“It’s like losing my mother,” Ahmed Khan remembers Saroj Khan

Ahmed Khan can’t believe Saroj Khan is gone!

“I got to know of her death at midnight. I rushed to the kabristan (graveyard) in the morning. I have just returned, numbed. It has still not sunk in. I knew she was keeping ill health. I wanted to visit her in the hospital but couldn’t because of the COVID lockdown. Now I’ll never see her,” says Ahmed sorrowfully.

Saroj Khan was like a mother to Ahmed. “Everything I know about choreography I learnt from her. At the age of 12, I was watching her do the choreography of Kate nahin kat-te in Mr India. I was a child actor in that film. Though I was too young to understand what was going on I could feel the uniqueness of the body language, the urgency of the movements. I knew then and there that I wanted to be a choreographer.”

At 16, Ahmed began assisting Saroj Khan. “I was a child bewildered and lost. She mothered me. She nurtured my talent. I was just like her own son (choreographer Raju Khan). Whatever I know about choreography I learnt from Saroj ji. She gave choreography in Indian cinema a name, face and place. All of us (choreographers) owe our careers to her.”

Ahmed got a chance to repay some of Saroj Khan’s debt two years ago. “In Baaghi 2 I got a chance to do my homage to Saroj ji’s iconic Ek do teen chaar from Tezaab I was so nervous . I thought she would be angry. But she was not upset. I went to her house with a cheque, a token gesture of appreciation (the ‘token amount’, I am told, was 20 lakhs). I knelt before her and gave her the cheque in her hand. I cannot tell you the emotions I felt at that moment. Saroj ji was my guru and a mother-figure. There were other great choreographers before her. But what she did to Bollywood choreography was historic.”