Made of Memories

Nargis was 14 when Mehboob Khan persuaded her mother to launch her in his 1943 Taqdeer. Sunil Dutt began as a radio jockey interviewing film stars on Radio Ceylon before Ramesh Saigal gave him a break in the 1955 movie Railway Platform. Everybody is aware of their dramatic love story triggered by a fire on the sets of Mother India in 1957. In the late ’70s, I

attended the grand mahurat of Rocky that launched Sanjay Dutt and in 1981, I was part of Nargis’s funeral procession at Pali Hill, reporting on the tragedy.

In 1991, I did a booklet on Sunil where he described his life as a “house of heartbreaks”. He said he had locked up his memories in the attic, thought about them only once in a while. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the heart-wrenching story of the famous couple, lovingly unfolded by Namrata Dutt Kumar and Priya Dutt in Mr & Mrs Dutt. They analyse the similarities and the contrasting qualities of their parents. Both were born in the year 1929. She as Fatima in Calcutta to Jaddanbai, a Muslim thumri singer, and Uttamchand Mohanchand, a Mohyal Brahmin. He was born as Balraj Dutt in Khurd, Jhelum, to landlord Devan Raghunath and Kulwant Devi, both Mohyal Brahmins.

Both Nargis and Sunil were committed to responsibilities. If Nargis took her personal staff driver Kasambhai and maid Ameenabai — whom the children addressed as nana-nani — to her new home, Sunil Dutt did everything in his ability to see his siblings were settled.

The most moving passages in the book are those elaborating on the diagnosis of Nargis’s illness. Soon after, she was admitted to a cancer centre in New York. She returned home a year later, after innumerable surgeries and immensely frail. In the following chapters, the sisters present a startling account of how their life fell apart after their mother’s demise. They watched hopelessly as their father, who had been brave all along, fell to pieces. Sunil expected his elder daughter Namrata to run their home the way Nargis did. Namrata couldn’t and felt exasperated.

Those were difficult times. Sunil was devastated. Sanjay was on drugs. Priya was appearing for her tenth grade exams while supervising her brother in a rehabilitation clinic and Namrata was in college. All of them needed an anchor and it was gone. But children have an inbuilt defence mechanism and, slowly, they took the reins of their lives in their own hands.

Sunil, with great foresight, had diligently collected memorabilia, preserved documents and dated sepia photographs. Today, Namrata and Priya have revisited the past and gifted us a glorious book. I wept while reading it and I’m certain Namrata and Priya did too while compiling it.