PICTURE TALK
Saeed Jaffrey was born to a Punjabi Muslim family hailing from Malerkotla in the year 1929. I first saw and met him briefly in Delhi, when he was shooting for Chashme Baddoor, a film directed by Sai Paranjpye starring Farooq Shaikh, Deepti Naval, Rakesh Bedi, and Ravi Baswani. Saeed was playing the role of a panwaari in the film.
This picture was taken during my second encounter with him, at the shooting of Gandhi, an Oscar award-winning film directed by Richard Attenborough, near a village in Delhi. Saeed was playing the role of Sardar Patel in the film.
The editor of Filmfare, the well-known film fortnightly from Bombay from the Times of India stable, had requested me to cover a few days of shooting of Gandhi for him. After the lady heading the publicity department of the film issued an ID card for the day for me, I went and saw a bald-pated Saeed, who was housed in one of the rooms at the Ashoka Hotel, where the entire unit of the film was staying.
A little later all the press corps were put in a vehicle which took us to all the sites of the shooting day. The destination was about 50-60 kilometres away from Delhi – large open fields around a remote village, perhaps in or bordering the state of Haryana. Apart from Saeed Jaffrey, I also had a chance to meet Roshan Seth, who played Nehru in the film, and all the cast shooting for the film that day.
My third and final meeting with Saeed happened in Bombay (now Mumbai), when I accompanied a Filmfare staffer to interview him. During all the three meets with him, there had been no occasion for me to have any long talk or any friendly chitchat except the usual pleasantries.
Saeed’s first wife was a Delhi-born Hindu woman Madhur Bahadur, who was also an actress and is now the well-known cookery writer, Madhur Jaffrey.
Saeed had acted in some 150 films, won many awards. He breathed his last on November 15, 2015, in London.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility for the same.
