Aadesh Shrivastava: The tragic, lonely death of a fiercely original composer

Before death snatched away the gifted composer Aadesh Shrivastava so cruelly and painfully on September 5, 2015, a day after his 51st birthday, he had almost died in another assault by cancer. That attack had left Aadesh weak and vulnerable, and it wasn’t just his health. It was the realization that the entertainment industry was filled with fair-weather friends. He was worried about his wife Vijayta Pandit , an actress and singer herself, and two very young sons.

During his first illness, Aadesh was shaken and traumatized. He said to me, “What will happen to my wife and sons if something happens to me? Falling ill so suddenly was traumatic. But the cold-shoulder treatment I got from the people with whom I’ve closely worked with for years, has caused me even more damage than the disease itself.”

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Nobody came to visit Aadesh after he fell sick the first time, not even his supposedly close friends with whom he had made so much music for years. Aadesh had to sell his favourite Hummer car to pay the hospital bills. He sold it at a throwaway price. Aadesh wanted his family and friends to hold his hands. Aadesh was the kind of person who would run at 3 am to help .

“I want to create a security blanket around my wife and sons to ensure they are looked after if something happens to me,” Aadesh vowed. Before he could get down to doing the needful, cancer struck Aadesh a second time and tore his life apart, limb to limb. It was painful to see him fade away bit by bit.

More painful was what followed. Aadesh’s widow Vijayta and his children were left to their own devices, no help, not even an encouraging call from anyone. I remember it was Diwali, soon after Aadesh’s death. Vijayta was trying frantically to contact her nephews, asking them to invite her sons over, so that the boys don’t feel miserable during their first Diwali without their father.

The last seven years have whizzed by in a blur. Vijayta says no one from the  entertainment industry has been in touch. She has been a single parent to both her sons and made sure they were not deprived of anything. Now the elder son Avitesh is all set to make his debut as a leading man.

Had Aadesh lived, he would have been so proud of his wife. He never looked for anyone’s help, never asked for anyone’s Help. Neither did she. Aadesh gave us outstanding tunes in films like Chalte Chalte and  _Baghban_ . But my favourite Aadesh soundtrack is Govind Nihalani’s Dev, where Aadesh collaborated with Govind Nihalani, who worked with A.R. Rahman in his earlier foray into a star-studded commercial film, Thakshak.

Kareena Kapoor turned singer for Aadesh in Dev in the quaintly assembled song Jab nahin. Kareena didn’t just recite a few poetic lines, she actually sang the entire song and carried the notes with extreme care and delicacy. Go back to it. The sound is still fresh. Dev isn’t an album of gimmicky sounds. It pulls no punches and yet manages to wallop a smart blow on our sensibilities. The versatile and virile sounds include a favourite track, Allah hoo, where Aadesh gets vocally ambitious and joins the inimitable Asha Bhosle for a duet .

No one knows that Aadesh also made a gut-wrenching short-film Sanaa on child prostitution. It featured the child actor from Black, Ayesha Kapoor. Within a span of less than ten minutes, little Ayesha takes us on a nerve-wracking journey that spins us into a dizzy web of guilt, accusation and regret for the lost childhood that we owe to all the Sanaa’s of this vicious and insensitive world. Aadesh packs in plenty of punch in his compact film. The abundance of talent helps to give the story an immediacy and credibility, as does the real locations where Sanaa moves within minutes from impoverished innocence to enforced and irredeemable.

Admirably, Aadesh Shrivastava stuck his head into a dark and disturbing area of our lives. A lot of attention is paid to intrinsic details. Ishwar Bidri’s  cinematography, Manas Choudhary’s sound design, replete with routine traffic noises in Mumbai and screams piercing through the mundane landscape, and Jayant Deshmukh’s art direction lend an aura of agonizing aestheticism to this bitter film about the end of innocence. Aptly, Sanaa ends with Shabana Azmi warning us of how many more Sanaas will be driven into the streets if we don’t learn to take care of our children.

There was so much that Aadesh wanted to do. He was a ferociously individualistic and original composer and did not hide his contempt for the successful plagiarists of the music world. Aadesh was one of those rare Bollywood composers who knew how to do a background score. Unfairly, big producers would let mediocre but more successful music directors do the songs and rope in Aadesh to do the background score. His masterly work as a background score in J.P. Dutta ’s Border, Refugee and LOC Kargil speak for themselves.

Aadesh was no stranger to adversities. Fate dealt him a number of blows  before the final one. But the determination to excel and to be kind never left him. His sister-in-law singer Sulakshana Pandit, who was, and is, not in the  best of health, lived permanently with Aadesh and Vijayta.

Aadesh once explained, “Sulakshana Didi looked after my wife Vijayta like a mother. Now it is our turn to look after her.”

Lamentably, there was no one to look after Aadesh’s loved ones when he was gone.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.