Jaydip Sengupta

Blurred past evaporating from teardrops
Unending dreams carving an arc of a smile
And a fleeting life,
negotiating between the two…
#Maa.

That was the last cryptic Instagram post from Sushant Singh Rajput on June 3.

It almost reads like a beseeching call for help to his mother whom he had lost when he was young. The apparent suicide by the 34-year-old actor, found hanging at his Bandra residence on Sunday, has left Bollywood, already reeling from the recent spate of untimely deaths, completely shaken.

Just a few days back, Sushant’s former celebrity manager, Disha Salian, also reportedly committed suicide by jumping off a building. She too was reportedly suffering from depression.

Even as the whole country grapples with the lockdown brought on by the pandemic, with regions divided into red, orange and green zones, Bollywood is struggling to cope with its own dead zone.

Irrfan Khan, Rishi Kapoor, Wajid Khan, Basu Chatterjee, the list keeps growing, even as actors and directors try to battle the depressing scenario of having to sit at home and wonder where their next film and paycheck is going to come from.

Sushant, too, endured his share of the suffering. An ‘outsider’ in Bollywood parlance, his roles were few and far between, even though he enjoyed immense success, both critically and commercially, with most of his films. Chhichhore, his last success on the big screen back in September 2019, was followed by Drive, which failed to get a big-screen release. He was reportedly struggling with depression for quite some time, eventually leading to this tragic end.

Born in Patna, Sushant moved to Delhi in 2002 after the death of his mother, a loss that left him devastated. A brilliant student, his move to Mumbai to follow his passion, after an unfinished Engineering stint, seemed to have paid dividends, when he landed a role in Balaji Telefilms’ Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil in 2008. Pavitra Rishta followed and soon he became a well-known face on Television. He even appeared in the dance-based reality shows Zara Nachke Dikha 2 and Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa 4, having honed his dancing skills as a member of Shiamak Davar’s troupe.
His big Bollywood break came in 2013 with Kai Po Che!, an adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s novel, The 3 Mistakes of My Life. The movie set the cash registers ringing, catapulting Sushant from a good-looking newcomer to a bankable star in his own right. Shuddh Desi Romance followed soon after, but the floodgates did not open as one might have expected. He had a minor role in PK in 2014 and then followed it up with the title role in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy in 2015. One movie per year was not exactly the kind of returns an actor of his talent would have bargained for, but then he did not ‘belong’ to the Bollywood family, so to speak.

Nevertheless, his role as M. S. Dhoni in the latter’s biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, hit all the right notes, becoming one of the biggest hits in 2016. Raabta in 2017 was followed by Kedarnath in 2018 and Sonchiriya in 2019, before Chhichhore happened, all being critically acclaimed thanks to his stellar performances.
He was linked to a few of his co-stars, but the failure, despite all his on-screen success, to be accepted by the Bollywood fraternity, may just have been too much for him in the end.

True to nature, the Bollywood bigwigs jumped on the bandwagon when it came to paying tributes, rattling off tweets to show how much they cared. Celebrity hairstylist Sapna Bhavnani, who worked with Sushant in M. S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, summed it up best in her scathing tweet. “It’s no secret Sushant was going through very tough times for the last few years. No one in the industry stood up for him nor did they lend a helping hand. To post about him today is the biggest display of how shallow the industry really is. No one here is your friend. RIP.”