Shashi Kapoor’s 5 leading ladies speak on his birth anniversary

During the shooting of Junoon, he would scold me for listening to the Beatles between shots. “ Why don’t you listen to Begum Akhtar instead? Shaukatji se kuch tto seekha hota!” My mother was known to get into her character hours before a performance and would surround herself with stimuli that would help her inhabit the world of the character she was playing…I would make a face and reluctantly switch off the Beatles to put on Begum Akhtar…I never admitted to him that it did help…I used to complain that he only scolded, bullied or made fun of me. But in a crisis, he was rock solid. In ’86 I had taken up the cause of slum dwellers in Colaba whose homes had been demolished to make way for an MLA hostel. We knocked on several doors, demanding alternate housing for them, before Anand Patwardhan and I, along with three slum dwellers, went on a hunger strike. No actor had gone on a hunger strike before and our fraternity was confused about whether to express support for me. On the fifth day, my blood pressure started falling and my mother was worried. Shashi Kapoor turned up wanting to know our demands. He left soon after and went straight to the Chief Minister, Shankarrao Chavan, telling him that the film industry had always supported the government in a crisis and now it was the Government’s responsibility to reciprocate. The Chief Minister must not let the demands of one of its members go unheard. The CM summoned the Housing Minister who came back with Shashiji to the Colaba footpath where we were, conceding alternative land for the slum dwellers and urged us to end the hunger strike with a glass of juice. I was on stage, about to thank Shashi Kapoor for negotiating the deal for us when I saw him step away from the media glare, slip away into an alley and disappear…“I had nothing to do with it…It’s their victory”, he said firmly before driving away. The fact is that I don’t know how much longer we would have had to continue with the strike had Shashiji not intervened ..but he didn’t want any accolades and never spoke about it, ever. That’s the kind of person he was…Was? I’m referring to him in the past tense ..but we will never really lose him because in death, his spirit, trapped in a frail body has been set free and will surround us like the air we breathe…”