I was crying when I wrote of my mother's last days

Actor Divya Dutta says her mother, a doctor, made her what she is today. After her husband passed away at 36, Dr Nalini Dutta became a single mother who raised her two children in Ludhiana at a time when the Punjab insurgency was at its peak. Divya still remembers standing in front of her mother as a 13-year-old when militants came home, praying that the bullets if any would pierce her. She remembers also when her mother took a lift with four militants because she wanted to get to the clinic in time and then received their bodies the same day. When her mother died five years ago, Divya thought life had lost all meaning. But writing Me and Ma, a book chronicling their relationship, helped to heal her, even though she was crying when she wrote of her mother's last days. Her mother helped start her off in her career, bringing her to Mumbai from Punjab for the Stardust Talent Hunt in 1994. It led to a call from the Stardust Training Academy. Divya never looked back, eschewing the conventional heroine route to develop a career which is likely to be as long as it is interesting. In a fun-filled annd often emotional conversation with Kaveree Bamzai, Divya speaks of the gratitude for her mother, the new audio version of Me and Ma, the bond of Punjabiyat and food she shared with Yash Chopra (who cast her in Veer-Zaara [2004] and changed the trajectory of her career), her forthcoming book on her life as an actor, and how her distinctive voice can sometimes get her into trouble--including once when she was bargaining for clothes in Janpath and was told by the shopkeeper that she could afford to buy anything!

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