Mahesh Bhatt on his mother Shrin: ‘The woman who belonged everywhere’

The filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt met the philosopher UG Krishnamurti sometime in the 1970s. Bhatt went on to become one of Krishnamurti’s most ardent followers, writing several books on him. The latest is The Ashes Are Warm – Memories of a Lifetime Spent with UG Krishnamurti (Rupa Publications).

“He was standing at the top of the staircase, clad in white,” Bhatt writes about his first meeting with Krishnamurti, who was also known as UG. “And as if walking through a tunnel, I began to climb toward him. His luminous face slowly eclipsed everything around me. A volcanic silence blazed through my gut. The clamour of the city receded into the background.”

The book doubles up as Bhatt’s own memoir. In the chapter excerpted below, Bhatt, the son of filmmaker Nanabhai Bhatt, writes about his mother Shirin. Bhatt created a character based on his mother in his award-winning film Zakhm (1998). Bhatt’s daughter, Pooja Bhatt, plays Noor, a Muslim woman who marries a Hindu director and hides her faith from her children. Noor’s reality is revealed through tragedy: she is killed during a communal riot.

She was never just one thing. Not to herself. Not to us. Not even to ‘God’.

In the Shivaji Park flat where I grew up, the walls carried no portraits of ancestors – but there were gods everywhere. Ganesha, garlanded with marigolds. Shiva, brooding in silence. A laughing Buddha, quietly smiling on the shelf.

Her prayer mat and Quran were hidden above the cupboard in her bedroom, out of sight but never far. At dawn, behind a closed door, she offered her namaz. Later, she lit incense and placed flowers before the gods – keeping peace with the world outside, and perhaps with herself.

My mother, fearing discrimination, cleverly concealed her identity behind a large bindi and mangalsutra, gave us all Hindu names, and sent me to an English-medium school run by Italian missionaries. She lived her life in disguise – not for glamour, but to protect the lives that had sprung from her.

She was a Shia Muslim woman living with a Brahmin film-maker in post-Partition India. A mistress in the eyes of the world. A mother, in the only eyes that mattered – mine.

To shield us, she bent to social lies so we wouldn’t have to carry the burden of truth. But her inner world was seamless. She visited Mount Mary’s Church and begged Mother Mary for a son after three daughters. When I was born, she said it was Mary’s gift – a child who would shield her from the world’s judgment, and maybe, one day, return the favour.

Then UG came into my life – the man who became the breath of it. And she, too, was drawn to him. Not because he offered salvation, but because he didn’t. He saw through illusion – and he saw her.

There was a morning I’ll never forget.

We were in Pali Hill, Bandra – the Beverly Hills of the Hindi film industry. Dawn had just broken. The light was gentle, like the hush before a confession. We were walking down a slope when we saw her walking up from my brother’s home, heading to mine. She was wrapped in a simple sari, barefoot in her slippers, moving like she had always moved: neither hurried nor slow, just present.

UG saw her and said, with a soft smile, ‘She’s a vagabond like us.’

And I think that best described what we three were in spirit. Vagabonds. Unanchored. Unclaimed. At home in the spaces between identities.

As she inched into her twilight years, something inside her began to whisper that the end wasn’t far. One afternoon, after lunch – she had just fed us both – she turned to UG and quietly placed her dilemma before him.

She asked if she should donate her body to a hospital for educational purposes. She was afraid that if she were buried according to her Muslim faith, the truth would surface – not about her, but about us. Her daughters were married to Hindu men. What would their in-laws think, knowing the mother-in-law was a Muslim? After a lifetime of living in the shadows, could she let that sunlight touch her children?

UG didn’t hesitate. ‘Don’t give your body to the medical fraternity,’ he said. ‘All that knowledge ends up in the hands of those who destroy life.’

Something in her settled after that. The long war within was over.

Then she turned to me – the son she had prayed for – and said, ‘After I die, only you will do what I ask. I’ve been everything in life. But in death, I must go where my mother went.’

She gave me a task. A sacred one. To bury her in her mother’s grave, in the Shia graveyard in Byculla, Mumbai.

She died not long after that. Quietly. Without the mask. I did what she entrusted me to do. And I realized something then.

My mother was never confused. She was never weak. She was just too vast to fit into any one faith, or face, or fate. She was a secret the world couldn’t decode.

But UG could. And in that recognition, she was finally seen.

Excerpted with permission from The Ashes Are Warm – Memories of a Lifetime Spent with UG Krishnamurti, Mahesh Bhatt, as told to Sunita Pant Bansal, Rupa Publications.