Hope and Glory: Talking to Asha Bhosle

Asha Bhosle likes my hair.

We’re standing on the grounds of a Nashik hotel, and she is posing in the shade of a tree. Dinesh is shooting from almost over my shoulder as Asha Bhosle and I talk, me doing my best to get her to laugh into the camera. She is, unquestionably, a diva. There is no façade of fashionable humility here; she has worked very hard to get to where she is, and she is quite happy to enjoy it, thank you very much. But, as Rudyard Kipling put it, she can “walk with kings — nor lose the common touch”. Perhaps it’s long familiarity with the media; maybe she has outgrown the insecurities that seem to come with stardom in a package deal from hell; or it could be that she has lived with success so long that it sits easily on her shoulders. Or, as Dinesh and I conclude, she’s just comfortable in her skin.

Now, we’re continuing to chat off the record, and she abruptly changes track. I like your hair very much, she says, I’ve been looking at it for a while; it’s so long, so curly! And she laughs and Dinesh gets his shot. As we walk her back to her car, where her retinue is waiting, I feel a little tug at my hair. Forgive me, says the world’s (arguably) most recorded singer — and that famous infectious laugh again — but I just wanted to see what it felt like!

The night before, she had been performing at an outdoor concert somewhere near the city. It was cold, she told us, very, very cold; backstage and in the audience, people were huddled up in multiple layers of clothing; she, however, wore a simple sari, and no footwear (she always sings barefoot), and had stayed on stage singing into the wee hours. And the food had upset her stomach badly. But since she knew that Anand (Bhosle, her son and manager) had set up a 10 a.m. meeting with us, she had woken at eight. One must, she told us, always be ready well in time for visitors.

We find a corner and sit: She, straight-backed, elegant, understated silk sari, shawl, three strands of pearls and diamonds, signature flower in her hair; Dinesh’s lanky frame folded into a corner on the floor; me perched on the edge of my seat. She is less comfortable speaking in English; my Marathi is limited to being able to understand directions, the way to the toilet, and invective, and my Hindi is of the tattered Bambaiya variety. I ask her if I may put my questions to her in English, and she nods assent.

We begin by talking about her ability to laugh her way through life, infecting those around her with her cheerfulness. “It comes from within,” she says, “I have always believed that one should share happiness; it is a medicine for life’s sorrows. We all get stuck in negatives: Anger, desire… I prefer to find happiness in everything, in small things: A flower in the morning; good music; cooking. I keep telling people, smile, you will look young; it is exercise! If you don’t smile, your face will look dull.”

And she does demonstrate the truth of this: When she smiles, the years melt away and you forget that she is a 76-year-old grandmother.

We talk about her childhood. Her father, Dinanath Mangeshkar, was a famous and well-respected singer and actor. “From as far back as I can remember, I saw my father and sister [Lata Mangeshkar] singing. We owned a theatre, employed around 200 people. When our father passed away [he died young, at 41], our financial position was not good but we kids were not much affected. We would have one cup of tea or peanuts, then go off to play. There was no radio, we only used to sing. Life was beautiful. My mother was a very clever lady. She took care of five kids alone, with no money. She used to tell us, ‘You are the children of a very big man. You will do something big, you can’t live in poverty. God has given you beauty and given you this voice.’” She laughs: “She convinced us dark-skinned, homely girls that we were great beauties!”

She eloped at 16 to marry a man 20 years older, against her family’s wishes. “I never thought I would be a singer. I always wanted to lead the life of a housewife, have kids, run a family, cook for them.” But the marriage turned sour: “My husband was short-tempered.” In short, he beat her. “Maybe he liked to inflict pain, maybe he was a sadist. But no one would hear about it outside. I gave him respect, never questioned what he did. I just I did my duty as per Hindu dharma.”

She had been taking singing lessons, and had begun singing playback for the movies. So, she says, she asked her guru whether she should sing classical or switch to light music. “He asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘Where is there more money?’ I thought once my husband sets up a business, gets stable, I would quit singing.” Pause. “But once I started, it was difficult to quit. I thought, God has sent me for this job, I should not go against his wishes.” The fact also is that her husband never made very much money, and she had to bring up her children and look after the rest of his household. Yet, she says, she never let her children speak ill of the man, because he was, after all, their father. For all her forbearance, the marriage ended. Her husband threw her out.

“My older sister Meena is also a very good singer but she doesn’t sing. Even Usha doesn’t sing a lot.” Young Asha, on the other hand, was literally singing for her supper. “If I hadn’t gotten married, I wouldn’t have left home, I wouldn’t have become a singer, I wouldn’t have had such wonderful kids, such great grandchildren.” She pauses for a moment. “If I had not met Bhosle, I wouldn’t have become Asha Bhosle.”

Her musical partnership with O.P. Nayyar played a large part in the creation of Asha the star. I decide not to ask her about the personal relationship with him which also ended badly — birds sing outside, the air is crisp and the day is lovely — so we talk instead of the late R.D. Burman, the other music director in her life, and her second husband. She laughs as she recollects drives with him, where he would only use one leg on the pedals (the other was folded under him), have a glass of whisky balanced on the dashboard, steer with his left hand, and sing, while his right hand played the beat on the car roof. (Later that day, she talked about that relationship too. “It was not a typical marriage,” she said, “It was more a musical partnership. There was much more in it than most marriages.”)

“Everyone gets married but how many of them love each other? Out of every 100 people, maybe there are 20 who are soulmates; everyone else adjusts. I have never found a perfect man in my life. I kept searching for love my whole life. Life is an adjustment. When we travel by train and there is space next to us and a stranger comes to sit, we adjust. Why shouldn’t we then adjust with our families? I adjust easily and that’s why I am happy.”

I ask her how much joy she got out of her music. “The part of my life that is not spent sleeping, I want to spend working. I work from morning till midnight. Imagine, I have sung almost 13,000 songs till date! There were days when I worked till 3 a.m., slept for a few hours and then went to work again. I used to manage the home, dropping the kids at school, cooking, putting them to sleep. My aim was to provide my children with proper education. I didn’t aim at giving them a luxurious life but a decent one. Today, people ask me, why didn’t you build a bungalow? I say, I am happy in a flat. Who needs a bungalow with many bedrooms? You need only one bedroom to sleep!”

She has sung in a multiplicity of genres, but also in a number of languages, many of which she does not speak. I tell her that she speaks three universal languages: Music, food and laughter. She, gracefully, does not cringe at the cliché. Instead, she talks of a performance at an IIT. “I sang to the beat of rock music, and these twenty-year-old kids were jumping with joy! I said, ‘These songs are forty years old, you weren’t even born!’ If these youngsters know my songs, my career will go on. I don’t know how many generations love me and my songs. As long as I can sing, I will sing. I do riyaaz every day. The day my song gets over will be the day I will be no more. Music is like breathing to me.”

Dinesh, who has been sitting at her feet looking adoringly up at her, chimes in: “Have you ever met someone like you?” She thinks hard, looks at us, looks back into the distance over the years, thinks some more. “No.” We burst out laughing.

Somewhere mid-way through our conversation, I had noticed the battery indicator on my recorder slipping into danger territory. I asked Dinesh if he had spares. Unfortunately he had none. Ashaji interjected, with a chuckle: “I always last longer than these batteries.” We decided to chance it and kept recording. Now, interview done, Dinesh and I express relief that the batteries had lasted. Her eyes sparkle again: “It has been said that things get recharged when they are near me!”

We had persuaded Ashaji to let us take a few more pictures on the road: We’d drive ahead, find a shady spot where the harsh noon light wouldn’t bleach out the shot. But all the likely locations we’d marked out on the way to Nashik were now shadeless. We find one rock face with some shade. But it is a foot lower than the road level, rutted, rubble-strewn, dusty, ash-filled from some recent fire.

Ten minutes later, her car pulls up, and she alights, with a little difficulty. She surveys our spot and declares that she wouldn’t be able to manage it. We put on our best pleading expressions. She relents, and we help her descend. Again, while Dinesh shoots, I squat under his lens and chat. She asks about us, our lives, where we come from. Then brings the conversation back to my hair. I wear it long because I’m balding, I tell her, and so I mean to enjoy it before genetics took it all away. “Why don’t you do something about it,” she asks me, “It’s our duty to be presentable, to look the best that we can.” She then tells me what she has been using, successfully, to combat thinning hair, and recommends I use it too. I promise I will.

Here, in the middle of nowhere, cars had slowed down at the sight of a big, professional-looking camera and lens, and then screeched to a stop when they recognised who was being shot. Now, as she takes my arm again to negotiate the uneven path back to the road, the fans close in, proffering scraps of paper, asking for photographs. “I’m tired,” she tells them. But she signs a few, poses for a few photographs from phonecams. Then she turns to us. “I’m close by, at Pedder Road,” she says, “Come and visit; and not about work.”

I give her back the dark glasses I had been holding for her while we took photographs, and she smiles a thank you as the car door closes. The fans sigh. So does Dinesh, our big, tough outdoorsman. So do I.

Asha Bhosle spoke to ForbesLife India in Hindi. The quotes here attempt to convey the spirit of what she said rather than accurately translate each word.