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The unrepentant baddie - Rajeev Masand
This week's Open Magazine column, courtesy Rajeev Masand
He’s one of Hindi cinema’s legendary screen villains, who famously enjoyed nothing more than filming those rape scenes in the good ol’ days. He appears in movies only intermittently now, playing grandpa roles, but stories about the old fox and his promiscuity are the stuff of Bollywood legend.
Most popular among these is an incident in which the married actor reportedly left home one afternoon claiming he was going over to a friend’s place for a session of cards. His suspicious wife, who’d heard enough stories about his indiscretions, is supposed to have decided to find out once and for all if her husband was indeed committing adultery.
She’s believed to have followed him all the way to a Juhu hotel. There, she reportedly waited for him to get into a room, and showed up at his door 20 minutes later. The actor apparently answered the door naked, with only a towel covering his modesty. Shocked at seeing his wife at the door, the actor is said to have slammed the door shut in her face.
The angry wife knocked and knocked and swore at him from outside, threatening to break the door down and demanding to know who was with him inside. After 20 minutes of relentless knocking, when her husband didn’t answer the door again, she went home seething.
Later that evening, when the actor finally showed up at home, his missus didn’t wait for him to take a seat before letting loose a volley of curses. To which the actor allegedly responded very coolly, claiming he had no idea what she was talking about. Insisting that she was paranoid, and that she’d hallucinated the entire incident, the actor dismissed his wife’s suspicions and assured her that he was indeed playing cards with friends all afternoon.
