MUMBAI: Actor Waheeda Rehman says she will always remember her friend Nanda as a thoughtful, caring and loyal person, who loved to cook and never let an iota of professional insecurity come in the way of their unique friendship.
Nanda died Tuesday morning following a heart attack at her residence here. She was 72 and was leading a reclusive life except for meeting her close ones.
“We were friends for 55 years, from the time when we worked together in Vijay Anand’s Kala Bazaar. After marriage, friends, especially female friends, tend to drift away as they have their husband and children to look after. But Nanda and I remained close friends, even after my marriage,” said Waheeda.
Waheeda shared that she and Nanda were very different individuals: “Quite a study in contrasts, and yet we were very close friends. Or maybe we were close friends because we were so different…so we found those personality traits lacking in ourselves within each other.”
“She was…it hurts to talk about her in the past tense…an extremely sensitive person, very thoughtful and caring. And she was a very loyal friend. She never visited anyone or anywhere. But she’d regularly visit me and my husband in Bangalore,” she added.
“Both Nanda and I were fond of cooking. Whenever she visited me, she’d be in the kitchen cooking up a fun meal and asking me to cook up something. She was like my soul sister,” reminisced the actor.
“We were both very secure about our careers. And we were both firm believers in God and destiny. It happened many times in the past that producers who came to me with roles went to Nanda because we didn’t agree on certain issues. Nanda and I never discussed work. Our work never came into our friendship. We were both down-to-earth and very Indian. We didn’t quite fit into the glamorous image on screen. We both attempted glamorous roles, but we realised it’s better to do roles close to our personalities,” continued Waheeda.
“We were like-minded people. We shared the same values. She went suddenly. She deserved a lot more than she got,” concluded the veteran actor.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 31st,2014.
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