with Gujarati-Hindu traditions. “I used to call her ‘mumma’, not ‘amma’,” he said, and called his grandfather a ‘great man’ who was ‘flogged’ in public for no reason.

“I believe that in his heart, he knows that this is not nice, because there are real illegitimate children in this world. You’re mocking them by making a charade of this,” he said about Mahesh. Declaring that his uncle ‘should have been more responsible’ about his comments, Dharmesh said that what he said about their family could have triggered his parents’ illness. “My mother got Parkinson’s because she got so worked up and didn’t know what to do. It triggered (her illness). And my father got Alzheimer’s.” Dharmesh said that he ‘fought’ with Mahesh over this, but in a ‘cultured’ way.

Mahesh said recently in an interview with Arbaaz Khan that he grew up with the stigma of being an ‘illegitimate child’. “I was born in 1948, it was post-independence India and my mother was a Shia Muslim, but we lived in Shivaji Park where majority of the people were Hindus and she concealed her identity and wore a saree, adorned a tika,” he said, adding, “When he (his father) came to our house, I felt as if an outsider has come. I would have encounters with vicious men who would put me in a corner and ask me about my father.” He also claimed that his father put ‘sindoor’ on his mother’s forehead for the first time when she died. “I remember that when she died, and my father came with his wife, that’s the time he put sindoor in her maang and I said ‘too little too late’. That broke me down. She always wanted a picture of him publicly accepting her,” he said.

According to a 2007 article on The Telegraph, Mahesh said that his mother’s funeral drove a wedge between his family and the Darshans. “We broke off ties with the Darshan family after my mother’s death because we wanted our mother to be buried the Islamic way, but they didn’t want that and thus severed the relationship,” he said.