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All she wanted in her life was to be a wife and a mother, but as she grew up and witnessed the cruel realities of the world around her, Bhanurekha, popularly known as Rekha, got a sense that she had to be an independent woman. She was born out of wedlock, was never accepted by her father, and was pushed into a business where she was frequently harassed at 13. Even when she fell in love with a movie star, it was more of a scandal than a love story as he was a married man, and never said a word about her, not even to deny the stories about their rumoured affairs. So, when Rekha decided to get married to a businessman in Delhi, she believed this would be a new beginning. Unfortunately, the happiness was short-lived. Within months of being married, they filed for divorce. Shortly afterwards, he died by suicide. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Rekha was expected to prove that she wasn’t to blame. She was called names and ostracised by many in the film industry who spoke openly against her.
Rekha met Mukesh Aggarwal in the early months of 1990 through mutual friends. She was starting to get to a stage where she wanted a break from the movies. Mukesh, who was two years older than her, wanted the same things as she did. He was based in Delhi and she lived in Mumbai, but after a couple of meetings, they knew that they were ready to get married. In a chat with Simi Garewal in 2004, when Rekha was asked if it was an arranged marriage, she said simply, “It wasn’t love, for sure.” She also described him as a ‘stranger’.
Back in 1990, it almost seemed like Rekha was finally going to get her happily ever after, but unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. They went for a honeymoon to London and after spending a few days together, reality started to dawn upon them. A few months later, they filed for divorce. In an interview with Filmfare shortly after Mukesh’s death, Rekha clarified that divorce “was not my idea in the first place,” and claimed that Mukesh “broached it first.” Rekha shared that it was during the honeymoon that she had started to sense the “vast differences in our outlook and temperament.”
Despite their differences, she believed that they could not work things out. “A stage came in our relationship when both of us decided that our incompatibility was too much to overcome and that we should part as friends. As evident from the divorce papers, the decision was to separate by mutual consent. There was absolutely no reason for anybody to hide the divorce papers from Mukesh since he was party to it,” she said.
Mukesh passed away only a few months later. Rekha was treated the same way that Rhea Chakraborty was treated in 2020 after the passing of her partner, actor Sushant Singh Rajput. She was called a “witch” and gossip magazines casually implied that she had played a role in his death. She maintained her silence for a while but when the gossip started to become too much to handle, she gave the aforementioned interview, which was titled, “I didn’t kill Mukesh.”
Fourteen years later, Rekha opened up about it once again in the Simi Garewal interview, and shared that this was the phase of her life when she “really grew up.” She said, “It was, as morbid as it sounds, the best thing that ever happened to me because I got a crash course of what people are all about.” When asked if she ever realised what was happening around her, to her husband, she said, “I didn’t realise anything. Before I could say the full name, it was all over (sic).”
Rekha opened up about the different stages of grief that she went through after Mukesh’s death and shared, “One went through the whole gamut of feelings. The initial shock and then denial that ‘no, this can’t be really happening to me’ and later on, this intense anger and then you go on this self pity trip that ‘what did I do wrong? I never meant to hurt anybody’. Then trying to understand it, in vain, of course, because you never understand it. And then, finally, of course, acceptance.”
Rekha never married after Mukesh’s death.
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