Madhubala and Dilip Kumar buried just metres apart; she could never forget him, says sister Madhur

Hindi cinema’s most famous unfinished love story has an unusual last chapter. Madhubala and Dilip Kumar never married, but they lie almost side by side in Mumbai’s Juhu.

“They are buried very close to each other,” says Madhur Bhushan, Madhubala’s sister. “Just five to 10 metres apart.”

Madhur has spent decades as the keeper of her sister’s memory. In a recent conversation with Vickey Lalwani, she set out to correct one version of that story that has circulated for years.

Veteran actress Mumtaz once suggested in an interview that Dilip Kumar walked away after learning that Madhubala had a heart condition and could not have children. Madhur rejects that account outright.

“This is a very big story,” she said, smiling, before getting to the point: “She got heart problem much later. Dilip Kumar was nowhere in the picture.”

Their story began on screen. In 1951, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala were first paired in Tarana, and audiences liked them together right away. Off camera, the two got along easily. In his autobiography, the actor credited Madhubala’s lively, playful nature with drawing him out of his natural shyness. He also suggests she arrived at a vulnerable time for him. He was still nursing an old emotional wound, and what helped him heal, he wrote, was not a sharp intellect but her spirit. In his words, her “liveliness and charm were the ideal panacea” for a hurt that was taking its time to fade.

Dilip Kumar also reflected on what made his on-screen partnership with Madhubala work. The pair went on to share the screen several times, most famously in the epic Mughal-e-Azam. But in his memoir he traced their chemistry back to Tarana (1951), a film he counted among the standout projects of his early career.

He compared it to the effortless rapport Raj Kapoor and Nargis had, and said that with Madhubala he found that same ease. He described her as quick and instinctive, reacting so naturally that scenes came alive even as the cameras rolled. A few rehearsals were usually all they needed before the final take. That, he wrote, was because she could “keep pace” with him and match the emotional commitment every scene demanded.

By Madhur's account, the illness came after the romance had ended, not before. The couple are widely reported to have separated in 1957, while Mughal-E-Azam was still being made. The main cause was friction with Madhubala’s father, Ataullah Khan, not her health. In his autobiography, The Substance and the Shadow, Dilip Kumar described being uneasy with Khan’s plan to start a film studio built around the pair. He also wrote that Madhubala’s heart condition was not a result of their breakup.

Madhur is not entirely sure when the illness began. At one point she linked it to Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958). But the first warning sign she describes happened on the set of Bahut Din Huwe, released in 1954, where Madhubala fainted and vomited blood for the first time.

“When we visited the doctor, they said we feel there is something wrong in the chest,” Madhur recalled. She admitted the film titles blur together for her: “I don’t remember these film names as Abba didn’t allow all this.”

Madhubala was shooting in Chennai at the time. She travelled to Bombay for tests and was told she had a hole in her heart. “No doctor in Bombay was capable to treat her as technology wasn’t so advanced then. It was a complicated surgery,” Madhur said.

By then, Madhur says, Madhubala was in a relationship with Kishore Kumar, her co-star in several films. He married her after the diagnosis and took her to London for treatment. The verdict there was swift and harsh.

“The doctor within fifteen minutes of meeting her said she had a hole in her heart and she had another two years to live. There is no cure to this and no doctor would take the risk,” Madhur said. Other doctors the family consulted said much the same.

Madhubala refused to accept it. “She said, ‘Sab bakwas karte hai. There is no hole in my heart. I can run, I can dance,’” Madhur recalled. Her body proved otherwise. She collapsed while filming the Mughal-E-Azam song in which her character is bound in chains.

From then on, her decline was steady. “She was critically ill. She struggled breathing,” Madhur said. “She was bedridden even before the age of 30. As soon as she turned 36, she died.”

On Kishore Kumar: 'Let the dead be in peace'

Asked how Kishore Kumar handled his wife’s illness, Madhur held back. “I don’t want to speak about the kind of attitude and behaviour he had. I have been taught to let the dead be in peace,” she said.

She has been more candid before. In an earlier interview with Filmfare, she said the doctors had ruled out a physical relationship and children, and argued that this made emotional support more important. “We’re not saying that he was wrong,” she said then, “but yet a woman needs emotional support no matter what.” She also claimed he visited only once every three months.

Kishore Kumar, for his part, told The Illustrated Weekly of India that he knew Madhubala was very sick when he married her. Speaking to Filmfare, he gave his own account of the marriage. He said he had never been in love with her, that he had first known her as his friend Dilip Kumar’s girlfriend, and that she was the one who proposed.

Madhur’s family did not oppose the match. She explained that her father had mellowed with age and her sisters had married outside the community. “My sisters married Parsis, Punjabis. One of our sisters married Johnny Walker’s brother,” she said.

Madhur’s most painful memories come from the very end. The family lived in the same Bandra house, on different floors. When Madhubala’s condition turned critical, Ataullah Khan phoned Kishore Kumar to tell him she might die at any moment. According to Madhur, Kishore replied that he had an outdoor shoot and his tickets were booked. He came only after her father pleaded with him.

“She couldn’t speak when she was sick. She had lost her speech about four months before death. Her lips had become blue,” Madhur said. “She was breathing her last and she died.”

Madhubala died in 1969, aged 36.

In those last weeks, Madhur moved into her sister’s room to nurse her, and it was there that Madhubala confided in her. “She told me she cannot forget Yusuf Sahab,” Madhur said, using Dilip Kumar’s birth name, Yusuf Khan.

Madhur doesn’t see that as a betrayal of anyone. “It is impossible to forget your first love, and if somebody claims they have, then they are lying about it.”

Dilip Kumar’s memoir describes a final meeting that fits with what Madhur says. Shortly after he married Saira Banu in 1966, Madhubala sent word asking to see him urgently. With Saira’s encouragement, he went. He found her frail, her famous smile now an effort, and he wrote that she told him she was happy her “prince” had found his “princess.”

Three years later she was gone. Today, the two rest just metres apart.