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'She was always searching for love'

In an exclusive interview to Rediff On The NeT, one of Persis Khambatta's friends, speaking on condition that he would not be identified, provides a memorable glimpse into the life and times of one of India's most beautiful women:

I last spoke to Persis three or four days ago. She sounded happy, though she still complained about the problems she was having with her neighbours, her family. After a long time, things had started looking up for her.

Persis, you see, hated living in India. In public, she may have said the sweetest things about India, but in private she despised the filth, the place where she lived, the neighbours, the problems she was having with her family. She said she was happier living in her digs in LA. She was on the verge of completing a deal to sell her flat in south Bombay and moving to Bandra. She had even seen a couple of places there. She would call me three or four times a week, always asking for my advice. In reality, she did not want the advice, she just wanted someone to speak to, to unload herself.

Professionally she was unhappy because she was doing nothing. She hated that. Star TV and its CEO Rathikanth Basu had called her to make a television series on her book, Pride of India. But after the first meeting where they seemed enthusiastic about the project, they never got back to her. They just kept her hanging. She would get mad, and wonder why the hell people could not say no!

This kind of thing happened to her all the time. Vinod Khanna signed her for a film which never got made. She was supposed to make a film with Viveck Vaswani, but that didn't happen. Then last week, she got in touch with Sony for Pride of India and they gave her their 90 % approval, so she was very happy.

She was quite clever commercially. After Star Trek, which put her on the cover of every magazine in America, she bought a flat in Cuffe Parade for a crore and a half. When she moved to India, she sold that flat, bought her current flat for 60 or 70 lakhs, and invested the rest of the money in deposits. So that gave her some money every month. She also got some money from America -- as a citizen, she was entitled to welfare. She had all that worked out. So it is not that she had no money to live on.

She was always overweight. She had a valve operation -- not open heart surgery as commonly believed -- and ate quite heavily. She was also depressed because she never found the man she was looking for. Though she was a Miss India, she was very naive and not very sophisticated, so men would lose interest in her quickly. She was married a couple of times, but she was a girl always searching for love.

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