The death of time When Dev Anand almost declared his love for Zeenat Aman

Basking in the glow of the success of Hare Rama Hare Krishna in 1971, Dev Anand, the ever-romantic hero, soon realised that he was in love with the film's leading lady and his discovery Zeenat Aman.

Describing his feelings for Zeenat, Dev Anand wrote in his autobiography, Romancing With Life that he enjoyed it when newspapers and magazines started linking them together romantically after the film's success.

He almost declared his love to her, but quietly withdrew when he saw her getting close to Raj Kapoor, who wanted to cast her in his film Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

"Whenever and wherever she was talked about glowingly, I loved it; and whenever and wherever I was discussed in the same vein she was jubilant. In the subconscious, we had become emotionally attached to each other," Dev Anand wrote in his 2007 book.

Some years later, Dev Anand admitted he felt jealous when Raj Kapoor kissed Zeenat in full view of the invited audience at the premiere of his next film Ishq Ishq Ishq.

He soon realised that he was in love with her and wanted to declare it to her at a romantic meeting at the Taj in Mumbai.

He wrote: "Suddenly, one day I felt I was desperately in love with Zeenat – and wanted to say so to her! To make an honest confession, at a very special, exclusive place meant for romance. I chose the Rendezvous at the Taj, on top of the city, where we had dined together once earlier."

Dev Anand wrote that he called up Zeenat and arranged to go to the meeting place after a brief presence at a party, where "a drunken Raj Kapoor .. threw his arms around her exuberantly. This suddenly struck me as a little too familiar. And the way she reciprocated his embrace seemed much more than just polite and courteous."




Suspecting something, Dev Anand recalled that a rumour had been floating that Zeenat had gone to Raj Kapoor's studio for a screen test for the main role in his new movie Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

"The hearsay now started ringing true. My heart was bleeding," he wrote.

The situation changed further for Dev Anand when Raj Kapoor, "in drunken joviality", told Zeenat: "You are breaking your promise that you will always be seen by me only in a white sari."

A dejected Dev Anand wrote: "More embarrassment was written large on her face, and Zeenat was not the same Zeenat for me any more. My heart broke into pieces... The rendezvous had already lost all meaning in my mind. I sneaked out of the place."

He added: "The evening delivered a blow to my personality, and my dominating spirit. I had decided on the spur of the moment to tell Zeenat for the first time how much I loved her. And that there was an idea in my mind of another story that would put her on a pedestal as never before, the highest so far. But that was never to be."

Dev Anand looked clumsy in fight sequences, tended to overact on most occasions, could rarely keep his limbs still and would often roll his pupils to dramatise scenes. None of this would go down as traits of a great actor. But, what Dev Anand brought to films in the late 50s and 60s was his dashing and cool dude looks, a smile that would make any woman’s leg go wobbly and his great chemistry with most of his heroines. In later years of course, everybody was in awe of his bountiful energy even though Navketan churned out films that would appease nobody’s palate.

Suraiya, with whom he was emotionally involved in the late 50s, Kalpana Kartik, who he married in the 60s, Waheeda Rehman, Nutan and Madhubala are some of the heroines with whom Dev Anand paired with in more than a couple of films. Here’s an attempt to find with whom he gelled, and wooed, the best.

Nutan: Perhaps one of the tallest co-stars of Dev Anand. Seven years separated their two hits – Paying Guest (1956) and Tere Ghar Ke Saamne (1963) but the two seemed to have a thing going. Be it ‘Aah chod do aanchal zamaana kya kahega’ from Paying Guest or ‘Dekho roota na karo, baat nazaron ki suno’, Dev and Nutan worked in great sync. Watch the ending of ‘Dekho…’ and look at Nutan coyly singing ‘hum tumhe maan gaye, tum bade woh ho hato’. Paying Guest did not have a great storyline and may appear amateurish for today’s audience but TGKS was brilliantly directed by Vijay Anand.

Waheeda Rehman: Guide was a super duper hit. Great is an adjective that can be used liberally for many aspects of this film. By the time the film happened in 1965, the two had had already delivered a few hits. Dev is all limbs as he climbs a few hills in ‘khoya khoya chand’ from Kala Bazar in which he is actually wooing Waheeda who appears barely a couple of times. Only Dev could have pulled it off. The softly hummed ‘upar wala jaankar anjaan hain’ by Rafi and cleverly picturised in a train by Vijay Anand is another captivating song in Kala Bazar. Anybody in Waheeda’s place would have swooned before the first stanza had been sung. Another captivating serenade is ‘hai apna dil toh awaara’ from Solva Saal.

Madhubala: Like ‘aah chod do aanchal’ from Paying Guest, ‘achcha ji main haari chalo maan jao na’ from Kala Pani is roles reversed. Only Nutan in PG and Madhubala in Kala Pani could have attempted to win over the hero. Dev is teasing Madhubala who has stood up to him. He melts and how! Jaali Note, Aaram and Sharaabi are other movies that saw Madhubala and Dev being paired opposite each other. But it was Kala Pani, which also saw Dev’s acting talents coming to fore, that remains their biggest hit.

Sadhana: ‘Abhi na jao chod kar’ from Hum Dono is the national anthem for any young couple even today. Dev, in a memorable double role and in a rare bare-chested moment in oeuvre, gets to woo not just Sadhana but Nanda too. To actually feel the chemistry between the two watch Asli Naqli. ‘Ek put banaoonga aur pooja karoonga..’ Two stars who were all smiles in the business of wooing.

Kalpana Kartik: Baazi, House No. 44, Nau Do Gyaarah, Taxi Driver… They carried their reel-life chemistry to real life. Watch ‘aankho mein kya ji…’ from House No. 44. Kalpana never acted after Taxi Driver, not even with Dev. What a wasted pair!

Geeta Bali, Mala Sinha, Usha Kiran, Asha Parekh, Mumtaz: Dev never seemed a difficult co-star for most heroines. He hit it off with these gals too, as he did with many of the younger generations like Zaheeda, Zeenat Aman and Tina Munim

It is almost as if time itself has died. The idea that Dev Anand is no more is a shock not only because it came so suddenly without any warning, but because it was never in the nature of Dev Anand to die. For a man who lived in the perpetual present to be consigned permanently to the past is an idea that takes some getting used to. It is as if implicitly we expected him to talk passionately about his latest project forever; the more forgettable his films became, the more unforgettable the man himself grew.

Nothing is easier for a legend than to live in the secure perimeters of the past, reliving sepia memories and retelling stories that turn into heirlooms. Old legends can carry the past gracefully, or become its embarrassment; Dev Anand’s unique ability was to speak of the past as if it were the present, and to act in the present as if it were the past. He spoke of his latest film Chargesheet with the same enthusiasm as he did of a film like Guide; to him they were both accounts of a present, separated by a few decades. Over the years, by exhausting his films of any notion of quality, Dev Anand, far from being rendered pathetic, became a symbol of the purity of a desire to stay in the present. Like a thumri singer who exhausts words of their meaning by repetition, till only music in its purest form remains, Dev Anand, stripped cinema of content, celebrating instead the fierce intent that drove him. What is most significant about Dev Anand films in the last few years is the fact that there are so many of them at such regular intervals. When the quality of his films first started deteriorating, we were filled with a sense of dismay at the presumed falling of an icon, but over the years he pushed past the boundaries of failure, drove through notions of good and bad, remained blindly immune to criticism and feedback till all that remained was desire to make the next film, and the one after, and the one after.

While Dev Anand at his best belongs to an era or two, the man himself has represented the idea that time exists only for the alive. His films may have been a mirror to the times they belonged to and might have striven to anticipate the future with many contemporary themes, but in the eventual analysis, Dev Anand’s attempt was not to be rendered timeless but to be always timefull; bursting with the energy of the present. One way of celebrating the man is to recall his wonderful body of work, that spans decades and includes films of all genres, to admire his role as someone who pushed the envelope and explored different facets of cinema, and to recall the unforgettable music that makes our memory ache with teasing sweetness, but his greater contribution perhaps came not from the quality of his films, or the contribution that they made at the time, but from the quality with which he lived his life. In the world of Dev Anand, the purpose of life was life itself; which is why for him to die is to cheat life.

In a larger sense, there seems to be a conspiracy afoot. This year has seen the passing of far too many greats, people who have given meaning to the idea of memory, and whose influence makes an entire generation what it is. The loss of Bhimsen Joshi, Shammi Kapoor, Bhupen Hazarika, Jagjit Singh, MF Hussein, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and ‘Uncle’ Anant Pai, in a space of a few months creates an uncomfortable vacuum, a vast empty space that is difficult to fill. Between them, they control a substantial part of our consciousness over almost four decades. In remembering them, we also remember ourselves as we grew up; the times we skipped school to watch a B&W classic in the morning show, how we first made fun of classical music and how without warning tuned into it, the hair styles we imitated as children, the songs we gawkily danced to, the tape recorders that eked out poorly recorded songs that we heard over and over again, and the poses we struck in the mirror. Each of these individuals brings to each of us a network of memories; our life has been threaded by their work.

When people who make us who we are die, we grieve as much for ourselves as we do for them. It snaps the cosy ties that link our yesterdays with our today; it forces us to confront the reality that the past that lives on in our memory has a mortality of its own. It tells us forcefully that yesterday can never come back; that Dev Anand will never slouch again and Shammi Kapoor will never pout again. It is an act of underlining the obvious, and it is a measure of how much we live in denial of the present that this comes as a shock to us. After all, for the purposes of our memory, Dev Anand has always been immortal; his death should not change that, but the truth is that it does.

Increasingly, it seems that we are on our own now. There are still many greats of an earlier era to shade us with their benevolence, but their number is dwindling at an inexorable rate. We are being orphaned not merely by people we looked up to, but by an era so many of us owe so much to. When Dev Anand dies, you know that death is no longer playing games, it means business. Suddenly, we are all much older.