Neha Dhupia and Tahira Kashyap Khurrana shared several interesting stories from their pregnancy phases, as they discussed the latter’s new book, 7 Sins of Being A Mom during a live chat session on Instagram. Neha, alluding to Tahira's story of forgetting her son in a restaurant that has been mentioned in her new book, said that she once forgot to take her daughter Mehr with her when she was just 40 days old.
Narrating the incident, Neha Dhupia shared that during the 40th night since Mehr’s birth, she and her husband, Angad Bedi left for a drive leaving their daughter with a nurse. They asked the nurse to call her when it was time to feed the baby.
“You know they say you should sit at home for 40 days so we were doing that. Literally, on the 40th night, we were waiting for the morning. We were so excited and we thought 'let us just all go for a drive'. We went for a drive on the Sea Link and we had that two-hour window,” Neha told Tahira.
While the couple were away for about 45 minutes, the actress revealed that they got a call from the nurse who informed them that the baby was crying.
“Both of us were like ‘we left for a drive’. And she told us ‘baby ro raha hai’. I was like ‘Aapko kaise pata? Baby humaare paas hai’. And then we looked back only to realise we forgot to take the baby on the drive. So the baby was crying at home. By mistake we left her,” Neha added.
As Tahira laughed, Neha explained her reaction and said, “I was shocked (when the nurse said that the baby was crying). I was like ‘how can she hear my baby, we are far from home’. Then, I was like ‘maybe these nurses these days have some other hi-fi way of checking’.”
Tahira, on the other hand, spoke about her son, Virajveer’s cesarean section birth and shared how it was seen as taboo that she did not have a ‘normal’ delivery. The filmmaker shared that her baby was born after 12 hours of intense labour and mentioned how she did not feel any maternal love immediately after her son Virajveer was born.
Tahira shared, “When the baby came out after 12 hours of intense labour, the doctor was just looking at me like, ‘Yeh lo apna bachcha.’ And I refused to open my arms. All those feelings that I had read about in the books, also heard from my mother and grandmother, all the tales of mother’s love, kuchh aaya hi nahin (I didn’t feel anything). And I just didn’t want to be pretentious about it.”
Tahira added, “So then, I had two sets of eyes staring at me. Nowadays, kids are born with open eyes, as you would know. My son and my doctor, both of them are just staring at me. And the maximum I could do was, I just wriggled my nose against his and I was like, ‘Now you can take him to his family.’ And the doctor was mortified. ‘What do you mean, his family?’ I was like, ‘Baaki ki family (The rest of the family)’.”
Neha Dhupia and Angad Bedi got married in May 2018. They welcomed their daughter Mehr a few months later. They welcomed their baby boy earlier this month.
Talking of Tahira, she has two children - Virajveer and Varushka - with celebrated actor, Ayushmann Khurrana. She has written The 12 Commandments of Being A Woman and I Promise… She is now out with her new book, The 7 Sins Of Being A Mother, which is an unfiltered account of her journey as a parent.
Tahira will soon make her debut as a director with Sharmaji Ki Beti, starring Sakshi Tanwar, Divya Dutta and Saiyami Kher. She had earlier directed the short film, Quaranteen Crush, in the Netflix anthology, Feels Like Ishq.
Image Source: Instagram/nehadhupia/tahirakashyap