Beauty and the beast

Beauty and the beast
A.N. Dar

After hearing of her death I have not been able to banish from my mind the stunning beauty she was when she took her first step towards stardom. That was in Delhi. I happened to get the first interview Vera Singh gave before she became Priya Rajvansh. That was way back, perhaps in 1963, when Chetan Anand had come to Delhi to collect funds for making a film on the India-China war a year earlier. As I remember it, he had kept it a secret as he did not want the idea to be stolen by his rivals. Yet he was not flush with funds and was going round the circles which mattered in Delhi.

To cut a long story short, I found Chetan Anand in Ashoka Hotel. Those were different days in Indian cinema as well as in Indian newspapers. While Chetan was keen that his idea should not be publicised before he collected sufficient funds, we had to be careful we did not give undue publicity to a commercial venture. I sold the idea of doing a story to my newspaper and Ch-etan agreed to talk about it. I was not a film journalist, and there were doubts about my enterprise. As one of my peers commented, why write about Chetan Anand's venture when the industry believed he was nearly bankrupt. But it was worth trying since the 1962 war was still big news.

I found Chetan Anand cooperative and willing to talk. He had just christened his film Haqeeqat. His latest find, the London model Vera Singh, that day turned into Priya Rajvansh, the star. The picture raised high expectations since the wounds of the war had not yet healed. To tell the story in a film was to call for much skill. Would the people want to see it? How would it go with the mood of the country which did not want to be reminded of a sorry episode in our military history? But Chetan was full of confidence. He related to me the story and also how the people in power and those in the film industry were reacting to it.

Just then, as we were talking, something very unexpected happened. A very glamorous woman came to our table and sat with us. Chetan said something like this: ``This is Priya. She is the heroine.'' If I had been with friends, I would not have been able to take my eyes off this statuesque Roman beauty. It is no use describing her after such a long time. I can only say that she was breathtakingly beautiful. Knowing that this was going to be her first film interview and that this was the first publicity exposure of a movie that was going to be the talk of the town, she had come well made up.

The one sentence I remember having written then in the only movie story I wrote in all my journalistic career was that ``this is the lady who is going to set the snows of Ladakh afire'', or something like that, or perhaps better than that since I was much younger then. She took your breath away.That meeting lasted an hour. I never saw Priya again. She went on to make Saheb Bahadur, Heer Ranjha, Hanste Zakham. None of the movies in which she starred became blockbusters. I don't think that any of these movies did justice to her beauty. Neither did her fame spread as Jitendra Arya, who had spotted her first in the London underground and then presented her album to Chetan Anand, had perhaps expected. Nor did her fame spread in the movie world as it took on Meena Kumari and Madhubala and Nargis. In time Priya withdrew from the public gaze and devoted herself to the ageing Chetan Anand. She got to be known as India's Greta Garbo. In her life there was surely something of Garbo as she retreated from the spotlight.

I have often thought about her. No one would have liked her life to end in a Bombay bathroom. As Dev Anand, Chetan's brother and one of her co-stars, has said, it is ``very sad the way Priya died.'' But is that given to us?