She’s so gentle and self-effacing you wonder how she came to be in films at all in the first place, a profession in which you need both talent and claws but claws alone will sometimes do, and having come how she reached the top (her talent apart, what about others’ claws?) and stayed there for years. You guess, in a place where everyone is making noises about himself or herself, a bit of stillness draws attention to itself and that stillness is Waheeda Rehman.
She’s super-cool in a natural, intrinsic way—it isn’t something cultivated or put on. Your praises, you suspect, never sent overdoses of adrenalin coursing through her system and your dispraise… but then she never really got a lot of this. Her performances on and off screen have always been liked by everyone.
She has come through the hothouse of top stardom unscathed, unsinged. There’s something unchanging about Waheeda, yet she hasn’t gotten dated. And always, she has had a way of looking at herself, shrugging an invisible shoulder, and saying, “All this fuss—about me?”
How do you describe her apartment at Bandra, with the sea just across the road? An apartment, a bungalow, a flat or a bungalat or flatlow? It’s a bungalow, still standing squat and steady by itself, though, nearby, highrises rise and perhaps will keep rising. There are, unless one is mistaken, two other families sharing the bungalow. The house is called ‘Sahil’, meaning the shore, or beacon or hope. But it seems very likely that Waheeda will presently shift to Bangalore. The Rekhis have bought a farm there and are planning to build themselves a house on the land. But it doesn’t look as if Waheeda is planning to give up films altogether—she can always come to Bombay for shootings of the occasional films she signs these days. What’s there to do, she sighs, except the endless mother?
Namkeen, Sawal, Dharam Kanta, Namak Halaal, Pyaasi, Mahaan, Coolie and Sunny constitute the list of films which Waheeda has either just finished or recently begun and involving directors of the order of Gulzar, Sultan Ahmed, Prakash Mehra and Raj Khosla. There was a time, following her marriage with Shashi Rekhi (the former Kamaljeet of films), when Waheeda didn’t accept any roles—she and her husband were seriously considering migrating to Canada. Then Yash Chopra coaxed her into Kabhi Kabhie. After that, Waheeda has always been doing some film or the other. But recently when she drove into Mehboob Studios quite near her home, she suddenly realised the last she was there was 15 years ago. Her shootings in the in-between years have been in other, sometimes newer, studios, or on locations, or, following today’s trend, people’s bungalows. “My first reaction was to wish Mehboob Saab had been alive,” she said. “The studio used to be so much cleaner in he older days.” (Actually the studio in those days was much more of an exclusive place, which Mehboob Khan largely kept for his own productions).