ZEENAT AMAN WAS THE PERFECT HOSTESS AT THE SATYAM SHIVAM SUNDARAM SHOOT IN PUNE AT RAJ KAPOOR’S LONI FARM HOUSE

Jyothi Venkatesh

Whenever the season of mangoes start in Mumbai, I am automatically reminded of none other than that eternal beauty Zeenat Aman, who reined Bollywood at one time doing films with both Raj Kapoor the showman as well as Dev Anand, the suave hero. At the same time she was acting in films being made by the dashing Feroz Khan on one hand and the films which were being made by his brother the handsome Sanjay Khan. She was a hot favorite of the movie mogul Manmohan Desai too and was the first choice of the film maker when he launched his film Dharamveer.

I digressed. I am coming back to why I think of Zeenat Aman whenever the mango season comes to Mumbai. Way back in 1976, in the second week of May, producer-director Raj Kapoor invited me and other journalists from Mumbai to his farm house at Loni in Pune where he was shooting for his magnum opus called Satyam Shivam Sundaram starring Shashi Kapoor and Zeenat Aman in the main leads. In the good old 70’s, an outdoor shooting coverage meant a picnic for the press folks since we consisted only of the print media and the topmost PR peropsn of that time- the late Bunny Reuben and there were no TV channels hounding the stars or for that matter the youtubewallahs or guys from the websites. There was a kind of homely feeling on location and the stars and the press use to have breakfast, lunch or dinner informally together, like a close knit family.

I remember after Raj Kapoor treated us to a sumptuous lunch in the afternoon on the first day of us having descended on location, it was time for having desserts after lunch. Zeenat Aman and I had bonded very well during the lunch since only the two of us happened to be staunch vegetarians and stuck to each other all through the lunch. When it was time for us to gorge on the ripe mangoes at the farm, when Zeenat saw me struggling with the knife to cut the mango and eat, she slided towards me and taught me how to scourge out the top of the mango at the centre and eat the mango straight, instead of struggling to cut it with knife and fork and eating it with spoon.

I could see my senior journalists sipping beer after beer with Rajji and talking about the film while I preferred to interview Zeenat Aman while eating the mangoes that she started picking for me one after the other fondly. We were in the comfort zone and had the right chemistry because at 24, I was the youngest of the lot of journalists and Zeenat was elder to me by just a few months. No wonder, I still feel that ever since that scorching afternoon, whatever mangoes that I have eaten have not tasted as sweet as the ones handpicked and given to me by the svelte and sexy Zeenat Aman, who proved to be the perfect hostess at least as far as I was concerned.

In the evening, I made up for the lost time by sitting with Rajji himself who very kindly gave me his company with scotch while I interviewed him. Shashi Kapoor had vamoosed in the evening after the shooting was packed up because he was shooting simultaneously for three films the same day and no wonder Raj Kapoor fondly nicknamed him Taxi.