In the world of high camp, you can't become a legend unless you are abductably gorgeous, reclusive to a fault, and have spent a lifetime finding love and failed in the quest. Rekha has delivered on these preconditions to a tee. But what also sets her apart from contemporaries is that in her prime she was not merely Venus but an exceptional actress.

But now that she has clocked 70, let's start from the very beginning, when she first landed in Bombay as a plump teenager with a tacky make-up aesthetic, a hideous fashion sense, and a sheen of saucy illegitimacy. She was the daughter of Tamil megastar Gemini Ganesan, but he had never acknowledged having sired her. While this paternal void could have ignited a lifelong yearning for a protective male figure, the vicious assault of the media branding her as a vern from hell seems to have catalysed a lifelong narcissism that helped transform her from an ugly duckling to India’s most desirable woman in the 1980s.

The yearning for a protective male figure likely gave us Bollywood’s most notorious urban legend—a “love affair” with then-reigning superstar Amitabh Bachchan who was 10 years her senior. Starting with Do Anjane (1976) until Silsila (1981), the screen couple shared a sizzling chemistry and delivered blockbuster after blockbuster for a straight five-year run of ten films.

To Rekha's credit, who had been scalded by the Cine Blitzes and Stardusts of the world, she now knew how to play the game. Thus, by the time the tabloids and magazines got to this star-crossed "love story," Rekha and the press had already rechristened the Big B. He was now merely referred to as "Him."

Just as well. "Him" gave India's reigning screen hunk a manlier, hairier, sexier, and more meta aura. In a brilliant turning of the tables, Rekha, by playing footsie with the salaciously slurpy school of the then film journalism, managed to cast her alleged paramour as a slippery phantom instead: a man who slips away into the shadowy small hours. By meeting the press every now and then and talking openly about "Him," who was now a hologram in her life (and ours), socialist India signed a collective erotic agreement with the siren.

Rekha's cascading hair with the widow's peak to boot, her large sad eyes, her cheekbones, her luscious lips dabbed with cherry-red lipstick, her diaphanous chiffon and silk saris, her buxom but sensuous body were dizzyingly delightful. But it was her wounded heart and the yarn she spun so gleefully around it that drove us insane.

Fans like their idols to be successful but also forlorn. It gives them an edge while simultaneously sating the public's desire to see screen legends and pop stars having pathetic private lives. It fits in well with the cliché that a gilded life in showbiz has to be tainted.

In fact, it was in the 1980s that canny producers and arthouse directors began using Rekha's enigma to create some unforgettable cinematic happenings. While Yash Chopra sacked Shabana Azmi and Parveen Babi from Silsila and cajoled Rekha and Jaya Bhaduri to play the lead roles instead, Muzaffar Ali cast her as a courtesan from 1840s Lucknow in Umrao Jaan (1982). While the former—as everyone knows—was about "Him" and her, the latter was Umrao Jaan's unrequited love for a Nawab. Into the mix was thrown in Girish Karnad’s 1984 erotic drama based on the ancient play Mrichakstika, in which she plays a seductive courtesan. Bachchan was to act in this film as well but was replaced because of his accident by the producer Shashi Kapoor.

The Rekha myth-making machinery was working full throttle by now. Celebrity dietician Dr Snehalata Pandey was commissioned to create "The Rekha Diet." The go-to aerobics instructor of the 1980s, Rama Bans, was pulled in to create a Jane Fonda-inspired video cassette in which the South Indian goddess contorted her lithe body to the strumming of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. An India Today report in 1984 on the launch of the video at Sea Rock Hotel in Bandra, then Bollywood's favourite recreational hangout, wrote:

"To add spice to the poses, the literature accompanying the cassette lists the actress' candid confessions of the most frightening experience: ‘when my loved one was in hospital’ kind. All of which should make for a muscle-stretching workout [sic]." Rekha and India Today were referring to Amitabh Bachchan's near-death experience after being punched in the stomach by screen villain Puneet Issar in Coolie (1983).

Everyone had a theory for when the "affair" ended. A favourite theory was that Rekha was petrified of visiting Breach Candy hospital and this really hurt "Him."

In the late 80s, Rekha walked the tightrope between being a screen goddess on the wane and becoming an arthouse legend on the rise. An ode to fading youth had her doing an item number for Feroz Khan's Janbaaz (1986). "Ek kam zindagani, us pe bhi kam hai jawaani, pyaar do, pyaar lo," crooned Rekha, surrounded by sex-crazed African extras in S&M fetish gear, sticking their tongues out and screaming "gilly, gilly, gilly!" whilst mimicking cunnilingus.

By now Rekha was as malleable as clay. And nowhere was this dexterity more on display than in Gulzar's epic drama Ijaazat (1987). In a twisted but brilliant reversal of roles, Rekha, for a change, was playing the devoted wife, while model-turned-actress Anuradha Patel portrayed a waif-like, porcelain-perfect other woman named Maya. Both are competing for Naseeruddin Shah's affections—and everyone comes out scarred. 

Maya was a female version of "Him," a mythical unattainable fantasy. With lyrics written by the director himself and with Asha Bhosale's scintillating voice complementing his sensuous Urdu, Ijaazat became a zeitgeist-defining moment for a Gen X audience that was poised for its own post-romance holocausts. Rekha's "mature phase" mirrored our own tryst with sexuality and heartbreak. "Mera Kuch Saamaan" became the breakup ballad for an entire generation.

This could easily be considered the thespian's zenith, because everything else that followed was the stuff of nightmares.

For starters, Yash Chopra dumped Rekha from Chandni (1989), choosing a younger Sridevi instead. There was an irony there because while film mags would not stop yakking about Rekha being sacked from the film, Rishi Kapoor looked visibly chubby in the Alps whilst dancing to "Mitwa" from the OST. Though she did light up the screen briefly in yet another erotic ancient drama, Mira Nair’s 1996 film Kamasutra: A Tale of Love, where she played Rasa Devi, the teacher of Kama Sutra.

But the worst was yet to come, a witch-hunt from hell that revealed the film industry's misogyny and Indian society's disdain for a single woman living her life on her own terms. For this revisionist take on Rekha, we only have her biographer Yasser Usman to thank. His 2016 page-turner Rekha: The Untold Story looked back at her troubled marriage to industrialist Mukesh Agarwal from a more empathetic lens.

Back in the day, Rekha had expressed to her friend, Delhi-based socialite Bina Ramani, that she was moving on with age and was keen to settle down. She introduced her to Mukesh Agarwal. But unbeknownst to both her friend and Rekha, Mukesh Agarwal was a depressive and had been plagued by mental health issues for many years. The star-crossed marriage ended when Mukesh Agarwal committed suicide by hanging himself on 2 October 1990.

Wrote Yasser Usman about the year that changed Rekha forever in The Times of India: "The headlines in the film magazines were: ‘The Black Widow’ and 'How Rekha Drove Mukesh to Attempt Suicide.' Her film that was playing at that time, Sheshnaag, was boycotted, and her face was blackened on its posters. The crazy witch-hunt pushed Rekha into a deep shell. She closed her doors for everyone. She did not meet or talk to the press for months. And then she made a grand comeback the next year with a super hit film, Phool Baney Angaarey. But it was clear that something had changed inside her. She was no more the outspoken and sensational conversationalist. She was now a recluse."

The 1990s marks the foundation of Fortress Rekha. To many fans of vintage Rekha, her story ends here. In fact, so enigmatic was she even 14 years after the Mukesh Agarwal incident, when Simi Garewal invited her for her pioneering talk show Rendezvous with Simi Garewal in 2004, it was like a national event. This was Rekha's Michael Jackson phase, in which her years of isolation had calcified her eccentricities

And whilst she was stunning looking even then, there was a tragedy behind the tinsel, a haunted homecoming of sorts, much like the end of Umrao Jaan.

There was a clip that Simi Garewal—never one to miss milking a moment of pathos from our Milky Way of tortured superstars—switched on the projector for Rekha. It was a film reel of the actress playing with her only friend, Pisti. Pisti was her late dog. Rekha shed innumerable tears at his loss.

Perhaps, as an audience, that is all we ever wanted of her. This is all that was fated: for her to become the freak she was meant to be. And Rekha, being a thorough professional, was once again delivering on point. Sultry, gorgeous, otherworldly, a troubled magical wonder who had flown down from Venus itself to quench our sensuous and voyeuristic desires.

In the late autumn of her life—and please remember, there is no winter in Rekhaland—her mystique remains intact. Like how she made it to the cover of Vogue Arabia at 69, looking like a million bucks, setting the Middle Eastern sands on fire. How does she still walk the red carpet and drive the paps crazy without much of a filmography in the past three decades?

And what is the secret of her immortality? “Love,” she once said casually in an interview. I’m beginning to believe her, despite some of those delicious lies.