When I run and hit myself on the pole it was not an accident. But Balu who was very fixed in his ideas loved the idea of my character going berserk on the railway platform. Usually directors are cautious about actors’ suggestions. How would a man react if he feels he would have to spend the rest of his life without love? I had to act like a man gone crazy with desperation as he watches his life go away. My character had to show the desperation of a man who’s losing the love of his life. You don’t need so many people.’ I knew something far more dramatic was needed in the climax. When he would see the size of my crew Balu would warn me, ‘I think you’re being had. There were only 12 people on location in Ooty. And his unit was the smallest, I’ve ever worked with. The face was to be washed with soap only. When Sridevi came on location, Balu gave her coconut to rub on her face. The railway-platform finale was partly my idea. Balu wanted a restrained finale where she drove off quietly.
I heard Shobha committed suicide when I was shooting the climax of Ek Duuje Ke Liye. It was an artiste’s way of liberating himself from his anguished emotions. So I asked him what he was doing playing his creative cards so close to his chest. My character was based on Balu Mahendra, who at that time was in love with Shobha, much younger to him. That whole contrast between her innocence and the world at large was preserved in the way I cocoon, shelter and protect her from the outside world. It was like kichad mein Kamal Haasan, ha ha. However, my character in Sadma finds Sridevi in a place that epitomizes sex. And I’d like to think we had imbibed a certain maturity in our outlook which showed in our work together. We had grown up watching cinema from the world over. Not that he or I was averse to the idea of sex on screen. In Sadma, both Balu and I made a conscious decision to keep sex out of the relationship between me and Sridevi. It was again about a very unusual relationship. When Balu directed his first film Kokila, I was his actor. Shobha, whom Balu loved, played the lead. In spite of being my senior he was a friend. We used to sit and talk about films between shots.
His debut film as a cameraman was with me. “Balu Mahendra and I shared a very close relationship.
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