Neena Gupta: I’m not a bold person

The Bollywood actor who has penned her autobiography, Sach Kahun Toh, shares that one incident in life can’t label her. From her days of growing up in Delhi, remembering how she was abused like any other young girl, to uncovering the truth of casting couch in Mumbai’s film industry, and taking to social media to ask for work, she talks about most of her ups and downs in life, but names only those people who gave her permission to do so.

When an actor writes his/her autobiography, the readers who pick up the book aren’t just regular literature lovers but also fans who want to know more about the star, or writers who need fodder to spin off stories from the revelations. And it’s for the latter that actor Neena Gupta has clearly mentioned right at the start of her recently released autobiography, titled Sach Kahun Toh: “The media doesn’t know me. Nobody knows the real me.”

Neena Gupta says she was compelled by the lockdown, due to Covid-19 pandemic, to write her autobiography, which has been recently released by Penguin. (Photo: Aalok Soni/HT)

(Photo Courtesy: Penguin Random House)

One senses too much angst against the industry, and feels compelled to ask: ‘Why so angry?’ And Gupta shares how she’s always been presented to the public through the media gaze, based on just one event in her life. “I’m not a bold person,” she says matter-of-factly, and adds, “Having a baby out of wedlock doesn’t make me ‘bold’. And that one incident doesn’t prove that I’m a strong person, who will not succumb to the wrong or bad circumstances and lose my way! My biggest strength is me saying to myself, whenever I face a challenge, that I’ll fight this and move on.”

Cover of Neena Gupta’s autobiography.

While the world, which knows her, perceives her as a solid persona, Gupta recalls it’s her father who was indeed the stronger one and stood by her like a rock especially when she decided to give birth to her child, Masaba (fashion designer). “What I had done to him was a sin, and when I decided to stick to it, I thought my father would never support me. I thought he would never come since he was old fashioned. He came from a place where women touched feet... and here he was supporting me. I couldn’t believe! We didn’t have a relationship where we could talk about what I decided to do, but there was an understanding... Later, when I brought him to Mumbai from Delhi, to live with me, I thought he would give me gaali for doing so, but I found he was happy going to the beach and joining a laughter club, which also celebrated his birthday. And that kind of life he never had in Delhi,” she reminisces.

Neena Gupta (centre) with her daughter, Masaba, and husband, Vivek Mehra. (Photo Courtesy: Penguin Random House)

Talking of her growing up years in Delhi, before she moved to Mumbai to pursue a career in acting, Gupta has opened a Pandora’s Box on the issue of molestation which almost every young girl goes through and yet chooses to not speak up for the fear of losing ‘the freedom to go out alone’. Gupta mentions in her book about incidents such as when she visited an eye doctor, who went on to examine other parts of her body that were unrelated to the eye. Do the recesses of her mind still jolt her with these thoughts from the past and make her feel that had she spoken up the first time it happened, things would have been different? “That’s why I’ve written about the abuse,” states Gupta, adding, “In those days, even if a young girl would tell her mother about what happened with them, the mothers would often not believe it, and reason that it could be their imagination... Bahut kuchh hua life mein — doctor, tailor — they leave a scar on the young mind that you will not forget.”

She has, however, hidden the identity of the perpetrators of abuse as she “didn’t want the children and grandchildren of these people to read anything bad” and feel bad about what happened in the past. Yet, she admits that writing it all, courtesy the time she got during the first lockdown when the pandemic hit, was like an act of purgation. And when she received the first copy of her book, while in Mukteshwar, Uttarakhand, with her husband Vivek Mehra, she says, “I was jumping! Never thought I would write it; at least I had the himmat and I’m proud that it’s done now.”

Author tweets @HennaRakheja

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