National award-winning actress Neena Gupta does not have pictures of herself while she was pregnant with daughter Masaba, her daughter with West Indies cricketer Sir Vivian Richards. She had to keep her condition hidden for as long as she could because she did not know who she could trust. “But regardless of how sad and lonely I was, I was still filled with joy and love for this little being which was growing inside me,” she writes in her new memoir Sach Kahun Toh.
Not that she was completely alone in her journey. There were a few offers. Filmmaker and friend Satish Kaushik called her and said, “Nancy (his nickname for her in college), if the child is born with dark skin, you can just say it is mine and we’ll get married. Nobody will suspect a thing.”
Sach Kahun Toh is a gripping read, full of revealed secrets and scintillating wisdom. Her personal life has been no less eventful than that of her on-screen characters. From her casting couch experience with a south Indian producer to how she did not have enough money for a C-section delivery, the actor has revealed it all. “I could afford a natural birth because it would cost only Rs2,000,” she writes. “But I knew if I had to have a C-section, I would be in trouble, because the surgery cost almost Rs10,000. Luckily, a tax reimbursement of Rs9,000 came through a few days before my delivery....”
She told THE WEEK that she is honest in real life as well. “Whatever I wrote just came from my heart,” she says. “I feel that things that come from your heart can never go wrong. I have tried to be decent and dignified in talking about people. It was not that I wanted to take revenge or malign anybody. It was just basically talking about myself, about things which a lot of people didn’t know about me.’’
After a lull in her career, Gupta shared a post on Instagram in 2017 asking for work. Badhaai Ho, in which she played a middle-aged woman who had to face an unplanned pregnancy, became a milestone in her second innings.
“Badhaai Ho is one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be such a big hit. The Last Colour (2019) is another movie that I am really proud of.” Her latest is as a 90-year-old in the Arjun Kapoor-starrer, Sardar Ka Grandson.
Gupta shared screen space with Masaba in Netflix’s hugely successful show, Masaba Masaba last year. The mother-daughter duo is all set to start the shoot of the second season. She has a string of promising projects lined up, like the film Good Bye, in which she plays Amitabh Bachchan’s wife. Then there is season 2 and 3 of Panchayat and her upcoming international film, Gold Fish, co-starring Kalki Koechlin. “I have signed two more big films that are not announced yet. So, I can’t talk about them,” she says.
Her fashion designer daughter means the world to Gupta. “I don’t know what I would have done if Masaba was not in my life,” she says. “When your daughter is younger, there are a lot of problems like birthday parties and boys. We have crossed that stage of our lives.” Masaba is yet to read Sach Kahun Toh. What about Sir Vivian? “I don’t know whether he has got it or not,” she replies.
Gupta has recently included one more item in her bucket list. “I want to do a solo item number choreographed by Saroj Khan at an awards night,” she says. It was Khan who prepared Gupta for her dance number ‘Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai’ in Subhash Ghai’s Khal Nayak (1993), which was such a big hit that it launched the “stage show saga” of her life. Initially, she was reluctant to do it, but gave in when Ghai called her and instead of saying hello, played the song over the phone. Twenty-eight years after that hit song, Gupta looks back on it fondly. She is now ready to compose the soundtrack for the next phase of her life.
