Dharmendra: A heartfelt tribute to the evergreen hero
My memories of Dharam ji cannot be described in a few sentences-they would fill an entire book. I met Dharam ji through my father-in-law, Hemant Kumar. He always treated me like a family member and was very protective, saying things like, ‘Idhar nahi jaana, isse nahi baat karna,’ and so on.”
I still clearly remember that once, while we were shooting in Nasik, he was playing with my younger daughter Payel on his lap, and suddenly he said, ‘Let’s marry off Payel to my younger son Bobby.’ I started laughing and said, ‘This isn’t a film script that we can write now and expect it to stay forever. When they grow up, they may have different thoughts. How can we decide my two-year-old daughter’s life right now?’ Then he also agreed and said, ‘Yes, that’s right. We actually don’t know what they will decide in their lives.’
People talk about his He-Man image, but I always felt his smile was divine. He was a very soft person in real life. One cannot imagine how simple he really was. I have worked with both his sons, Sunny and Bobby, and also with Esha. During Ghaayal, Sunny and Pehlaj Nihalani approached me first. Then Sunny came again with Rajkumar Santoshi, but both times I said no. And then Dharamji himself came and requested me to do the role. He explained that he needed someone like me-someone with an innocent, spiritual, and beautiful smile-to play the character. He said, ‘With your smile you can make people your fan, and if something happens to you on-screen, the audience will never forgive the person who causes it.’ He then told my husband, ‘Babu, please tell this ‘jhalli’ to do the role.’ Sometimes he called me ‘kudi’ and sometimes ‘jhalli,’ meaning half-mad. So obviously, I accepted the role — I couldn’t say no to Dharam ji. But look at the simplicity of a man of his stature. No ego, no tantrums. Sunny wasn’t doing very well at that time, and he was very worried about his son’s career, so he himself came to request me. This gesture shows how much he cared about his family.
We were having dinner at home when Dharam ji came to ask me to do Ghaayal. I told him, ‘Dharam ji, I worked with Pehlaj Nihalani in Aadhiyan because of you, and I didn’t even increase my fees. But in this film, I don’t know the director at all — it was Rajkumar Santoshi’s debut as a director. The film became a super hit, and then Sunny’s career took a new flight.
He once told me that if anyone bothered me-if some hero said something to me, I should tell him immediately. Once, Rani Mukherjee’s mother, who is my friend, took me along to a film ‘muhurat.’ Dharam ji met us at the entrance and asked why I had come there and where my husband Babu (Jayant Mukherjee’s nickname) was. He was out of town at that time, so Dharam ji clearly told me not to enter the premises and to go straight home. He even called his driver, Nandi, to drop me back.
With his divine smile, he looked like an angel, but he always knew who was doing what — who was playing politics and whom he needed to protect. I feel he was a king at heart. If he liked someone, he made them part of his own family. Because of his amazing nature, he became the Dharmendra. He had a wonderful sense of comedy-just look at Chupke Chupke, it will make you laugh till your stomach hurts… but personally, I loved his performances in Mamta and Anupama.
