Saira Banu shared clips from her films with Dev Anand. (courtesy: sairabanu)
Veteran actress Saira Banu has kept her promise and shared a “funny incident” with Dev Anand on Instagram. Saira Banu, on Dev Anand's birth centenary on Tuesday, said, “There's another funny incident with Dev Saab, I will write about it tomorrow.” She has dropped some videos from Shankar Mukherjee's Pyaar Mohabbat and wrote, “We were shooting in a small, dingy boat in the middle of the sea, Dev [Anand] Saab was getting uncomfortable with the swinging boat and once he toppled out of the boat and fell right into the sea water. At that time, I had this terrible habit of giggling and laughing uncontrollably for minutes together. We pulled him out of the water into the dingy boat and my laughter wouldn't stop. Dev [Anand] Saab for the first time looked so angrily at me that I could've frozen!”
In another anecdote, Saira Banu shared how the crowd in Baalbek, Lebanon, misunderstood Dev Anand for Shammi Kapoor. She recalled, “Another incident happened at Baalbek, Lebanon, where I was singing a song in the resplendent ruins and a huge crowd of foreigners gathered around to watch the shoot. Apparently, Junglee had been popularly released over there and the crowd was shouting out to us “Shammi Kapoor… Shammi Kapoor” Oh God- --- they had mistaken Dev [Anand] Saab for Shammi Kapoor. Just imagine the big-heartedness of Dev [Anand] Saab that he played around to them, waving his hands, smiling at them and saying Yes…Yes…Hello…Hello. I am Shammi Kapoor. How big-hearted he was.”
Saira Banu added that throughout their outdoor trip for Pyaar Mohabbat, Dev Anand was busy working on Prem Pujari's script. The film, released in 1970, starred Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman. However, Saira Banu claimed that she was Dev Anand's first choice for Prem Pujari. “All along this outdoor trip, Dev [Anand] Saab was busy writing his script for Prem Pujari which he was going to direct for himself. Every day he narrated what he wrote brimming with pride and happiness “Saira….. You have to do this film with me”. And as we shot throughout Europe, Dev [Anand] Saab fixed Rome as the point where he would wind up the script and Dev [Anand] Saab determined that Naseemji and I would go out in Rome and have dinner to celebrate. We did exactly that.”
Sharing yet another incident from the sets of Pyaar Mohabbat, Saira Banu added, “Back home again on the sets of ‘Pyaar Mohabbat' where we had to show a storm happening on the ship in the same shooting, the set was tilted to such extreme levels that Dev [Anand] Saab and I both crashed through sheer Twelve Feet glass windows and were cut up badly. By the grace of God, we got away lightly.”
“These were some memories of many with Dev Saab,” she completed her note.
On Dev Anand's birth centenary, Saira Banu wrote an elaborate note on Instagram. Take a look:
Dev Anand died on December 3, 2011 in London. He suffered a cardiac arrest.