Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Lost star

Parveen Babi’s life is a morality tale on so many levels. On the most basic level, it teaches us about the dangers of the brittle world of show business and the damage it can wreak on the vulnerable and fragile; it underlines the importance of family and a support system for those in the limelight

She would have turned 67 tomorrow, had she lived. How would she have marked the occasion? The last birthday she’d celebrated had been her fiftieth. She’d hosted a dinner for a handful of her friends — the few people who had managed to pierce through the smog of her paranoia and who she had accepted into her inner circle; her trusty manager who’d stuck by her through the savage spins of her tumultuous career; her building watchman along with the neighbourhood handyman; a couple of priests from the Church where she’d been baptized a few months before; and inexplicably, a random fan who had cold-called her and had managed to win her trust.

Parveen Babi

She’d worn her prettiest kaftan and most flamboyant lipstick for the occasion. The table had been laden with dishes which she had prepared herself and glasses were clinked and jokes cracked. But, according to “Parveen Babi: A Life” authored by journalist Karishma Upadhaya, “Under that bright veneer of fun though, there was anxiety, and the laughter had not been as spontaneous as it had once been. The guests found it very hard to ignore the Dictaphone she had casually placed on the coffee table, in between glasses of mocktails and plates of food.’

It was to be one of her last hurrahs.

Nine months later, this once-celebrated leading lady of the Indian film industry, a veteran of over 50 movies of which a dozen or so had been blockbusters at the box office, whose face had once adorned the cover of an international magazine when it turned its focus on India’s film industry, was found dead. Her body starved and gangrenous and only discovered two days after her passing, when her building security had alerted the police.

Parveen Babi’s life is a morality tale on so many levels. On the most basic level, it teaches us about the dangers of the brittle world of show business and the damage it can wreak on the vulnerable and fragile; it underlines the importance of family and a support system for those in the limelight; it reveals the prejudice and pain endured by intelligent, beautiful and successful women who do not abide by patriarchal societal conventions. But above all, it emphasises the need to de-stigmatise mental illness and the way its victims are viewed and treated.

At the height of her illness, when this once celebrated and vivacious leading lady, a woman known for her magnanimity and good manners and her intellect and sophistication, had begun to tell anyone willing to listen that she was the victim of an international conspiracy, that her food was poisoned and that a bugging device had been surgically planted under her ear, the media and the public had lapped it up. “She’s gone crazy”, “She’s lost her mind” the headlines had screamed.

Sixteen years ago, the empathy and sensitivity for those suffering from mental illness had been more absent than it is today. An overweight, unkempt Babi spewing fantastic conspiracy theories was given none of the support and understanding that she so urgently required. Alone and friendless in Mumbai (according to some versions she rebuffed their overtures and stonewalled their solicitations), she was a walking train wreck, a tragedy waiting to happen in full public view, and no one, not her family, her lovers, colleagues, nor her adoring fans had stepped forward to prevent it.

Would things have been different if it had happened sixteen years later, today? Perhaps not. Yes, since Babi’s death there have been others in the public eye who have tried to bring about a more empathetic understanding of mental illness. Deepika Padukone was brave enough to share her own; Ira Rao, Aamir Khan’s daughter, courageously faces prejudice stigma and vicious trolling each day as she recounts her tryst with depression; and Neerja Birla, through her NGO Mpower, have attempted to educate the public about its vicissitudes. But these interventions have been a drop in the ocean against the tide of misunderstanding and prejudice. We have only to look back as recently as last year to know how Sushant Singh Rajput’s struggle with depression and his ultimate suicide resulted in a heinous media circus that engulfed the nation.

According to her friends, before Babi’s illness manifested itself, she had been a warm, effervescent and hardworking woman who had achieved a fair measure of success in a very competitive and demanding industry through her own merit. Why then had she ended up so alone and ill?

The answer lies in our individual responses to mental illness. How would we respond to a manic and distraught Parveen Babi today? In a world already so fraught and hard-hearted, who would have the compassion and sensitivity to view someone with Babi’s affliction with the empathy and sensitivity it deserved? Which of her friends and colleagues would have the patience and perseverance to assist her in accessing the medical help that she so urgently required? Which media outlets would turn down the opportunity to make fodder of her illness or moolah out of the TRP it generated and leave her alone until she had healed? As for her doting fans and the general public, would anyone have cared to look beyond the manifestations of her paranoid schizophrenia and see the unwell and ailing woman under it, crying out for help?

Sixteen years ago, a once-strong and successful woman was allowed to suffer unimaginable pain and to die alone. The tragedy is that were the same circumstances to present themselves today, she’d probably have met the same fate, or worse given the all-pervasive presence of social media and its army of trolls. “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” Wrote political theorist Hannah Arendt, an early victim of Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

On the eve of what would have been her 67th birth anniversary, what does it say about the prevailing culture of our time that had she been alive, Parveen Babi would perhaps still not get the understanding or empathy that she required? It is a sobering thought, one that should engage us far more than it does.