Let The Sunshine In

When a cancer diagnosis turned Sonali Bendre’s life upside down, she decided to make the best of a difficult situation. Her inner optimist took over, and she has allowed the world into her new, challenging reality with grace and empathy. Bazaar speaks to her about hope, grit, and honesty.

- Sanjukta Sharma

Cancer’s most terrifying burden—its unpredictability—is often also a gift. Survivors like Sonali Bendre and I know how. Looking at the cancer-untouched world pass by, in what sometimes appears to us like a fuzzy, smug, and desirable unison of normality, we recognise that we know life’s bare bones, we know that time is a gift. Some of us have also learned to laugh about our living years, now divided into AC (after cancer) and BC (before cancer).

By the time I met Sonali for this piece, I’d watched her being interviewed about her experience with stage 4 metastatic uterine cancer. Cancer has been with humanity for centuries, yet not accepted as just a disease. That’s probably because a pill or an intravenous fluid can’t obliterate it, and treatment can be more debilitating than the cancer itself. She has been imperturbably articulate, open to all kinds of questions—an all-round champion of the need to talk more about the disease. Sonali’s outspokenness challenges us, triumphantly: So what?

I wait for the actor in one of her living rooms, turning the pages of a graphic novel about seven outré children and their commander who must save the world. The space is filled with all kinds of books, and big, bolstering furniture. Her gorgeous and restless golden retriever, rather incongruously named Isis, accompanies her to the sofa. Sonali is in a linen lounge suit by Anavila with baby-pink and white stripes, and her makeup is in subdued shades of pink. Her pixie hair is carefully ruffled, its shortness making her face strikingly expressive. She signs copies of the new book in her book club, The Familiars by Spacey Halls, poses with it, and then we get down to what I hoped wouldn’t be a text-book interview.