On screen, Shefali Shah feels intimidating, unreachable. In Mira Nair’s cult classic Monsoon Wedding (2001), her character Ria is the guarded elder sister constantly training her piercing gaze upon family members. In Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), she plays the unhappy matriarch Neelam Mehra, who stuffs her face with chocolate cake. Human (2022), a nerve-racking medical thriller, casts her as the menacing antagonist Dr Gauri Nath. And her most acclaimed role is also her most recent—reprising the steely, tenacious, all-business DIG Vartika or Madam Sir in season 3 of Delhi Crime. So I am thrown off when Shah’s debut book, The Audacity of Being, published by Bloomsbury, paints an entirely different picture of the actor behind the scenes.
“Sometimes I look at pictures of myself and wonder as to what all I could have done right to look like how the ‘stars’ look—beautiful, graceful, stately and right off a Vogue cover shoot,” she confesses in the opening chapter. Later, she writes, “Whenever I join a new project, I am the same nervous wreck of a person, with all the same doubts bubbling to the surface. I am not good enough. I will make a fool of myself. All these people are important, famous stars and I don’t belong here. I don’t know anything.” But Shah is more cheery than anxious when she joins our Zoom call two days before the book hits the stands, wearing a loose, light pink kurti which matches the frames of her glasses. So far, she reveals excitedly, “No one else has read the book except a few journalists, my publisher and me.” Then she pauses. “Wait. One copy has also gone to my mother.”
Described as a “sort-of memoir”, The Audacity of Being is a non-linear essay collection spanning several themes, from the unrelenting pressures of having to look flawless as an ageing actress (“TV pe toh acchi lagti hai,” Shah recalls a stranger saying to her years ago) to the painful falling apart of her first marriage. She knows celebrity memoirs can be tedious to read, what with some taking readers through every detail of someone’s life from start to finish. “I was very clear that I don’t want to write it in chronological order,” she says. “No ‘Once upon a time, I was born in Santacruz.’ That’s boring. I didn’t want it to be so perfectly built. It’s messy and chaotic, which is more me.”
The book glides between humour and vulnerability: in one chapter, Shah describes giving birth to her first son in harrowing detail; in another, she gushes about the joys of being a pet parent. Writing about being offered her part in Dil Dhadakne Do, she recalls director Zoya Akhtar starting with, ‘I know you won’t do it, but I still had to try once.’ She remembers being in an auto rickshaw twenty years ago, when she received a call from someone insisting that Amitabh Bachchan wants to speak with her. After irritably hanging up on the prankster twice, she answered his third call, ready to tell him off, before hearing “that famous and unmistakable baritone… I gestured at the auto driver to pull over, covered the mouthpiece and whispered with a bit of a flourish, ‘Amitabh Bachchan ka call hai.’ Needless to say, the auto driver rolled his eyes.”
