Miss Indias: Mother & Child

Seated beside her mother, Naqi shares with Pramilla more than familial pride: both have eyes that hold your gaze, a face that easily breaks into the most genial smile, and a man-ner that immediately puts you at ease. But if Naqi exudes a stately grace that seems to come naturally to her, Pramilla has an impish charmthat gives the lie to her age. Jewish by birth, Pramilla’s journey of the glamour world began with the chance signing of a film while she was on a visit to her cousin—also an actress—in Mumbai. From doing second leads, she soon graduated to meatier roles. And not just the coy swirling around trees that seemed to be the order of the day—if she was playing the stuntwoman in one, she was the vamp in another, and soon she was one of the most talked about faces in Mumbai. To the extent that when the Indian press voted in the first-ever Miss India, in 1947, Pramilla won the contest hands down. “At that time, it (the Miss India pageant) was more of a popular-face contest, and since I was on the cover of most magazines in those days, I was chosen,” recounts Pramilla, aware of the irony of a Miss India being conferred on a much-married- mother-of-four-and-expecting-a-fifth young woman. “In those days, the rules and regulations had still not been formally laid down,” she smiles. In between films and the title, Pramilla went on to tie the knot with the popular actor Ku-mar, alias Hasan Ali. “He and Jayant were the only two six-footers in the industry in those days,” she says with pride. The couple then launched their own production house, Silver Films, and had five children in five years (four sons and one daughter). “Well, we were a production house after all,” chuckles Pramilla, age not in the least withering the nonagenarian’s robust sense of humour.

However, Independence followed by Parti-tion split not just the country but also her mar-riage. Kumar wanted to go to Pakistan, but for Pramilla her world was India, where the rest of her family lived. “It made no sense to me to go to an alien country just for the love of my hus-band, so we decided to call it quits,” she says. With that parting, the onerous task of rais-ing five children fell on the delicate shoulders of Pramilla. But she refuses to make her story the typical single-mother tearjerker. “I had no problems at all in bringing up my kids. I had the full support of my family. I ran my business, acted in movies and had great fun bringing up my children. Today, all of them are well settled, and shower their love on me; I feel blessed. Life has been kind to me. I always got everything I wanted—education, adulation and beautiful children,” says Pramilla, who incidentally faced the arc lights once again after four decades when she shot for Amol Palekar’s soon-to-be-released Thang this year. “She was the best mother one could have ever had. Beautiful, warm and very very mother! She was always there when we needed her—be it for a hot meal or the school concert. More than anything, she was the most gener-ous person I had ever seen, and this generosity of spirit she passed on to her children in gener-ous measure,” says daughter Naqi. Though Pramilla herself did not keep up her contact with ex-husband Hasan, she made sure the children were in touch and taught them to fol-low both Muslim and Jewish customs.

“She always said our surnames should match our upbringing, or else we’d have an identity crisis,” says Naqi, who followed her mother’s footsteps into modelling, films and by her time a more formatted Miss India pageant.

That is, till she married Vikram Kamdar, the wealthy heir of Kamdar Furniture, and gave up the many charms of the glamour world for do-mestic bliss. Here again genes probably played their part when in four years Naqi bore three children. One of them, however, tragically passed away at the age of seven due to a kidney ailment. And while it shattered Naqi com-pletely at the time, it was perhaps her inherited reservoir of strength that helped her tide over the pain and instead plunge herself into the family business. Today, the lady is an accom-plished interior designer, besides being a fabulous artist.

For Naqi, the mother-child bond has only strengthened with the years. She’s leafing through the dog-eared albums, full of her mother’s and her own photographs and clip-pings. When she finally looks up to speak, she is thoughtful: “I guess I did turn out a lot like my mother. Only she was—is—more beautiful.”