‘I dIdn't want to be a vIctIm. I hate self-pIty'

Actor Sonali Bendre-Behl on dealing with cancer, the positives that have emerged and the role that her book club played during her illness

- Kunal Purandare

Sonali Bendre-Behl walks into Granth bookstore in Juhu, suburban Mumbai, on a rainsoaked afternoon in July and immediately inquires about new arrivals. The 44-year-old actor found comfort in books ever since she remembers. In 2015, she authored her first book, The Modern Gurukul: My Experiments with Parenting, and in 2017 she started the Sonali Book Club online to encourage reading.

Last year Bendre-Behl was diagnosed with metastatic cancer, with doctors giving her a 30 percent chance of survival. Not one to wallow in self-pity, she chose to be open about the disease, with posts on social media giving insights into her treatment in New York.

Now, sitting by a window at the store, and sipping hot coffee, BendreBehl is dressed in a pink top, an oversized jacket of the same colour and white trousers. She wistfully recalls the year gone by and talks about the positives that have emerged from it. “I am forgetting things so easily now… it’s called brain fog. It happens after chemotherapy. They say it gets better, but I am enjoying it. It’s nice to forget things,” she says with a smile. The pain though is not easy to conceal. “Chemotherapy is hard… the treatment is worse than the disease.”

Q You shared a nicely worded post on Instagram last July to say you were suffering from cancer.

Every time I have put out a post on cancer, I’ve maintained the reality of the situation without being fake about it, and yet not lost the positivity. And shared it without it making me sound like a victim, because that is one thing I definitely don’t want to be, and won’t be.