Veteran actor Simi Garewal and the late Pamela Chopra grew up together and after Pamela's death on Thursday, Simi recalled the years that she spent with her maternal cousin who was like a "third daughter" for her mother. The Karz actor shared that Pamela was a "movie buff who knew more about cinema than I did." Simi recalled the first time the late Yash Chopra laid eyes on Pamela, and how Simi spotted him even though Pam thought he was paying more attention to Hema Malini. Simi told Mid-day, "I took her to BR Chopra's daughter's wedding, where Yash and she met for the first time. She [felt] that he was paying more attention to Hema Malini, but I had caught Yash sneaking a glance at Pam several times." The Do Badan actor recalled that it was a few months after this encounter that Yash's older brother BR Chopra and his wife met Simi's mother with a proposal for Pamela. "Her father, Mohinder Singh, who was in the army, was initially hesitant as the Chopras were wealthy [in comparison]. But my mother assured that she would take care of everything. She took care of her like her own daughter," she recalled. Simi shared that her and Pam grew distant as the years went by and never really "dove into what happened." She said, "Strangely, after her marriage with Yash, she started distancing herself from us, which hurt all of us deeply as we couldn’t understand what happened. Though we would go for Aditya [Chopra] and Uday’s [Chopra] birthdays, which eventually stopped." She recalled meeting her at Yash Chopra's funeral in 2012 and said that "Pam was warm." "We never got a chance to find out what happened, [even when] we spoke, laughed, and joked around. We never dove into what happened," she remembered. Pamela Chopra passed away in Mumbai on Thursday at 74.
