'Amitabh would discuss morality, poetry, MF Husain with me'

It was on December 20, 1990 that I got an invitation from Amitabh Bachchan to be his house guest at Prateeksha in Mumbai. The invitation came through a call on my Delhi landlord's telephone because I did not have my own connection then. It seems he had called earlier in the day while I was at office and wanted to know when I would be available "directly" to take his call. So there I was at 10 minutes past 6 pm to talk to him.
I told him the trains were full and I might like to postpone my visit until later into the New Year. But he said he was to visit South Africa and would get very busy; now he was in a lean period when breaks were manageable. He would send me plane tickets both ways, the return being an open ticket, and I was not to worry because I would be very well taken care of at his house. But the nights, I said, I would want to be in my office guest house, fairly close to his Juhu house, because I was not too comfortable living in with families, my own relatives included. I was duly booked for the nights at the airport hotel, fully paid for by Amitabh Bachchan.
The reason for the invitation was that I had posted him, albeit rather late, copies of my MPhil dissertation from JNU titled the Social Construction of a Hero - Images By Amitabh Bachchan. The stuff I wrote, he said, were presented just in the way he thought of himself in his mind. How could I ever know his mind so well was the curiosity he wished to satiate through my visit to his home.
When this happened I was 29 years old. From age 17, I had been a fan of Amitabh Bachchan, having seen him for the first time on screen in Sholay -- and Sholay wasn't even exclusively his film. I was not romantically attracted to him; my attraction was philosophical. In my mind I was already speaking to him all the time. So, frankly, I no longer needed to meet Amitabh. But I would get a chance to see Jaya Bhaduri; that became my overriding interest in visiting Prateeksha.
Amitabh's driver picked me up in the wee hours of the morning to drop me at the airport. I was worried about a packet of soft notun gur (new-season jaggery) sweets getting squashed on flight - it was for the Bachchan family, purchased from Annapurna in front of Sopan, their Delhi bungalow. Finally, as the day broke and life picked up in the streets of Mumbai, his car drove me into Prateeksha.
Amitabh was the first person to greet me. He was getting very distracted by a light sweater I was wearing from Delhi, because though Delhi was freezing, Mumbai was hot. He took the journalist who was interviewing him and me into the wooden shed at the corner of his garden because here he could run the air-conditioning. He was more enthusiastic talking about my work to the journalist than about discussing his.
It was close to lunch that I met the family in full force, which included Ajitabh who had come down from London. We sat down to dine in the finest silver crockery over a 12-course meal. There were furtive glances from the staff trying to see what kind of a star I was to merit such an honour. Perhaps the reason was that I was an academic and so was Harivanshrai Bachchan. Teji, Amitabh's mother told me that Harivanshrai had read my work.
Amitabh was perceptive of my addiction to pickles and insisted that it should be always set before me for meals. Jaya was torn between being a good host and just chatting with me, finding in me a fellow Bengali who remembered her glorious films and her famous Bengali directors. But the memory that I would cherish were the philosophical discussions with Amitabh and Jaya over the nature of self, manifestations of ego, anger, morality, law and justice, democracy and ethics, stardom and cinema, poetry and epic, spectacle and extravaganza, violence and obscenity, rightwing politics and liberalism, vendetta of the media and the emancipatory power of popular culture, of Husain and Ganesh Pyne, of eyes and laughter, of image and appeal. Much of this has been captured in my forthcoming book of 60 philosophical essays around the image of Amitabh Bachchan.
(As a JNU student, Susmita Dasgupta spent a week at Amitabh Bachchan's Mumbai residence, Prateeksha, in the 1980s. Here she recounts her recollections)