TLI Staff
New Delhi: Dilip Kumar was all of 5 when a fakir visited his house in Peshawar and predicted about his “great fame and unparallelled achievements”. The actor narrated this incident in his autobiography Dilip Kumar: The Substance And The Shadow saying that a fakir came to his house seeking food and money and took notice of the little Yousuf playing in the front room of the house. He called out his grandmother and asked her to bring the child in front of him.
“He announced that I was not an ordinary child. I shut my eyes and pretended I had not heard him,” he wrote, adding, “He fixed his stare on my face and told Dadi” ‘This child is made for great fame and unparalleled achievements. Take good care of the boy, protect him from the world’s evil eye, he will be handsome even in his old age if you protect him and keep him untouched by the evil eye. Disfigure him with black soot if you must because if you don’t you may lose him prematurely. The Noor (light) of Allah will light up his face always,'” wrote the late legendary actor in his autobiography.
However, what happened next was unexpected and left a deep scar on Dilip Kumar’s psyche for the years to come, turning him into a loner. The actor’s grandmother thought the only way to save his life and protect him from the evil eye was to disfigure his face. While the actor’s parents tried to reason with her, she was adamant and from the next day onwards little Yousuf went to school with a streak of black soot on his forehead.
“Needless to say, I was a spectacle when I arrived in the school every morning. The murmurs and sniggers that greeted me on the first day amplified in my subconscious and made me find reasons not to go to school the next day,” narrated Dilip Kumar.
The incident turned the actor into a loner and he learnt to enjoy his own company, away from the glares of others who he thought would mock him.
“I became a loner at my school and played very little. I chose to stay quiet and play with the colouring books that were available in the small library of the school. A couple of kind teachers urged me to go out and play but I was loath to listen to them. Instead I found mysef getting lost in the make-believe world of the pictorial books with increasing interest. I was not more than five years old then,” the actor wrote.
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