When Master Ali Bux seemingly abandoned his second daughter, Mahjabeen Bano, at the door of an orphanage, unable to take the weight of another daughter, it sent a signal to the infant someplace. Despite the fact that he brought her back home, she was torn by guilt, which established the tone for the rest of her story. Even as she grew up to become the deified Meena Kumari, Mahjabeen’s sense of abandonment remained. “That moment remained in her subconscious mind. Here was a traumatized soul… Life had decided that she will suffer,” thus reiterates Vinod Mehta’s Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography. “The atmosphere in which I grew up was devoid of love and affection…since then I am looking for love, searching for it, craving for it.”
According to Ashwini Bhatnagar’s memoir Mahjabeen As Meena Kumari, Meena revealed in an interview. Meena’s first full-fledged engagement with a much older Kamal Amrohi was a sign of the search, in a departure from magical romances. He’s a writer and filmmaker, and she’s clinging to his pearls of wisdom. Rumours of his control and her depravity quickly soiled what began as a clean wedded existence in a home filled with white drapes, white mogras, and white baths. The mentor was said to have turned into a tormentor.
After fleeing a ‘whitewashed’ environment, Meena Kumari is said to have found solace in newcomer Dharmendra. Despite its sincere intentions, the rumoured romance remained just that… a diversion that left her lost and lonely. She discovered a resonating rhyme and rhythm in friend and co-poet Gulzar. Two souls searching for poetry in the prosaic of life. It was all about finding solace in appreciation and acceptance with young filmmaker Sawan Kumar Tak. A partnership with no future but the ability to make the present bearable.
True life of Meena Kumari was a death desire of sorts, whether it was her own latent masochism that found pleasure in agony or her vagrancy that preferred the journey to the destination. Cirrhosis of the liver was the clinical reason of her death. Heartbreak, on the other hand, was a cunning assassin. “I am in love with love… I am craving for love… love is my biggest weakness,” Meena Kumari was mentioned (Ashwini Bhatnagar’s Mahjabeen As Meena Kumari), reflecting a search that had numerous beginnings but no end.
Also Read: Is there a chance Kriti Sanon may be cast in Meena Kumari’s biopic?
