Kishore Kumar: What The Heart Wants, The Head Delivers With Guilt

How the singer loved and lost Madhubala.

‘Haal kaise hai jaanab ka?’ she giggled, splashing water on him.

He tapped his straw hat, ‘Kya khayal hai aapka?’

‘Hai, tum toh machal gaye oh ho ho,’ she stood up, tilting the boat with her weight.

He arched on his left, and sat down on the flat board in the bow, ‘Yun hi phisal gaye, ah ah ah.’

‘Cut,’ director Satyen Bose yelled from a distance. He was seated with his film crew on another boat, instructing the camera operator to switch to a new angle. ‘Joldi koro, I want to take far shot, far from here,’ he huffed.

Kishore Kumar began yodelling.

Kumar and Madhubala were shooting for a song in the wobbly boat in a placid lake. The boat was being paddled by a stuntman who was not included in the camera’s frame. The stuntman also appeared oblivious to the actors’ off-screen romance.

‘But you know, I cannot marry you, I will only give you distress,’ she called for Kumar’s attention.

The stuntman looked puzzled, trying to deconstruct her dialogue from one end of the boat.

‘I don’t care,’ Kumar inched closer to her face.

‘I have a hole in my heart,’ she added.

He grabbed her right hand, opened her thumb, took off his hat, and placed it on a whorl in his hair.

‘Do you feel something?’ he pried.

‘Na,’ she grew curious.

‘Rub it,’ he tamped her thumb on his head, putting pressure and rotating it like a driller machine.

She wrinkled her face to give him a sign that she felt nothing.

‘Then how do you expect me to feel the hole in your heart. I see heart, I don’t see hole.’

She laughed at his cunning; he had a child’s guileless charm, there was innocence in his appeal of a kind that can hardly be called romantic, but fetching to the maternal instinct in her. She found herself ready to adopt this grown up brat.

‘Behki, behki, chale hai pawan jo udde hai tera aanchal,’ Kishore teased.

‘Chhodo, chhodo, dekho-dekho, gore-gore, kaale-kaale baadal,’ she flirted, trying to dismiss his affection.

They docked at the waterfront. Kishore was outfoxed by her playfulness, ‘Kabhi kuch kehti hai, kabhi kuch kehti hai,’ he said as he stumbled out of the boat.

At their wedding, he held her shy face by her chin, holding her luminescent smile in his eyes, ‘Zara nazar toh samabhaalna,’ he winked.

Their civil union had upset a lot of people including Kishore’s parents and first wife Ruma. She did not want to divorce him so he could bring home a notun toy to play with.

Ruma had taunted Kumar during the bou bhaat ceremony at home, when Madhubala stated she could not cook a grain and laughed the loudest at her own admission, while others frowned as her indecent display of milky-white teeth and contagious honesty.

For a month, Kishore and Madhubala, both dour-faced, addressed each other as Pagle-Pagli in the Kumar household where Madhubala had a tough time adjusting to his family’s demands of her as a model housewife like Ruma.

Madhubala, who had always been a star since eleven, could not breathe in the stifling atmosphere of the strict Ganguly family. She decided to confront Kishore about it. He was not blind to it either, though he could not stay apart from his joint family.

They agreed to separate, she moved out of his house, back to her Bandra bungalow which was not far from his. They would call each other on and off, sometimes going out on what Kishore called, ‘boy-girl dates.’ He would yodel on the phone to capture her giggle.

Madhubala enjoyed this the most; marriage was over, courtship continued.

‘Pagli…pagli…kabhi tuney socha raste mein gaye mil kyon?’ he would prod her over candle-lit dinner at a glittery five-star, away from the spectre of marriage and its accoutrements.

She would light up, tinkling her glass of claret with his, ‘Pagle…pagle…teri baaton baaton mein dhadakta hai dil kyon?’

They would burst out laughing at each other’s silliness; how they both loved playing it out, their dreary unfilmable lives were in these nimble moments, floating with gaiety and under-table footsie.

‘Hod-aay-e-ee…yud-aay-e-ee…ud-aay-eee,’ Kishore would bleat at his table, often setting the waiters in a scramble. Her toes would reach for his to stop. ‘Woohooo,’ he would empty his glass in one big swig.

The same year she went to London for medical treatment and was told by doctors that there was no cure for her gun-shot heart. She had at most a year to live. The news devastated her; she came back, stopped working and sought to distance herself from everyone.

When Kishore got wind of her poor health condition, he tried to intervene and move in with her, but she would have none of it.

‘Kaho ji, kaho ji, roz tere sang yun hi dil behlaayein kya?’ she quipped. She thought it could get worse, the more she saw him, the more her heart would bleed.

‘Suno ji, aha suno ji, samajh sako toh khud samjho, batayein kya!’ he would plead, bowing, pointing at the hole in his head. Her giggle sounded hurt. Blood crawled up on her lips in spittle. Kishore’s head pounded with agony.

After her death, Kishore Kumar’s fame as an eccentric artist became a lore. To give it further credence, as he began to stun visitors with erratic behaviour; biting a producer’s hand, locking a financier in a cupboard, talking to the trees in his bungalow’s front yard, he put matters to rest when he placed a signboard outside his door. No one disturbed him.

The hole in his head was spreading. The board read, ‘Beware of Kishore’.

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