In Bollywood, heartbreak doesn’t end with blocked numbers, but it lingers in film reels, camera archives, and gossip columns that refuse to die. Case in point: Devdas (2002), Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s glittering museum of pain. The irony? It holds a secret cameo by none other than Salman Khan, Aishwarya Rai’s very public ex, tucked neatly inside the most romantic song of the film, Morey Piya.
Now, every cinema geek remembers the scene where Paro gets a thorn in her foot, Devdas kneels to remove it. Classic Bhansali melodrama, soft lighting, sitar strings, tragic foreplay. But what if that tender gesture wasn’t Shah Rukh Khan at all?
Film journalist Anupama Chopra noted in her writings about Devdas’s chaotic shoot that Salman, despite his breakup with Aishwarya, was a frequent visitor on set — much to the crew’s discomfort. One particular day, Sanjay was trying to perfect the thorn-removal scene. Enter Salman, ever the uninvited leading man, casually demonstrating how Devdas “should” do it. Sanjay, ever the opportunist for cinematic serendipity, told the camera crew to roll. The shot, or at least the hand movement was too perfect to discard. And so it stayed.
In the final cut, the camera doesn’t reveal a face, just a hand. The audience saw only Devdas’s tenderness. Insiders, though, swear they saw the ghost of a real love story flicker for a second — Salman helping Aishwarya, one last time, on a set drenched in artifice and emotion.
It’s poetic, really. Two lovers torn apart by tabloids, captured one last time in SLB’s operatic tragedy about love that can never be. Cinema imitating life, or maybe ambushing it.
So next time Morey Piya plays, squint a little. The hand that brushes Paro’s foot might just belong to the man who once broke her heart and left behind the most unintentional cameo in Bollywood history.
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