A new book about Sanjay Dutt has revealed the reaction the actor had to hearing his mother Nargis’ voice on audio tapes, three years after she died.
In Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy, Yasser Usman tells Dutt’s story — the good, the bad and, at times, the absurd.
The book, published by Juggernaut, reveals the actor’s drugs usage, philandering, and an incident where he drank the blood of a monitor lizard.
Nargis died on May 3, 1981, of cancer just before the release of Dutt’s film Rocky.
“Sanjay had not cried when his mother died. It had been three long years since Nargis had passed away but Sanjay’s wounds were still festering,” Usman writes.
Dutt was at a drug rehab centre in the US. His father Sunil Dutt sent him some tapes of Nargis talking during her final days.
“When Sanjay got the tapes from Sunil he had no idea what was on them. He pressed play and suddenly the room was filled with Nargis’s voice. He remembered his childhood, when his mother’s voice would reverberate through the Dutt mansion,” the book says.
His mother’s voice was weak, broken and in immense pain.
But Nargis still spoke of her dreams for her son, and gave him some advice.
“More than anything, Sanju... Keep your humility. Keep your character. Never show off. Always be humble and always respect the elders. That is the thing that is going to take you far. And that is going to give you strength in your work,” Nargis said.
Dutt realised how much she loved him and cared about him.
“I burst out crying and I cried and cried... I cried continuously for four days... I think till then I hadn’t grieved for her when she passed away. So her voice and those tapes changed everything in my life,” the book quotes Dutt as saying.
“He knew that he had to rebuild his life. For a moment he felt his mother had come back from the dead to save him. The incident was a turning point in Sanjay’s life. His mother’s weak yet loving voice cast light where there had been darkness. Confident that his mother was watching over him, Sanjay started to take his treatment seriously. The healing truly began,” Usman writes.
He goes to describe other titbits like how almost a decade before the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case, Dutt was involved in a shooting spree in posh Pali Hill for which he was even arrested. He once smuggled heroin into the US and at the height of his addiction he hallucinated that his father Sunil was melting.
