A trip to Mumbai isn’t complete without visiting the famous bungalows of Bollywood stars. These homes are now major landmarks, and people always gather there to see them.
Before Shah Rukh Khan’s Mannat, Amitabh Bachchan’s Jalsa, or Salman Khan’s Galaxy Apartments became landmarks, it was the late Rajesh Khanna’s bungalow that garnered attention, but for all the wrong reasons.
Along the coastline of Mumbai, a shadow of a structure once stood: the sea-facing mansion on Carter Road, grimly known as Aashirwad.
It was not a home but a magnet for malevolent fate, whispered to hold a curse that preyed upon the careers of the three cinematic legends who dared to reside within its walls.
The curse’s first victim was Bharat Bhushan, the dazzling star of the 1950s. After settling in, the house turned his golden touch to dust. His films became failures, his luck curdled, and the inescapable blight of debt drove him into poverty, forcing him to flee the property in ruin.
Next, the house laid claim to Rajendra Kumar, the famed “Jubilee Kumar,” whose success was once thought eternal. Though he sought to rename it ‘Dimple’—perhaps in a desperate bid to ward off the darkness with a familial blessing—the malignant influence held fast.
By the decade’s end, the house had successfully drained his good fortune, condemning him to a slow career demise and prompting another terrified sale.
The final and most tragic resident was Rajesh Khanna, the undisputed First Superstar.
He bought the relic and defiantly christened it Aashirwad (meaning “Blessings”), a name the curse seemed to hold in contempt.
Though he achieved one final, legendary burst of success, a streak of 17 consecutive hits, the end was inevitable.
The shadows of the house eventually swallowed his prominence, extinguishing his star power and fracturing his personal world. He remained a prisoner within the manor, a monument to a life of faded glory, until his death in 2012.
In a final, desperate act to silence the whispers of the ‘cursed’ bungalow, Aashirwad was sold in 2014 and utterly demolished in 2016, its bricks and mortar torn down to bury the legend and the terrifying careers it had claimed beneath the rubble.
