9

How Bollywood Came to My Rescue

‘Everyone wants attention, more or less. I just want a lot.’

—Zara Larsson

I imagined a black-robed, white-haired judge sitting above, awarding me life in ten-day blocks. First there had been a ten-day wait before my operation. Now there was going to be a ten-day wait at the hospital while I recovered. Perhaps there would be another ten-day gap before I could start the dreaded chemotherapy sessions.

So here I was, lying on my hospital bed, feeling completely dependent on the nurses for my movement. I was anxious and in pain—not only physically, emotionally too. Not knowing what lay ahead, I surrendered to going with the flow. I began taking each moment as it came. Swinging between life and death, I had plenty of time to be alone with my thoughts. My mind went back to the charmed life I had led in Mumbai.

I entered the world of films in 1991 with the top-grossing Saudagar, a dream break by any standards. With a mentor of the stature of Subhash-ji, life could not have been more perfect. The audience immediately sat up and noticed the new Nepalese girl and many sang praises of her innocent beauty.

Money, name, fame and a string of hits—I had it all. I had friends whom I could party with at any time and awards that were coveted by many. It was a life only the chosen few get to live.

But even though the world was at my feet, something strange began happening to me. I soon started feeling the misery of existence. I became wretched.

I think it was during the shooting of Laawaris, which released in 1999, that I felt the pressure getting to me. I had been working non-stop till then. I confided in Dimple Kapadia that I was tired of this routine of getting up, putting on make-up, going out for location shooting, returning home exhausted and being constantly ‘on the go’.

Without my realizing it, my life went into a downward spiral. I quickly lost interest in the privileges that were being bestowed on me. I became bored and disinterested in life. The pressure of performing so many roles, of expressing so many emotions every single day, began to vex me. I became a robot—instantly donning another persona at the snap of ‘Lights, Camera, Action’.

I became tired of the relentless pattern of my days—wake up, shower, put on make-up, work, come home, remove make-up, sleep. I think I felt the final snap at the point I was acting in twelve films in a year. The pressure was too much. The burden began seeping into my bones; the complexities of my characters began gnawing at my soul. There was no holiday, no time to watch the clear blue skies and golden beaches. Just constant trips to the film set and the hotel.

I remember how resentful I had felt when I had gone for a shoot in Australia. I wanted to immerse myself in the timelessness of the Great Barrier Reef, the MacKenzie Falls, the Kakadu National Park and the stunning landscapes. I wished to run outdoors to explore the bushwalking trails and soak in the beauty of the Blue Mountains. For I hail from the mountains myself and have been an ardent nature lover all my life.

Instead, I was shepherded out of Mumbai, taken to the film set, asked to memorize my lines and perform and promptly flown out of the country to yet another film set.

Was I enjoying getting up at unearthly hours? Was I ecstatic about visiting so many countries? Was I appreciative of all these opportunities? No. I felt like an automaton, reduced to being a pretty face. I think that’s when my mind began to get toxic. Emotionally, I began to go into reverse.

To take my mind off shoots, to numb myself, I started drinking. If I was on a diet, it would be vodka. I remember my ex-boyfriend once telling me that I had no sense of balance. He said, ‘You are a workaholic. You either work hard or party hard. Where is your sense of balance?’

Of course I was aware that I had a tendency to go overboard. Many people around me had tried to tell me that.

But the truth is that I wasn’t enjoying it. I didn’t appreciate my work. I simply didn’t like it. Somewhere, in a contorted way, I began wilfully doing the wrong things. To spite myself, I chose the wrong films. I began feeding my ego.

I insisted on being the central character, even if it was in a B-grade film. At that point, I did not even care who the director was. Getting a central role mattered more than anything else.

My state of mind was toxic, my approach to life complacent and my attitude ungrateful. So here I was, reliving the past in my head in a hospital in New York, praying desperately that I would live.

I snapped out of my reverie abruptly when one of the nurses came up to me and asked me to stand up.

What? How does she even imagine I can do that? Everything hurts so badly. I just can’t! And won’t!

Of course I understood that the nurses wanted me to move my body to begin the healing process. They encourage you to either walk in the hospital corridor or move around a bit to begin the curative and restorative effects post-surgery.

The next moment my hard taskmaster made me do exactly what she had in mind. I clenched my teeth at the onrush of pain. I all but collapsed. Then stand I did, on legs that seemed to be made of jelly. The torture did not end there. On the third day, a nurse came up to me early in the morning and said, ‘Come on, honey, let’s walk to the washroom and take a shower.’

I was horrified. I protested. She was adamant.

She handed me a walker and insisted I ignore the pain.

‘Oh, it’s not too bad, honey!’

I summoned up all my courage. Using superhuman effort, I put one foot in front of the other. The pain made me grimace. But the nurse was calm—in a strict, no-nonsense manner. She expected me to walk towards the bathroom as casually as if I were taking a morning stroll.

Once there, she got busy taking my hospital robe off.

I let out a raspy, guttural scream the moment I saw my naked body reflected in the bathroom mirror. What had happened to my marble-white satin skin? My flesh had been ruthlessly stapled with steel pins right from below my breasts to my groin.

Is this really my body?

My head spun, my knees gave way and I collapsed.

Very professionally, the nurse steadied me and gently led me forward until I was seated on the toilet seat, groaning with the effort of so much movement. And the shock of seeing my maimed body.

‘There, there!’ she said and clucked like a mother goose. I tried to collect myself. But my body would not cooperate.

Ignoring my discomfort, she began to bathe me expertly with the help of a hand shower. Professionally, she manoeuvred through the jagged route of the horrific steel staples that kept my body from splitting apart.

I was overcome by weakness—physical, emotional, mental. I felt really sorry for myself. However, that left no impression on the caring nurses. They made me go through this routine every single day.

One day, however, overcome by emotion and weakness, I slipped in the bathroom. The attending nurse rushed to help me and called out to the other nurses to give her a hand. Together, they carried me back to my bed.

I realized then that I was just a mass of flesh and blood—mutilated and broken inside out. More than doctors, I was now completely dependent on nurses to make me whole again. The realization was a humbling one.

One night I needed a nurse urgently. I rang the bell several times to call the nurse on duty. I was anxious and the wait seemed endless.

This is no good. I need to think of a ploy.

To tell you the truth, with each passing day, I was becoming stronger. That is why my mind was clear enough to implement a strategy, and Bollywood came to my rescue.

The next day, when the morning-shift nurse arrived, I began making small talk with her—the light and breezy kind that connects one woman to another.

Shamelessly, I resorted to name-dropping. Mine!

‘Have you heard of India’s Bollywood?’ I asked the nurse as she pulled out and reapplied my wound dressing quite mechanically.

‘You mean in which they dance and sing? Ah, yes! I love watching those musicals.’

‘Well, I am a big star there, you know. I have done eighty films in Bollywood.’

She paused, mid-action. I could see a veil of admiration descending on her bored eyes. She looked at me with new eyes now.

She checked my vitals more attentively, smiled at me more and even placed the TV remote in my hands!

My heart rejoiced as I stroked the length and breadth of the TV remote. It had worked!

After that, I began dropping gems of information about my starry life on my attending nurses. The result? I would receive more sympathy and extra care from them. I could even ask for and become the privileged recipient of more heated blankets whenever I fancied them.

‘Really?’ the nurses would ask me. I would nod my head, trying to look important and yet being very matter-of-fact about it.

My clever plan had worked, but it drained my energy. I had to use the same strategy shift after shift.

‘Why don’t you Google me?’ I asked them, hoping they would give me more attention.

My fairy-tale introduction actually worked as an open sesame. They suddenly became curious about me and the enchanted life I had led. It opened the door to many deep conversations, surprisingly. We shared our joys, sorrows, concerns, fears and hopes and spoke about the situations we currently found ourselves in.

From a patient–nurse relationship, we graduated into one of woman to woman. I got into a first-name basis with each of them. We joked, laughed, prayed and kept track of what was going on in each other’s lives on a day-to-day basis. We discovered each other’s human side. The bonds between us became personal.

My head clearer now, I began noticing the flowers that would arrive in my room and told them stories about the people who had sent them. As I began to feel better, I also noticed the cards from fans, family and friends that arrived in the mail for me. The nurses would carefully prop them all up in neat arrangements in my room.

Grateful and delighted at this attention, I would say loudly to them: ‘Are they all beautiful? Any particular one stands out?’ It was a game we played happily each morning and afternoon.

With my new-found friendship, the days began to fly quickly. One by one, the tubes connected to my body began to be removed, much to my relief. There was only one prominent one inserted into my lungs for draining excess fluid. That took a long time to go.

But eventually, one day, there remained no more appendages and tentacles attached to me. The wounds that still looked frightening to me were now bandaged up tightly, waiting to be taken off after the healing was complete.

One day, another renowned doctor came visiting me—Dr Navneet Narula, fondly known as Zeena-ji. She was a pathologist at Cornell Medical Centre. Dr Narula was unpretentious and straightforward. Methodically, she went through every report—the doctors’ as well as the lab’s.

All the time, I kept my eyes focused on her face to gauge her reaction.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears and she looked away from me. I saw her wipe her tears. My heart sank.

Later, I heard that she mentioned to her husband, Dr Jagat Narula, how grave my medical reports were. Also, her admiration for how composed and calm I was despite knowing that.

Nothing in my life has gone smoothly.

One day I was informed that the ghastly staples would be removed from my body. Post-surgery, the doctors had stapled my skin after stitching it to keep it together while it healed—much like stapled paper. My entire torso had been opened and from the stomach down, I was stapled up.
When I got to know that these were going to be removed, I became a bundle of nerves. My heartbeats became mad and irregular, my palms sweaty and there was that old sinking feeling.

No more pain, god. Please. No more pain!

A tiny sigh of relief escaped my lips when I saw the nurse who had come to do the job. I liked her and knew all about her life. She smiled at me reassuringly and I relaxed. She had earlier given me an injection and had done it so painlessly that I had admired her expertise. I was happy that she would be removing my staples. I was certain she would be kind to me. At least I prayed she would.

As always, I began to hide my nervousness by blabbering away. I assumed that our chit-chats would make her more sympathetic and kind towards me.

Flippantly, I popped several everyday questions at her. I acted normal and friendly, as if cutting off steel staples from my tender flesh was a daily game I enjoyed playing.

In a bright, high-pitched voice that belied my trembling body, I asked casually, ‘So, what did you have for lunch?’

We could well have been sitting in my house, exchanging pleasantries over green tea.

I did not know if she was listening. I did not even know if I expected to find out the answer to my world-shaking query. She was focused on only the task at hand.

Suddenly I felt a painful snip on my stomach.

Wincing in pain, I asked once again, ‘So how are your kids?’

Again another snip.

I gritted my teeth.

‘And your work?’

Snip, she went again, until I realized what a silly question that was. This was her work. And this was what she was doing right then. But I kept asking random questions. Anything to take my mind off from the pain.

Each time she snipped with her steel pincers, I yelped loudly. She had not spoken until then. But now she did. She stopped mid-snip, looked me straight in the eye—her blue ones locking with my brown ones—and asked, ‘Is it really hurting? Or are you just scared?’

I paused, feeling like a child who had been caught and reprimanded. I took a deep breath.

Am I just afraid or am I in pain?

The discovery made me snap my eyes open. A frisson of shame rushed through me. Yes, there was no pain, just fear.

So I resolved to become more mature. As she went about the process of de-stapling me, I trained my mind to not listen to the clipping sound any more. I clenched my jaws. Wilfully, I diverted my mind to other worries—bigger ones. God knows I had enough of them.

After a long session of gritting my teeth silently and scraping my palms with my nails, the ordeal was finally over. All the staples had been removed.

But when I looked down at my bruised body, I was shocked.

In the centre of my body were two gaping holes—crater-like, cavernous depressions. Horrified and traumatized, I looked at the nurse in confusion, my swollen lips unable to form the right words.

She replied nonchalantly, as if we were witnessing a piece of art, ‘You shouldn’t be scared of these; what is inside you is far more dangerous.’

Her last sentence left me gulping for air.

***

Finally, it was time to leave the hospital. There were a zillion papers to be signed. I could see my brother running around trying to complete the formalities.

As for myself, I felt strange. I lay in bed and looked at the hospital room that had been my home for so long. I thought of the kind faces of the nurses who had so charmingly switched over from being mere caregivers to caring friends.

I felt a twinge of regret at leaving everything I had become accustomed to.

I remember shaking myself. Was I experiencing something like the Stockholm Syndrome—a psychological condition in which the prisoner becomes overly fond of its captors and does not want to leave them? I had read a story about a hostage who developed a psychological bond with his captors as a survival strategy during captivity. It was scary, if not funny.

Paperwork over, I was overcome with gratitude and relief. As I was wheeled out, I noticed that the big lobby of the hospital was filled with smiling nurses. Regardless of what the future had in store for me, I felt happy at that moment. The worst was over (my operation). So what if the worst (chemotherapy) remained? It was still ten days away.

The chemotherapy session would take place in a different wing of the hospital. I would not meet these nurses there.

I went over to each sister and hugged them warmly. I presented each of them with colourful flowers (our talking points!) that had spread happiness and fragrance in my room. I was grateful for the cheer they had brought me.

Joy radiated from each of us and wrapped us closely in a strong bond. I told each one of them how lucky I was to have had such amazing caregivers and how saying goodbye to them seemed so hard.

A change had begun taking shape within me during my stay at the hospital. I started becoming more appreciative of each moment. I learnt the art of picking up each moment carefully, diving inside it, admiring its possibilities and experiencing it fully before stringing it back with the other pearls on the necklace of time. I realized I had become a moment-to-moment person, filled with a deep appreciation for every little bit that life generously handed to me.

Gently, I told myself the words I had heard somewhere: Today I open the door to the future, take a deep breath, step on through and start a new chapter in my life.