Late actor Shammi Kapoor’s son, Aditya Raj Kapoor, has recalled how his father’s second wife helped him get over the death of his mother, actress Geeta Bali. Aditya said that he had become ‘a wounded, anguished, rebellious, howling animal’ after his mother’s death and used to write ‘threatening letters’ to his father from boarding school.
In an interview to SpotboyE, he called his father’s second wife Neela Devi his ‘second mother’ and recalled how she decided not to have kids of her own for the sake of Aditya and his sister. He said: “My mother Geeta Bali, an almost-uneducated woman, came to see me at the boarding school more often than my father. My mother had given up her career and my father’s had just started. So she had more time to visit me. My mother was the original Sridevi. She passed away when I was nine. The whole boarding school wept with me. She used to mother all my friends. Those were not easy years for me. Mom was gone. Dad had become so successful he had no time for me. Superstars today have organised lives. In my father’s time fans had no access to him through Internet, television or magazines. They’d barge into our home at any time. I was left with no space that I could call my own with my father.”
Calling Neela Devi his ‘second mother’, Aditya continued, “It was Neela Devi who made that space for me in our home. She devoted her life to my father, decided not to have any kids of her own because my sister and me were already there. No Hindu woman would do this. From boarding school I used to write threatening letters to my father. I used to tell him that I’d run away from school. I told him he could marry any woman he wanted. But I had to have a mother. Neela Devi filled that gap. She turned me from a wounded, anguished, rebellious, howling animal to a human being. Just goes to show, that a mother makes the family. But I never stopped missing my mother Geeta Bali. My first and second mothers were different people.”
Aditya also revealed that his spiritual guru told him to leave Bollywood just when he was set to make his acting debut.
