Reports of Sridevi’s untimely death on 25 February 2018 were met with an incongruous mix of shock, disbelief and crass conspiracy theories. In the following excerpt from his recent book Sridevi: The Eternal Screen Goddess, author Satyarth Nayak reconstructs that fateful night in Dubai, the events that led to it and the media frenzy that followed.
It was on a Sunday that the world woke up to the death of Marilyn Monroe. It was on a Sunday that it woke up to Princess Diana’s passing. And it was a Sunday on 25 February 2018 when the world woke up to the tragedy of Sridevi’s sudden demise the previous night. While initial reports screamed massive cardiac arrest, the autopsy by Dubai authorities subsequently declared it a case of accidental drowning in the bathtub of her hotel room at Jumeirah Emirates Towers.
Sridevi had checked in there on 20 February along with Boney and Khushi for the Marwah wedding. After the celebrations, while Khushi had flown back to Mumbai, Boney had travelled to Lucknow for a producers’ meet with Minister of State, Neelkanth Tiwari. Sridevi had stayed back in Dubai to shop for Janhvi’s upcoming birthday, the first time after her marriage to Boney that she was alone in a foreign land. Intending to surprise the actress, Boney had flown back to Dubai that very night and had insisted on taking her out for dinner to Zuma, her favourite restaurant. As Sridevi went for a quick bath, Boney waited. Twenty minutes later, getting no answer from the bathroom, Boney panicked and barged in to find the actress submerged inside a filled bathtub. For Sridevi, who had always stated that her biggest fear was loneliness, death had come when she was all alone. The actress was rushed to Rashid Hospital, where she was declared dead on arrival. And in what shall forever remain a freakish coincidence, somewhere around this time in India, Amitabh Bachchan had tweeted: “Na jaane kyun, ek ajeeb si ghabrahat ho rahi hai.”
As the news spread through Dubai that night, it had triggered an instant tsunami of shock. An aghast Sadiq Saleem had rushed to Rashid hospital. He recollects: “It was midnight and there were many people there. Media and fans were flocking to learn what had actually happened. I kept recalling the fan frenzy when Sridevi had been invited to Dubai to receive the Icon of India Award at the Asia vision ceremony in 2015; people had tried to crash the barricades just to get a closer glimpse of her. The next morning, I went to the forensic department where the post-mortem was going on. Ironically, the TV in the waiting areas was showing Lamhe and the hospital scene was going on where Anil Kapoor tells Sridevi, ‘Aap ko kuch nahi hoga.’ When the securities came to escort the crowd out, I observed an ardent fan, Hema, who went inside the morgue and hid behind the wall. She was there with many other bodies for more than two hours.”
By the dawn of 25 February, there was an outpouring of grief. The Hindustan Times headline announced “India’s heroine is no more”. DNA declared—“The Queen Exits”. The CNN write-up eulogised—”If Bollywood is the world’s biggest film industry, then Sridevi was its queen”. A sombre Amul banner prayed—“RIP Mrs. India”. Everyone was mourning the end of an era, the end of India’s first female superstar. One of the first to tweet, Priyanka Chopra wrote: “I have no words. Condolences to everyone who loved Sridevi. A dark day. RIP.”
While the tweet from President Ram Nath Kovind hailed the actress as “an inspiration for other actors”, Aamir Khan tweeted about being an admirer of “the grace and dignity with which she conducted herself”. While Kamal wrote that “Sadma’s lullaby haunts me now,” Hrithik Roshan’s tweet called her “the most magnificent star of all”. If Rishi Kapoor tweeted, “Henceforth no more moonlit nights! Chandni gone forever,” Virat Kohli wrote, “God must be eager to receive you. Heaven gets an angel.” And while Aanand L. Rai celebrated the star by tweeting, “Heroes get remembered but legends never die,” Genelia D’Souza remembered the person Sridevi was as she tweeted: “I still remember shooting for a south film and you visited our sets. It was cold, I was freezing and with no hesitation, you just took out your gloves and gave it to me. I have never bought another pair of gloves.”
Looking back at that wedding night, Anil Kapoor reminisces how radiant Sridevi had looked. And how startled he had been at something she had done: “I remember her eagerly asking me to click a picture with her. It took me by surprise because normally it would always be the whole world asking her for a photo but this time it was the other way around. It is one of my last pictures together with her. It is almost as if she had some sort of a premonition.”
An emotional Adnan Siddiqui, her co-star in Mom, told the Indian Express: “Boney-saab was crying like a baby. For us living in Pakistan, she was a heroine who ruled the screen like a queen. On the day of the wedding, my flight landed at 12 in the night. She said, ‘Itni der kardi aapne aane mein (You are so late).’ Those words are still ringing in my mind. Maybe that was her last goodbye.’
Jeetendra had last met Sridevi, along with Janhvi, at a party. He recalls: “They were standing together in a corner. They looked so beautiful, so happy. I went up to Sri and said from the bottom of my heart, ‘Kisi ki nazar na lage.’ Who knew?”
Obituaries kept raining as more of the world media joined in. While the BBC hailed her as “one of the greatest Indian actresses of all time who made Bollywood accept that you didn’t need to be with a big hero to make a hit”, Canadian newscasters fondly remembered those “magical eyes that took up half of her face”. Twitterati shared images of a Sridevi mural in Leicester and a Sridevi doll in a Singapore restaurant, celebrating her global stardom. Shruti Haasan shares: “I once met this ballet teacher in England who turned out to be a huge Sridevi fan. He told me he had watched all her films and hoped to meet her one day. I told him that I knew Sridevi and would try to make his dream come true. He turned teary-eyed hearing this. We spoke on phone the day after she passed away—both of us miles apart but bound by the same pain.”
While the industry shed tears, many still remained in denial mode, still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Rohini Ramnathan, a radio jockey with Radio Nasha and a self-confessed Sridevi admirer, says: “We never realise the impact of people in entertainment until we lose them. Sridevi was a force. She was a feminist even before it was cool to be one. Today the only thing I have to say to her is—‘Thank You, Sridevi, for doing all of this for an entire generation of girls like me who grew up wanting to be Manju, Seema and Pooja. Wanting to be you.’”
But even as the grieving mounted, so did the rumours. With constant delays by Dubai authorities in returning Sridevi’s mortal remains, speculations ran amok regarding the cause of her death. Many questioned why the official post-mortem report spelled it erroneously as “Accidental Drawning”, wondering if it was a botched-up investigation. A report claimed that an insurance worth 240 crore rupees had been taken out in Sridevi’s name and could only be cashed if she perished in the UAE. As conspiracy theories rose high, the Indian media sunk low. News channels dished out crude reconstructions of the actress’s last moments, a journalist even reporting while lying inside a bathtub. Suddenly gossip had displaced grief, rumour had usurped reportage. Sridevi’s lifestyle and diet had come under the scanner based on pure conjecture. Media autopsies were happening on every channel and morality judgements were being passed about beauty and ageing. Some channels were even urging viewers to phone in with their own theories. Actress Khushbu Sundar’s tweet soon lashed out against this orgy of voyeurism: “. . . we have lost a woman who lived her life on her terms, with dignity . . . made a name that can put any man to shame . . . so just shut up n let her #RIP”.
The demise of an intensely private woman had become a public vaudeville. There is a certain relish, a ghoulish pleasure, attached to ripping apart the personal life of a superstar because one gets to turn a screen-god human, into mere mortals like us, knock them off their pedestal to our level where they can be just as flawed as we are, just as commonplace. And this scrutiny turns even more macabre when it is a female actor in question. Years ago, before the release of English Vinglish, Sridevi had visited the Tirupati Temple in a simple sari and with no make-up. A Telugu channel had instantly flashed the headline—“Sridevi loses her beauty”. And in 2018, when she had arrived at HT India’s Most Stylish Awards at her opulent best, reports had erupted wondering if she was looking “too plastic”.
Body-shamed in life as “Thunder Thighs”, she was now being body-shamed in death. With actresses being constantly bullied to conform to a “type”, Shobhaa De put it well in her obituary for Sri in The Week: “Maybe we are all guilty for Sridevi’s untimely death. We never wanted her to age. And she tried a bit too hard not to disappoint us.”
Excerpted with permission from Sridevi: The Eternal Screen Goddess, by Satyarth Nayak, published by Penguin Random House