Book review | Rekha: The Untold Story

Title: Rekha: The Untold Story
Author: Yasser Usman
Publisher: Juggernaut
240 pages
Price: Rs 499; Rs 140 (digital)

The title, Rekha: The Untold Story, is calculated to pique interest. But does Yasser Usman's book come good on the promise? Does it add anything substantial to what we know of the actress's life? No.

The reason for this is that Usman hasn't managed to get Rekha who, in recent years, has acquired a reputation for being a "recluse", to speak to him for this book. Neither have Amitabh Bachchan or Jaya Bachchan spoken to him. This is a handicap, since Usman sees Amitabh and Jaya as protagonists in the Rekha story, the three forming the antipodes of a Bollywood-ish triangle – the lover, the wife and the 'other woman'. Quite like Silsila, whose director, Yash Chopra, pulled off a casting coup that forever cast the three in these roles in the public eye.

In the absence of an interview with either of the three, Usman is forced to rely on what is already there in the public domain – interviews and what was printed in the gutter press at the time, what people around at the time told him and pure gossip.

There is, often, more than a kernel of truth in gossip, but it's also often difficult to sift the reality from the fiction of gossip. This is especially so in the case of Rekha, whose public persona, rumours of multiple affairs, etc. must take on from the characters she played on screen. And Rekha played the troubled-sexuality roles better and more often than other actresses. Or perhaps it was the perception that she actively garnered with her often outrageous comments to the tabloid press that led to her being typecast in the courtesan/'other woman' roles – Umrao Jaan, Utsav, Silsila, Astha and so on. Often, as Usman points out, the rumours of love affairs were actively fanned by the film's publicists to whip up interest before its release.

All this must surely complicate the story of Rekha's career and life, especially one that was already so full of melodramatic potential: born out of wedlock, likely sexually exploited when she first entered the Hindi film industry as a teenager and body shamed for her plumpness and dark complexion. It needs great sensitivity to be fair to a woman whose life has been so rich in drama, or the narrative, as with Usman's book, tends to get dragged down into stereotypes.

Take Usman's version of the story of Rekha's "marriage" with Vinod Mehra. Did the two really marry, or was it some hasty ceremony in a mandir? But here's what Usman says about what happened next: that when the couple came to seek Vinod's mother's blessings, she pushed Rekha away and even beat her up with chappals. It's something straight out of the Mera Pati Sirf Mera Hai-kind of films Rekha was doing in the 1980s. Even the central traumatic event of Rekha's life, the suicide of her husband Mukesh Agarwal, has nothing in this book other than what was written about at the time – that Agarwal was likely a manic depressive, that he and Rekha married in haste and discovered their incompatibility soon after, that she refused to see him or talk to him. What's more troublesome is that Usman reproduces even the salacious speculations of the time – the allegations that Rekha and her secretary Farzana were in some kind of a lesbian relationship and Agarwal had got in the way. My only new takeaway from this passage was that the controversial cop, Delhi's erstwhile police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, was a close friend of Agarwal's. The couple had visited Kumar's house soon after their marriage. There's a photograph from that visit, Rekha looking happy and somewhat shy.

It's an image that speaks far more than Usman's words.