‘Every birthday of mine is a dry day’

Bollywood’s former Jubilee Queen, Asha Parekh, continues to be a happy soul. Asha, who turned 75 on Monday — her birthday is on Gandhi Jayanti — says that she doesn’t feel her age at all and is happy to share her birthday with the Mahatma, but there’s a downside to that. “Every birthday of mine is a dry day. So my friends never get to toast my health and well-being with a glass of wine .... aah, never mind. I am happy to be alive, well, healthy and still not pushed into oblivion, as many of my colleagues are,” she says. Oblivion is far from Asha’s ambit. In fact, 2017 has been a particularly eventful year for her. “My memoirs, The Hit Girl, came out,” she says. “I was apprehensive that it might hurt some. But I was determined to tell the truth. Or else, no point in writing about your life. My co-author Khalid Mohamed and I were very careful about the lives that were touched in my memoirs.” In the book, Asha boldly spoke about her relationship with Nasir Hussain. The late filmmaker’s family members, she says, weren’t hurt by her book. “Nasir saab’s family has always been close to my heart... They all respect me,” says the former actor. However, the year saw Asha’s dream project, her hospital for the poor, being shut down. It faced this situation once before, in 2007. Its future now is uncertain. Asha sighs, “It was my parents’ dream that I tend to the poor. Alas, the dream has ended.” Brightening up, she says that she is thankful for what life has given her. She has one wish: “I just wish [that] when I go, I go without pain. And [that] people will remember me as a nice girl.”