Dec 14, 1998

The actress can't opt for roles suited to her age without destroying the mystique she has created around herself. Other than this, she is living life on fast forward.

By Madhu Jain

"Watch it, she can lie with such finesse. Today her entire life is a lie," the Bollywood insider warns. He's talking about Rekha, the Last Empress of Bollywood. The star whom actor Shashi Kapoor parks somewhere "between Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe" and describes as sexuality wrapped in enigma.

The film glossies are not so generous: they wrap her in tabloid cliches. The Man-Eater from Madras who chews young boys and idlis for breakfast. The Husband-Eater dispensing kisses of death. The Female Devdas, forever pining for Bachchan. The Sex Siren who inhabits male fantasies as the quintessential courtesan in her screen avatars in Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Umrao Jaan, Utsav and now Kamasutra. The Sunset Boulevard Lady who's put age and life on pause. Madame Narcissus forever peering into the mirror on the wall, making sure she's still the fairest of them all.

But, poof, like pricked balloons, these images deflate when the door opens on a waif-like, almost girlish Rekha in a white denim shirt and figure-hugging black calf-length pants, poised demurely behind a glass-top table. Her open hair, as if just washed, frames a naked face. The caterpillar eyelashes are missing. The only colour on it, a dab of red across the lips. Everything seems to have shrunk. Age, too. Her 44 years have whispered past, like an airborne kiss. She's wrinkle-free but for a hint of circles under her eyes and the laughter lines which punctuate an otherwise flawless skin. "I feel a new energy, as if my cells are reviving," she says, her tapered fingers doing pirouettes in the air. "This is puberty for me, for the first time I am beginning to feel the physical changes. I have become more aware of my body," she continues, her voice now a husky gurgle. "Today I register everything. I still feel like a teenager."

But hold that image. Is Rekha reinventing herself, finally making her self in Her Image? Or is this yet another illusion? Rekha's onscreen and offscreen personae are headed in opposite directions. In reality, she's on a rewind, finally living, as she implies herself, the countless screen incarnations of adolescent love and nascent sensuality of the '70s and '80s.

Age cannot wither her nor stale her infinite variety, but in the celluloid world it has overtaken her. In Mother '98, Sawan Kumar Tak's film to be released later this month, Rekha plays a single mother with a 19-year-old daughter, with three over-the-hill actors as her besotted heroes: Jeetendra, Randhir Kapoor and Rakesh Roshan. In Rama Rao's Bulundi her co-stars are Anil Kapoor and Raveena Tandon and she plays the elder bhabhi. In Prakash Mehra's forthcoming comedy, Tumse Achcha Koi Nahin with Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi, Rekha no longer has young heroes serenading her. Nor producers queuing up outside her door with roles which could exploit both her obvious talent and (to paraphrase Roland Barthes' words about Greta Garbo) her luminous maturing.

Is this -- as Randhir Kapoor, her friend and co-star in many films puts it -- her "career menopause"? Rekha does seem stuck in that tricky twilight zone out of which Amitabh Bachchan, her legendary co-star and Raj Kapoor to her Nargis for much of the '70s, has still not found an easy exit. Has she, to use the Americanism she picked up from her nephews and keeps peppering her conversation with, "woken up and smelt the coffee"?

Obviously, the aroma is still faint. Rekha turned down Kalpana Lajmi's offer to play the ageing actress (more than shades of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard) in Darmiyaan, which was eventually done by Kiron Kher. More recently, she refused to act in a Mahesh Bhatt film in which Shah Rukh Khan plays a young director making a film about an actress who has become a recluse and she falls in love with the young man. Says Bhatt: "Rekha is afraid to destroy the entire myth that she has created. Her problem is how to deal with ageing." While Hema Malini, Sharmila Tagore and Waheeda Rehman graduated to more mature roles or motherhood, Rekha is still stuck in a time zone, reluctant to play mother, he says.

Why didn't she? "Now I would, but with the right person -- like Shekhar Kapur -- or in a film abroad with a strong sense of screenplay." She fears that if it were "distorted" the audience would believe that Rekha was playing out her life. "Like in Darmiyan, they would have said, Rekha waqai mein aisi hai," she says, adding, "I am sensible, not stubborn. If I trusted a director ... After all I played a mother in Judai when I was 17."

It took Tak 15 years to earn her trust. "I narrated the story 15 years ago and she said she didn't look like a mother," says Tak. "Now too, she told me, I don't look like a mother but I will manage to look like one'." But there are mothers and mothers: Mother '98 is a very sensual mama who blow kisses and is still the stuff that male dreams are made off.

Bollywood cynics whisper that this is the way all out-of-work actresses go before the final fade-out. But producers haven't yet yelled "cut" on her almost three decades of screen life. She first popped up in 1969 as a dusky, plump and gawky southern belle in Sawan Bhadon. However, the arc lights are still on: Qila released this year may have been a flop, but her steamy mud bath scene with Akshay Kumar in Khiladi proved that she was still high on the Richter scale for sensuality and plain oomph. "I may not have big roles, but I am still a leading lady. Who else has been a leading lady for three decades? I am senior to Amitji and Jayaji," says Rekha, almost like a pep-talk to her self. And she's right, she's still batting on long after Zeenat Aman and Hema Malini, who came later, have gone on to motherhood, while the Great Bachchan himself is petering out. Nor does Rekha believe in mapping her future. Que sera sera. "I don't think ahead. I'm discovering myself every day: my role as a provider, entertainer, giver, lover. I believe in now, tomorrow is now, yesterday is now too. Now is all I have."

So, while the dream merchants have not even begun to reinvent Rekha, she's redesigning the real-life Rekha. The coffee's stronger here. Underneath the Rekha who still pouts and poses in the film magazines, who never lets photographers capture a Rekha who has not been designed by her, there is a new creative persona being forged. She will soon hold an exhibition of photo frames which she has made with dry leaves and pista shells. She is taking singing lessons for an album she plans to cut. She is launching a Rekha label for children's clothes designed by her. And she is painting. The survivor avatar has also written her views of the world for a limited edition of mini booklets. Rekha's pressed fast forward here. It could be because of her dark premonitions. "For the last one and a half years I have been getting strong flashes, not hot flushes, just one thought: there is very little time for me. It is uncanny, it's goading me to do all the things I want to do -- in a hurry."

She's also grappling with her demons: "My lifeline is my conscience. Ah, you think I sound like a saint, well I am the worst and the best person I have come across. I am aware of this side. Everybody has a Satan and an angel inside. If I can't control them, I'm at war. But Satan has become weaker, he has changed into a pathetic thing."

But he still has the power to frighten. And then she retreats into a shell. Shashi Kapoor describes her as a kachhua (tortoise) who pulls her head in whenever she is threatened or does not want to communicate. "She has put on the kavach-kundal (the armour and earrings that Karna puts on in the Mahabharat) to protect herself," says Shashi.

Or she runs back to her mansion and pulls up the drawbridge. Remember the old story about the king whose soul resided in his parrot. Rekha's, obviously, lives in her home. "She is so exposed that this is one thing which she keeps very private," says Snehlata Pandey, one of the rare friends who have shared "sambar and rice" with her there. "She treats her house like a temple, is devoted to it and keeps her house and herself in the same way."

And Rekha says, "My home is an extension of me."

But is anybody home? You can't help but think that she lives in a world of make-believe, with the shutters down on reality and relationships. "I don't register anything: the pollution, the stink, the ugliness. Do you think that if I let it reach me I would look like this?" It's obviously lonely in that sealed-off world. "She is a sad person trying to look happy, she is a lonely person who has put herself in solitary confinement," says Randhir Kapoor. And into this world are allowed only the closest friends whom you can count on one hand: her best friend and secretary Farzana, her make-up woman Hatija, Surinder, an airhostess and a friend in Hyderabad.

It's almost as if the actress is shutting out a past she wants to forget. Off-loading the albatrosses she was made to carry. "She is alone in this wide world and had to face the Bombay world and this industry when she was only a teenager," says director Yash Chopra. But this is, he explains, what made her, made her special "unlike Sridevi". "Rekha is not synthetic, she is real and she is passionate. If she is in love with somebody, she is in love and to hell with everybody else."

Childhood still eludes her; there's bitterness in her voice when she talks about becoming the breadwinner of her large family at 13, when she was pulled out of Class IX in Sacred Heart School in Chennai (Jayalalitha was the head girl). "I was forced to leave my friends in Madras and come to an alien place where I did not know the language. I hated acting. I was put on a diet, couldn't eat ice cream or chocolates. Had to get up at 5 a.m., get those bouffants and cut my hair. I was a mother to my mother ..." Rekha seems to have banished her expectations of life as well they are also out in the cold. "I have so much to give, so much warmth. I am like a full reservoir. House full hai. I have to empty it a bit to make some room before I can receive love."

House empty hai. The actress has almost abstracted herself into an essence: "I would like to be a fragrance in the lives of others." There are imaginary guests in this marble villa by the Arabian Sea, especially her imaginary lover. "The first time I was in love was when I was eight or nine: I imagined this ideal in my mind, it was Shiva, the God, not seen in the flesh and blood. But in a picture in my head." And when she encountered him in flesh, she was 14. "He was the personification of this picture in my mind." And he is not, she hints, the tall man in her life and her screen lover.

Meanwhile, Rekha is the Waiting Beauty, listening out for a director like Shekhar Kapur to come and give her the kiss of screen life.

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