Twenty-five-year-old cricketer Rishabh Pant’s surprise visit to Rourkee that turned into a nightmare in the wee hours of December 30 brought back a flood of memories.
Fourteen months after he became a household name and knocked Sholay costars Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan off the popularity charts, Amjad Khan was en route to Goa for the shooting of The Great Gambler, when he asked driver Sakharam to rest for a while and took the wheel. It was early morning, it was a clear road.
Pregnant wife Shehla was with him in front and three-year-old son Shadaab was in the backseat with the driver when the green-coloured Mercedes crashed at top speed into a tree.
Like Rishabh, Amjad had either dozed off for just a split second or was briefly distracted flipping the cassette in the music system.
Whatever the reason, with the steering wheel ramming into him, Amjad emerged with broken ribs and a severely punctured lung. When co-star Amitabh Bachchan signed the papers giving the medical team the go-ahead for a tracheostomy, few thought Amjad would come out of hospital alive.
Newspapers said that the tragic Madrasbound Caravelle flight that had crashed at the Mumbai airport killing all 95 people on board, just three days earlier, had prompted Amjad to take his family to Goa by road. After the horrifying sight of the Caravelle on fire, which many had seen in Mumbai, people were jittery about flying. But Amjad had pooh-poohed it, stating that fear was not in the DNA of a Pathan like him.
He was fortunate.
After he was airlifted from Goa to Nanavati Hospital in Mumbai, the roster of visitors had included Satyajit Ray.
Earlier, Manikda had signed Amjad to play the Awadhi nawab, Wajid Ali Shah, for Shatranj Ke Khilari. When he visited Gabbar Singh who was battling for his life, Ray assured him that he’d wait as long as it took but nobody else would play Wajid Ali Shah. Ray had even decided that if God forbid, Amjad didn’t pull through, he would scrap the film but not cast anyone else in the role earmarked for him.
Amjad was a blessed man. The actor who’d quietly slip out with the support of a stick and go to the studios to look at film sets and wonder if he’d ever have a career to come back to, went on to do varied memorable roles in films like Qurbani, Love Story, Inkaar and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar.
But he was never the same man again. The steroids that had been pumped into him, his inability to exercise or swim with a rod in his leg where his femur had broken, his own habit of smoking three packs a day and downing 32 cups of tea with milk and sugar, topped with a sweet tooth, took their toll on him.
Sixteen years later, he passed away in his bed at home, his bowl of dessert by his bedside.
A veteran sports journalist said that Rishabh’s accident also reminded him of gifted Jamaican cricketer Collie Smith, whose spinal cord was fatally damaged on the road from Radcliffe to London in 1959. Gary Sobers had been at the wheel, once again an early morning collision. Fortunately for the cricketing world, a devastated Sobers — who was fined for irresponsible driving — sobered up in time to not only become a legend but also play for two, on behalf of 26-year-old Collie too.
Accidents have thrown up some unbelievable tales of resilience. When a shard of glass from the broken windshield penetrated his right eye and permanently damaged it in a cruel car accident near Hove in England, Oxford’s first Indian captain was only 20 years old. Yet Saif Ali Khan’s father, Tiger Pataudi, went on to become the youngest captain of the Indian team at age 21, playing Test cricket with a cap pulled down over his damaged eye.
Rishabh is obviously not playing Sri Lanka at the moment and will probably not play the Border-Gavaskar Trophy or the IPL in the coming weeks.
But he got help in time like Amjad did. He’s also younger, fitter, luckier. Restrict speed to the field and return quickly to the crease, Mr Wicketkeeper.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author
