"Happy Birthday Diva- REKHA"

If ever there is a beauty pageant for seniors, she would have stood first and scored a perfect 10 even in the swimsuit category. It’s hard to imagine her as a gawky 13-year-old being shunted from one studio to another. At an age when most girls experience their first crush and subsist on ice-cream, she had to romance nongentlemanly actors twice, thrice her age.

One can’t even imagine what kind of horrors a young girl had to daily battle to eke out a survival out here. That she survived unscathed from all that and blossomed into an individual, who is as beautiful from within as she is on the surface, says a lot about her courage, about her zest for life.

There are a million stories in her, some pretty and some not so pretty.

She’s shielded them from the world and knowing her, I can faithfully say that she will never disclose them. But something written by her, edited by her, should see the daylight. There are so many things that she can teach us, so many things that a million fans are eager to know, to imbibe.

Do it fast, Ma’m! I’ve always been a fan of her at the movies. One fact that fascinated me was her ability to change herself almost at will. How from a plump dusky teenager of Saawan Bhadon (1970),

she metamorphosed into a svelte belle du jour in Khubsoorat (1980) is a study in how mind can transform matter. All those hours of yoga and spa treatments moulded her into someone we came to know as an epitome of both grace and beauty. And from someone who barely knew Hindi, she has emerged as someone who can give lessons in Urdu diction. It’s said that when people thought of King Akbar, Prithviraj Kapoor of Mughal-e-Azam (1960) fame came to their minds.

The same can be said about Rekha - that when we think of a classical courtesan, our minds immediately go to her outof-this-world performance in Umrao Jaan (1981). One of the rare actors, who has invested gravitas, glamour and soul into her performances.

She’s ripe for more author-backed roles. Let’s hope our filmmakers are listening…

By Jitesh Pillai (10th Oct 2015)