Bhatt Saab, was Raj Kiran a casualty of depression?
Depression is not merely the absence of light; it is the crushing weight of darkness, where every breath feels like a battle against an unseen tide. I felt this truth viscerally when I met Raj Kiran in the psychiatric ward of Masina Hospital, Byculla, Mumbai. I had woken up that morning with an unnameable heaviness in my chest—a whisper of dread, the kind that cannot be explained, only obeyed. Something in me stirred with unease, and without thinking, I got into my car and drove to Masina Hospital.
What prompted you to do this?
I had heard that Raj had been admitted there, and though the world had already begun to forget him, I could not. I went not just as a director who once worked with him, but as a man trying to reach across a growing silence.
What happened when you reached the hospital?
What I saw there broke me. Raj—who once carried sunlight in his face—sat like a fallen statue, his body present, but his soul withdrawn into some unreachable interior. His eyes, once bright and alive, were vacant, as though time had erased the language of feeling from his gaze. I sat beside him. I spoke. I smiled. I waited. But he remained locked within that devastating fog that depression casts—not the solitude of being alone, but the cruel isolation of being unreachable even to oneself.
What do you remember of him during the shooting of Arth?
He had been the most pliable actor I had ever worked with. In Arth (1982), amidst legends like Shabana, Smita, and Kulbhushan, it was Raj who brought a raw tenderness that no script could command. His quiet intensity lent the film its invisible spine. He made stillness speak. He made pain gentle. There was a strange radiance in him. Who can forget the heartbreak etched in his smile during “Tum Itna Jo Muskura Rahe Ho”? That wasn’t acting. That was a soul cracking gently before our eyes. Or the haunted dignity in “Jhuki Jhuki Si Nazar,” where the pauses between words became poetry.
Raj Kiran was the sunshine in Arth?
Yes, I still remember the Metro Cinema night. When the song ended, the audience cried out —“Once more,” they cried—not for the song, but for the man who made silence sing. In the final scene of Arth, as Shabana’s character poured her pain into the world, Raj sat across her, silent. That silence became the soul of the film. He did not act. He received. His stillness gave her truth the weight it needed. Without that moment—without him—Arth would never have become what it is today.
To lose it all to depression?
Somewhere between the applause and the afterlife of fame, he slipped away. A slow vanishing, not into death, but into disappearance. He faded like a photograph left out in the sun—until there was only a blur where once there was a face. Some say he was later spotted in an institution in Atlanta. Others believe he is no more. The facts, at this point, matter less than the feeling: that we lost him before we were ready. That we could not hold him back from the tide that claimed him. Raj, wherever you are, know this: we loved each other deeply, and in losing you, we lost a piece of ourselves. Your silence still speaks, your charm still lingers, and your absence aches in our hearts.
