MUMBAI: Singing legend Asha Bhosle reveals she used to often fight with her late husband, composer RD Burman, because he would give the best of the romantic songs to her elder sister, Lata Mangeshkar.

“He would give me numbers that used to have a lot of screaming notes like Piya tu ab tu aaja and Aaja aaja mein hoon pyaar tera. One day I confronted him with that. And he said that if I will refuse to sing those songs, then he will never compose such tunes ever. According to him, only I could do justice to those songs. So I had to give in,” Asha said at function organised for naming a road after the legendary composer, also known as Pancham. The road in RD Burman’s name is located in front of the house he lived in North Avenue, Santacruz.

Going down memory lane, she offered more glimpses into the trend-setting composer’s private life. She said, “As his wife, I knew the private Pancham like nobody did, even though we lived more like friends, as partners in our musical journey than as husband and wife.”

She revealed that Pancham had only two passions in life. “One was, of course, music and the other was cooking. Since I am also a good cook, we often used to have competitions at home. That was the way he used to relax himself after thinking about music, composing

tunes and experimenting with sounds,” Asha said.She also disclosed that the composer was completely blind to the material side of life.

“So much so that, one day, when he saw me wearing a diamond ring, he wanted to know the name of the gem I was wearing in my finger. When I told him that it was a diamond, he asked if the diamond really looked like that. You see, that was Pancham,” Asha recalled.