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With the upcoming thriller Rustom, Akshay Kumar has sprinted to the winning post in the race to reboot the sensational Nanavati murder case of November 1958.
To avoid legal hassles, Dutt had been refashioned as a commercial airline’s pilot named Anil Kumar Sahni. Leela Naidu essayed the part of his wife, Neena. The third end of the triangle - camouflaged under the name of Ashok Srivastava and as incarnated by the charismatic actor Rehman - carried shades of Ahuja.
Veterans Ashok Kumar and Motilal enacted the silver-tongued lawyers for the prosecution and the defence. The parallels were a no-brainer.
The film, with an evocative music score by Ravi (particularly the still-hummed title song), was tagged with an ‘Adults only’ censor certificate. Premiered at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir cinema, it had struck up average business.
Naval Commander Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati had pumped three bullets into Prem Bhagwan Ahuja, persistently described as the ‘Sindhi playboy businessman of Bombay’. Ahuja was involved in an adulterous relationship with Nanavati’s British wife, Sylvia.
So what was that about Akshay Kumar winning the race for
re-filming the crime de passion?
Some asking around indicates that Madhvani’s script, after some rewriting, had been okayed by Sylvia
Nanavati, who had resettled in Toronto with her two sons and daughter and was joined by Kawas Nanavati
after he had served a three-year sentence. Nanavati passed away in 2003. His
widow and children have maintained a rigidly invisible profile.
Yet, Madhvani was persuasive enough to get a formal sanction from Mrs Sylvia Nanavati.
A book titled Nanavatika Muqadama has been written in Hindi, a chapter in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children narrated a thinly-veiled account of a Commander Sabarmati (rhymes with Nanavati!), and yet another riff, an e-line book on Nanavati is in the works.
Which just about makes the naval commander’s case an ongoing fascination through almost six decades. Love, murder, redemption, all the ingredients of a why-dunit are here.
Around noon, she had arrived at the school on Outram Road, Fort, for a meeting with the principal. Although classes were on, the teachers as well as even junior students in their pre-teens had rushed to the stairwell to catch a glimpse of her. Classes had come to a standstill.
Sylvia Nanavati emerged some 15 minutes later, ensured that her son who must have been around 10 then, bid goodbye to his classmates, which he did with tears of bafflement in his eyes. That was the last time the son, an accomplished athlete at the school sports events, was seen or heard of by the Cathedralites.
It is learnt that the Akshay Kumar movie directed by Tinu Suresh Desai and produced by Neeraj Pandey, who previously helmed Special 26 (based on a true-life jewellery heist), is a ‘fictionalised’ reprise on the Nanavati case, which will be asserted through a disclaimer.
In this case, the lead characters have been named Rustom Pavri, Cynthia Pavri and Vikram.
Truth, once again, is about to be Bollywood-wrapped in fiction.
(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and a weekend painter)
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