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Mr and Mrs Dutt: Memories of Our Parents by Namrata Dutt Kumar and Priya Dutt
Sometimes the greatest love stories are between parents and children. No, no, please, it’s not what you think. This is the purest kind of love that sees two daughters giving up almost a whole year of college and school to sit at their mother’s bedside in cold, cold New York, first waiting for her to come out of coma, and then willing her to live. It’s the kind of devotion that sees a father selling his beloved home to pay for his son’s legal fees. It’s the kind of passion that sees an enormous star, at the height of her fame, with 46 films behind her, moving from a grand, fourbedroom apartment in Marine Drive, into a one-room flat to share it with a young man, with just two films to his credit, his mother, his sister, her children, a domestic and a dog. Mr and Mrs Dutt: Memories of Our Parents is a memoir both profound and poignant. It is a story of a family at once ordinary and amazing. A family that has to live with the shock of being branded terrorists after having worshipped at the feet of honesty all its life. A family that loses one battle with cancer only to see it repeated in the death of an adored daughter-in-law. Namrata Dutt Kumar and Priya Dutt have written an account most moving in its simplicity and raw in its pain. Whether it is at the burial, when they bathe their mother’s body with their father, rejecting the help of the women of the family, or the frisking they are submitted to while delivering meals to their brother in prison, the two daughters- familiar to 24x7 television viewers as the women who stand stoic in the background every time Sanjay Dutt goes to prison- emerge with steel in their spines and iron in their souls. Not Nargis’s daughters for nothing, they are mini earth mothers, keeping their father afloat as his dies, a brother out of de-addiction centres first and then jail, and a family together despite the many temptations of fame. It is a collective of remarkable lives which have often been chronicled- Nargis and Sunil Dutt were, after all, leading actors of their times, she an independent woman who once earned more than the Big Three of Bollywood, and he an eternal risk-taker, whether it was with a one-man film or a songless desert tale. But never has it been told so intimately. Sure there is a little glossing over-would you not do the same if an eerant Sanjay was your brother, and forever in a daze at critical junctures in your life? But there is an almost savage ability to endure laceration. There is Nargi’s tearful letter to her resentful son, sent off to boarding school at Wanawar at 10 (“You must study hard and become a big man so that you can look after us in our old age. Be a good boy don’t give any chance to your teacher to be angry with you any time.”). Here is Sanjay’s descent into drugs at college in Mumbai. There again is an anxious mother on her deathbed telling her elder daughter to take of Sanjay, almost prescient in its anticipation of further troubles (“See that he does not get mixed up with those silly boys again. He is too stupid in his head; he does not realize what he is doing and how it is going to harm him.”) And here again is the family, six days after Nargis’s death, going to the premiere of Sanjay’s first film, Rocky, because she would have wanted it that way. It is also, despite a constellation of stars, every family’s story. A story that will not leave a dry eye in the auditorium. A story of a family trying defiantly to grow up normal, away from the attention- there was one air conditioned room in the house, where the whole family would sleep on the floor, one television set, no phones in bedrooms and weekend picnics in a more innocent Mumbai’s Powai Lake and Madh Island. There was a time when they did not have enough money even to buy new school uniforms, and yet another, when their imprisoned brother’s rakhi gift was Rs 2 tea tokens collected over 16 months in jail. It is also a remarkable love story between two individuals who were wide apart and yet unlimately extremely down to earth. He, Balraj Dutt, was a refugee from Pakistan Punjab who slept at Simla Haircutting Saloon at night, in between studying at Jai Hind College, working once a week in Radio Ceylon and every day at the BEST bus depot as a checking clerk. She, Fatima Rashid, was Bollywood royalty, growing up in Chateau Marine, the woman in white for the leading filmmaker of his time (which, understandably, the girls have overlooked- she was, after all, not Mrs Dutt then), and a role model for a young nation’s working women. That they found in each other a soulmate has often been a source of wonder to people. Well, not anymore. Source: India Today