Sharmila Tagore has always been championed as the rare female actor of her generation who managed to do it all. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who quit working in the movies after they got married and had children, Sharmila appeared in some of her finest films after she had her son Saif Ali Khan in 1970. While her family members have always applauded her in public, the journey was far from easy for Sharmila, and in a recent interview, her daughter Soha Ali Khan discussed the same.
In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter India, Soha was talking about work-life balance for mothers who are working in the entertainment industry, and she shared an anecdote from her mother’s life. She shared that when Saif was little, and Sharmila was working full-time, she sometimes wouldn’t get a chance to see him for weeks at a stretch. On other occasions, Saif would get upset.
“Sometimes, my mother didn’t see my brother for weeks. And then, she would rush home to do bedtime with him and he would be like, ‘I don’t need you. I don’t want you right now’ because he was also upset. So he is fine with the didi and then you are like, ‘What did I rush home for?’ And then you are so stressed about that time that you end up being short with your children, so it’s a lot,” she shared.
Previously, Sharmila spoke at a Mother’s Day event for YFLO, and said, “I was working two shifts a day and for the first six years of his life, I was really absent.” She added, “I don’t think I was a full-time mom. My husband was there, but I wasn’t.”
Soha shared that she has a lot of sympathy for mothers and added, “I am very sympathetic to mothers, new mothers, trying to find their feet, what they need. I think raising a child is an incredibly challenging, incredibly rewarding thing to do.” Talking about her own experience with motherhood, Soha shared that she once started crying on set because she hadn’t seen her daughter all day. “Wherever I am in the world, when it’s 7 o’clock, I start to get very antsy. That’s my ritual with her, bedtime. So even when I was on set, I burst into tears once because we were in Rajasthan and we were shooting in Mandava and it was bedtime and I had not seen her all day but that was one day,” she said. Soha’s daughter Inaaya Naumi Kemmu is 7-years-old.
