Jiah Oh Jiah, Kuch Bol Do

Subhash K Jha talks about late Jiah Khan

How and why did Jiah Khan die? It’s been 9 years since she ended her life. We are still clueless as to why Jiah took her life. That she killed herself seems evident, though her mother, who has been relentlessly pursuing justice for Jiah , feels it was not a simple suicide, that it was possibly murder.

Let’s not mock the Murder India theory for what it is: a mother’s wound that won’t heal. It is a fact that Jiah was in a relationship that a left her miserably insecure. But that doesn’t make her death murder. She was unhappy in the film industry . There were wolves in directors’ clothes who took advantage of her, none more so than this slimy sibling of another well-known director who during the making of a franchise film, targeted Jiah for his sexual advances.

The entire cast of the multi-starrer stood by quietly ignoring the girl’s plight.Jiah would come home and cry every night before her mother.Why wasn’t appropriate action taken against this sickeningly lecherous director(who was later accused of sexual harassment by multiple women). Why was Jiah targeted when there were other actresses in the film?

Because she was an outsider, a young vulnerable outsider.So I would like to think that Jiah was killed by the conspiracy of silence in the film industry which protects sexual offenders.

Jiah is not the only young actress to die under mysterious s circumstances. What about Divya Bharati? What really happened to the 19-year old sensation Divya Bharti on the night of April 5, 1993 when in the presence of dress designer Neeta Lulla and her husband, she plunged to her death, reportedly in an inebriated condition?This is what we have heard and what we’ve been told. But doubts about the nature of her sudden and shocking death still remain. For, like it or not,her husband producer Sajid Nadiadwala’s name is still whispered conspiratorially regarding Divya’s mysterious death.

Though Divya’s father has given Nadiadwala a clean chit,and though Nadiadwala has moved on long back(earlier his productions after Divya’s death were dedicated to her, now no more) the question that haunts those close to Divya is, what really happened to Divya Bharti that night? How could she get so drunk and still climb the window sill of her apartment? To reach a place of life-taking imbalance one has to first be able to get to that place. And if she was so drunk why was she allowed to do something so dangerous by other people who were in the room?

A lot of Sushant Singh Rajput’s fans still believe that he didn’t take his life, that it was taken away from her. But let me assure them he did. It is all very well to romanticize a matinee idol’s death for the sake of folkore. But truth is not just stranger than fiction , it is often far less seductive and appealing than fiction. Accepting that Jiah and Sushant took their lives is contrary to how we see the screen icons. Forever young and enigmatic.