Hyderabad:One way of looking at Sushant Singh Rajput's life may well be that it was a chronicle of a death foretold. Take a look at his display picture on Twitter, The Starry Night, painted by Vincent Van Gogh in 1889, a year after his breakdown that resulted in the self mutilation of his ear. Or his last Instagram post, from June 3, with a picture of his beloved mother who passed away in 2002, with the words: Blurred past evaporating from teardrops/ Unending dreams carving an arc of a smile/ And a fleeting life/ negotiating between the two.
Not everyone has a bucket list at the age of 34, but Sushant, who died by suicide this week, did. As if that was not enough, he also died on screen in five of the eleven films he did since his stunning movie debut in Kai Po Che! in 2013. As the charismatic Ishaan, the abiding image from the film is of the backlit Sushant walking into the sunset, happy that his protege Ali Hashmi has made a smashing debut playing for India against Australia. Ishaan's death was a conscious decision director Abhishek Kapoor took and it was a change from the book it was based on, Chetan Bhagat's The 3 Mistakes of My Life. It was Kapoor's way of distilling the pain and savagery of the Godhra train massacre and the Gujarat riots into one act, the deliberate death of the film's most loved character.
In Raabta (2017), the reincarnation drama directed by Dinesh Vijan, one of his avatars dies, the other, Shiv Kakkar, is saved from drowning by the girl. In Kedarnath (2018), set against the backdrop of the 2013 floods in Uttarakhand, he plays a Muslim guide who falls in love with the temple priest's daughter and it is to save her, among others, that he foregoes his place in the departing helicopter. The last scene, his arms outstretched, like his favourite actor, Shah Rukh Khan, before he turns and is swallowed up by the earth is difficult to watch now given the reality of his death.
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In Sonchiriya (2019), the dacoit film shot by Abhishek Chaubey, his character Lakhna invites a heroic death from the arch rival played by Ashutosh Rana, choosing quite deliberately to step out from his hideout behind a tree. In an interview after his death, Chaubey said, "That moment in the film where Lakhna has a vision of his alternate life, has taken a completely different meaning in my head. It has taken a life of its own."
In his last theatrical release, Chichhore, his cinematic son narrowly avoids death, sparking the video that has now gone viral, of Sushant as the father telling the son: "Tumhara result nahin decide karta ki tum loser hain ki nahin, tumhari koshish decide karti hai (Your result doesn't decide whether you're a loser, your effort does)." Words to live by.