Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi ‘didn’t have a job or an income’ as Sharmila Tagore went to work, told daughter Soha to limit spending: ‘I’m a prince, but…’

Also read – ‘Sharmila Tagore converted to Islam before marrying Tiger Pataudi, her name is Ayesha’: Daughter Soha Ali Khan recalls parents’ interfaith marriage

Soha continued, “People would ask him, ‘What do you do?’ And he would say, ‘I’m a prince’. That was his answer. And they were like, ‘But what do you do?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m a prince’. So, he was at home. Amma would go out for work. When we were young, she went away for three months to shoot Mississippi Masala, which Mira Nair directed. It had Denzel Washington. I would miss her a lot.” Soha said that she used to write her mother letters, but because sending letters to America was expensive, she would be told to limit herself to one a week. “I remember Abba told me, ‘One letter a week, I’m not sending one letter every day to America. I may be a prince, but mehenga hai’.”

Asked if her friends had a culture shock when they came over to her house and saw her dad at home, she said, “No, because he was Tiger Pataudi. Everybody knew him and loved him. Even today, I meet people who tell me that they saw my father play. It was just understood that he was a retired legend who’d done so much for his country… I’m just hugely proud of being his daughter.”

In a previous interview with Zoom, Soha said that although her father played cricket, there was no real money to be made in sports back then. “She was the eldest of three sisters and the breadwinner for a very long time. Even after marriage, she was the one earning an income, while my father had inherited wealth and played cricket, but there was no money in cricket back then,” she said.