'The pain of not having a home is bearable, but the pain of having one -- and not finding peace in it -- is far worse.'
Bungalow No 48 in Pali Hill was a dream for many but not for its owner, filmmaker Guru Dutt.
For his wife, singer Geeta Dutt, it was a haunted space, for him, never the sanctuary he longed for. In time, he had it demolished -- that too on his birthday.
The heartbreaking story of the palatial house that never became a home for the celebrity couple has been vividly captured in two books, Bimal Mitra's Bichhde Sabhi Baari Baari and Yasser Usman's Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story.
Purchased for Rs 1 lakh -- and razed in 1963, the year before Guru Dutt was found dead after a cocktail of alcohol and sleeping pills -- the bungalow was the filmmaker's prized possession. But tragedy soon seeped into its walls.
It's the house in which he tried to end his life twice.
'I always wanted to be happy in my household. My house is the most beautiful among all the buildings in Pali Hill. Sitting in that house, it does not look like you are in Bombay. That garden, that ambience -- where else can I find it? Despite this, I could not stay in that house for much longer,' Usman quotes Guru Dutt as saying.
According to Lalitha Lajmi, Guru Dutt's sister, it was Geeta Dutt who suggested they leave the house.
'She believed that the bungalow was haunted. There was a particular tree in the house and she said there's a ghost who lives in that tree, who is bringing bad omen and ruining their marriage. She also had something against a Buddha statue that was kept in their huge drawing room,' Lajmi, who witnessed the relationship from the early days of courtship till the end, recalls in Usman's book.
Grappling with depression, a troubled marriage and his wife calling it 'graveyard', the director-actor eventually made up his mind.
According to Usman's book, on the morning of his birthday, the man who once dreamed of peace in his expansive bungalow -- yet often found resting only in a modest 7x7 foot room at his studio -- called in workers and instructed them to tear it down.
'I remember it was his birthday. He loved that house and he was heartbroken when it was demolished,' says Lajmi.
The abrupt demolition of the house is also recounted by writer and close friend Mitra, who held many fond memories of time spent at the Pali Hill bungalow.
Mitra was the author of the Bengali bestseller Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, which Guru Dutt famously adapted into a critically acclaimed film.
When Mitra visited Bombay (now Mumbai) at Guru Dutt's invitation, he was surprised to be taken not to the familiar Pali bungalow, but to a modest rented flat. Bewildered, he soon learned that the house had been demolished.
Later, Guru Dutt drove him to the site of the now razed Bungalow No 48. Nothing looked the same.
'I felt as if he wasn't my Guru anymore, as if this wasn't Bombay -- as if this wasn't Pali Hill... Where Guru used to sleep, there was now a pile of bricks...The flower garden at the front was now covered with thorny shrubs,' recounted Mitra, staring at the ruins of what was once a majestic bungalow where he had often stayed during his scriptwriting visits.
Stunned, Mitra finally asked his friend why he had taken such a drastic step.
Guru Dutt's reply, 'Because of Geeta... Ghar na hone ki takleef se, ghar hone ki takleef aur bhayanak hoti hai (The pain of not having a home is bearable, but the pain of having one -- and not finding peace in it -- is far worse).'
When Mitra posed the same query to Geeta, she said she had been sleeping in the guest house and, upon hearing a loud noise and looking out the window, saw that the workers had already torn down the entire house.
'I immediately called up Guru who was in the studio and told him that labourers were demolishing the house. "Let them do it! I have asked them to raze it to the ground," replied Guru Dutt.'
Guru Dutt, regarded as amongst the greats of Indian cinema would have been 100 on July 9. He was found dead in 1964 when he was just 39.
He directed just eight films and took 104 takes for that searing climax shot of Pyaasa where the poet protagonist stands framed in light and shadow as he asks Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kya Hai?
Guru Dutt's life can perhaps be summed up in these three numbers -- a superbly talented filmmaker and actor who died just too young from a cocktail of alcohol and sleeping pills and whose films went from being easy-breezy to dark and personal, reflecting his own turmoil and struggles with self.
Never perhaps has there been a showbiz personality -- his life and work both underscored by tragedy -- who has left such a profound impact and so many unanswered questions. His films, some which he produced and others he directed, include Baazi, Aar Paar, Pyaasa, Kagaaz Ke Phool, Chaudhavin Ka Chand, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam.
In Pyaasa, Dutt's role as Vijay, the anguished poet, epitomises not just his artistic mastery as actor and director but also the man he probably was -- an obsessive and uncompromising artist at odds with society and its rules.
In Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story, author Yasser Usman quotes close friend Dev Anand as saying Dutt would reshoot a lot and scrap most of it if he did not find it perfect.
'By the time he made Pyaasa in 1957, the indecisiveness had magnified manifold. He would shoot and shoot and was unsure about what he really wanted in a particular scene. Even with himself, for the famous climax sequence in Pyaasa, he shot 104 takes!' Usman writes.
Pyaasa carries the disillusionment that manifests again in his last directorial Kaagaz Ke Phool, the semi-autobiographical story about a director unwilling to compromise.
He made it when his relationship with wife Geeta Dutt was going through a difficult time and never really recovered from the debacle of the film he termed a 'still born child'.
He sank into depression after that and told friends he didn't have it in him to direct successful films.
The marriage between the two Dutts, one a top playback singer who delivered gem after gem in his films and the other a director on the rise, didn't have the fairytale ending that people thought it would.
It took its inevitable toll.
Guru and Geeta Dutt had realised that their marriage was not working. Geeta Dutt, too, had taken to alcohol and sleeping pills majorly, Guru Dutt's sister Lalita Lajmi recalled in an interview with Usman.
Guru Dutt tried to commit suicide twice. Once, during the making of Pyaasa, and again a few years later when Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) was in production.
'The second time, it was an overdose of sleeping pills He was unconscious for three days. Then, on the fourth day, we heard his scream. The first person he asked for was Geeta. It was strange because their relationship was going through hell,' she is quoted as saying in Usman's article for The Print.
Guru Dutt died on October 10, 1964. Geeta Dutt died eight years later on July 20, 1972 of liver cirrhosis at the age of 41.
The personal turmoil seeped into the director's works, many of his films as an actor and filmmaker seeped in fatalism and despair.
Their son Arun Dutt -- the couple had three children: Tarun, Arun and Nina -- said in an interview with WildFilmsIndia that his father was a mix of Vijay from Pyaasa and Suresh Sinha from Kaagaz Ke Phool, a serious and melancholic personality.
Before his death, he was starring and producing Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi, which finally released in 1966 and was reshot with Dharmendra as the leading man.
Guru Dutt was born Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone and Vasanthi Padukone on July 9, 1925, in Bangalore as the eldest of four children but spent his formative years in Kolkata where he picked up not just the language but a close affinity to its culture.
It was a disturbed childhood, his sister has recalled in Usman's book.
As a young child, he was obsessed with shadow play on the wall -- a fascination that carried into his films which stand out for their stark interplay of light and dark and evocative song picturisation; most famously perhaps in Sakhiya Aaj Mujhe Neend Nahi Aayegi in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam and Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam in Kaagaz Ke Phool.
When he was just 16, Guru Dutt had to discontinue his education to supplement the family's income. He first worked as a telephone operator, hated the job, left it after a month and joined Hindustan Lever's Calcutta office. But influenced by his uncle B B Benegal, a film publicist and painter, Guru Dutt started to nurture a different dream.
That was around the time he decided to pursue his passion for dance and joined Uday Shankar who called him to Almora to join his dance academy. Guru Dutt later joined Prabhat Film Company in Pune as a choreographer and assistant director. It's here that he met Dev Anand, who went on to become a close friend.
In 1951, Dev Anand roped him in to direct Baazi, a massive success at the time and one that set the tone for noir style filmmaking in Hindi movies. Written by actor-writer Balraj Sahni, it featured Geeta Dutt's voice in most of the songs. Remember Tadbeer Se Bigdi Hui Taqdeer Bana Le. This is where Geeta and Guru Dutt met and fell in love. They married two years later in 1953.
Baazi was followed by Jaal, again starring Dev Anand and Geeta Bali, another success in the noir tradition.
In 1954, Guru Dutt starred and directed Aar Paar, a hit with classics like Ye Lo Main Haari Piya and Babuji Dheere Chalna in Geeta Dutt's voice and the often remixed Kabhi Aar, Kabhi Paar in Shamshad Begum's voice.
He next directed and acted in Mr and Mrs 55 with Madhubala. After that came CID, starring Dev Anand and directed by his protege Raj Khosla.
Guru Dutt's next Sailaab was a box office failure the same year and led to Pyaasa, a story he had written years ago when he was out of a job.
Pyaasa marks a change in Guru Dutt's directorial style as he poured everything in this dream project and brought back Waheeda Rehman, the newcomer he had discovered for CID and with whom he formed one of the most successful pairings of Hindi cinema.
Many of his films, whether happy or sad, centre around a struggling hero caught between two women.
In Pyaasa, poet Vijay is torn between Meena (Mala Sinha) who chooses money over love and self sacrificing sex worker Gulabo (Rehman). In Kaagaz Ke Phool, the director struggles with an unhappy marriage while he finds his muse in his leading heroine Shanti (Rehman). The relationship remains unfulfilled and without definition.
Through his career and many ups and downs, both in his personal and professional lives, the one constant was the core team he built painstakingly after his first hit Baazi. These included writer Abrar Alvi, cinematographer V K Murthy, Waheeda Rehman and comedian Johny Walker, all of whom rallied around him in his moments of despair and encouraged him to not wallow in pity but look ahead.
One outcome of this was Chaudhvin Ka Chand in 1960, very different in mood and tenor from Kaagaz ke Phool. After the success of the film, Guru Dutt started dreaming again and convinced writer Bimal Mitra to write the screenplay of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, his last film.
By then, of course, the artist was drowning in personal tragedy. Close friends and family have gone on record to say that he was given to depressive episodes and the problem was further compounded by alcoholism and reliance on sleeping pills.
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