Sanjay Khan Lies About His Relationship With Zeenat, She Doesn’t Care

I’ve known  Zeenat Aman for many many years. She is  well-read, articulate, warm  but reserved. She doesn’t invite unnecessary  closeness with any one. It takes years to win  her trust but only moments to break her heart.Most importantly she has  never lied  about any of her relationships, although most  of them have been downright  disastrous.

 In fact  we laugh about  it whenever  I mention her atrocious choice  of  intended life partners.

 During one such conversation the  forever-feisty femme fatale had said to me, “I’ve to agree with you. When  it comes to men I’ve been pretty stupid. But one lives and learns , no regrets.”

For years now, 38 years to be precise,  she has lived with an  eye injury a parting  gift from  a certain Mr Khan who has now come  up with his alleged  biography.

It is titled The  Best Mistakes  Of My Life.

A  Pack Of Lies would have been a better title.  A  futile fake  and embarrassing exercise  in self-glorification  the  book(I refuse  to call it a biography) just goes to prove why our Bollywood actors refrain from  writing their biographies . Or why  Mr Amitabh Bachchanhas  vowed  to never write his memoirs.

“I can never  bring myself to lay bare my life. My  life is  not mine alone  It involves many  people’s lives,” he told me once.

Sanjay Khan seems to have missed this vital  truism about self-confessionals.You have to keep the sensitivities  of your loved ones in mind  .But then  you can’t only be looking back anxiously at who is going to get hurt by  your words. If you can’t  speak about your personal life, then  you can’t lie about it either.

When   the legendary Vyjanthimala’s biography came  out it denied her relationship with Raj Kapoor.

Raj Saab’s  son Rishi Kapoor was livid.

“What does she mean by  denying the relationship? My  mother and we the kids suffered the ramifications of the relationship,” saidRishi, making the legendary beauty  look like  a liar.

Much the same  is true of Sanjay Khan who has chosen  to gloss over  his widely-reported messy  relationship  of  5 years with ZeenatAman which culminated  in her being thrashed in full public view  at a 5-star hotel.

The  incident and the relationship has been completely  obliterated  from the  book. Has Mr Khan forgotten  or does he take the readers  to be  fools?

A very senior and respected actress colleague of Zeenat says, “Of course it happened(the public beating).  And of course they were in a relationship. We warned her against it.But if he chooses  to not go public about it,  then that’s his choice.What  happened was between the two of them.We are no one to  judge them.”

An outspoken   major veteran actor who has worked with both Khan and Aman is embarrassed  by what he calls  the “tampering of  truth.”

“We all  know what had happened  between  Sanjay Khan and Zeenat. I was  a first-hand witness to it. First  of all , anyone who raises his hand on a woman and that too so brutally that she is scarred  for life, should be in jail , not writing his self-glorifying fairytale biography. And secondly, if you were brazen enough to  humiliate and  hurt a lady in public ,why are you shy of admitting  it now?This is as  bad as  the film Sanju which  completely whitewashed Sanjay Dutt’s image,” says  the  irrepressible actor.

Veteran  actress  Asha  Parekh who recently released her memoirs says she was “very clear in  her head” about what she wanted  to say. She went public with her long-lasting relationship with  filmmaker  Nasir Hussain after seeking the  deceased  director’s family’s presence.

“One can only write  about one’s life if one wants to tell the truth. Otherwise what is  the  purpose  of a memoir?” reasons Asha Parekh.

Perhaps  while writing The Best Mistakes  Of My Life Sanjay Khan forgot his  biggest mistake: being in a very public relationship and then pretending  it never happened.