Veteran actor Mumtaz said that she was never involved with the late superstar Rajesh Khanna, as much as she’d have liked to. She said that she ‘missed the boat’, because he was in love with her friend, Anju Mahendru. In an interview, Mumtaz reflected on Rajesh Khanna and Anju’s doomed romance, and his sudden decision to marry the 16-year-old Dimple Kapadia. She said that Anju had no idea about it, but that she remains fond of him to this day. She talks about him to this day; she has photos of him in her house. She respected him a lot, and continues to respect him,” Mumtaz said in an interview with Vickey Lalwani.
Asked if she was ever seeing Rajesh Khanna, she said, “I wish I was involved with him, but I wasn’t. I missed the boat, I’d say. I’ve denied this a 1000 times, but if people keep insisting that there was something between us, all I can do is say, ‘I wish…’”
She continued, “Anju was a very good host. When I got married, my husband and I would go to their house, and they’d be very generous as hosts. They’d drink, Kaka would drink… I knew that they love each other very much. In fact, I was surprised when I learnt that he’d left her and gotten married (to Dimple Kapadia). I didn’t expect it at all. Even today, I’d say that Kaka might have still bee alive had he stayed with Anju. She looked after him like he was a flower. Even when he was ill, she always used to be in the bungalow. She always used to look after him, his food, his ‘dawai-daaru’. She was a wonderful person. But you can’t escape destiny.
Mumtaz said that she and Anju remains friends to this day, and that she had asked her what happened when she found out that Rajesh had married Dimple instead of her. “I asked her, and she said, ‘I don’t know. I was at a party, and the next thing I know is that he had decided to get married’. She’s a proud woman, she’s very happy. It didn’t bother her that her boyfriend of so many years had left her. She didn’t want to mope over him. She must’ve been hurt, of course, but it wasn’t like she was howling in grief,” Mumtaz said.
In a 1973 interview with Stardust, Anju had spoken about her relationship with the superstar, and how his declining career impacted them. She said, “It was becoming quite difficult to be around Rajesh Khanna. As his films began to fail at box office, this kept him stressed mentally. He had become quiet moody, short tempered and would get annoyed easily. He would stay stressed the whole time, and that gave me stress. Due to all this, even I became quite irritated. I did try and tell him that highs and lows are normal in a celeb’s life. He wanted me to pay attention to him the whole time and just pamper him, but that was not possible for me.”
It was said that Rajesh Khanna took his baraat via Anju’s house on his way to marry Dimple. But they reconnected in the late 80s, after he had separated from Dimple. Anju re-entered his life, and took care of him like she used to. In an interview with SCREEN, she said, “When we spoke to each other for the first time after almost 17 years, I admit that both of us felt a bit awkward. I didn’t call him Jatin as I used to in the past and he didn’t call me Nikki. I didn’t call him Kaka either. It would have been too filmy.”
