This Is Not A Comeback

Since her Instagram debut earlier this year, ZEENAT AMAN has charmed cinephiles and netizens alike with her eloquence, wit and honesty, emerging as a sincere voice in a sea of sanitised, monetised celebrity feeds. Naturally, her audience craves more. In a diary-style entry for Vogue India, she pulls back the curtain on her life a little more, penning her own story with the trademark lyricism that everyone has come to know and love.

My fame is an amorphous beast. It has taken me 50 years to bring it to heel.

Sometimes, it has been a purring cat on my lap, and at others, a slavering wolf breathing down my neck. But now, it's simply an animal that I can look in the eye. An eternally untameable companion that walks by my side.

People say I hid from it for three decades, but that is not entirely true. Its gaze wandered when my priorities shifted. After years of living a life dictated by stardom, a life of endless shifts, performances, appearances, rumours and obligations, my days had begun to ring hollow. I was aching for something of my own. A family, really. One with bonds as deep as the one I shared with my own mother. The birth of my sons in 1986 and 1989 gifted me all this and more. As I contended with their diapers and bibs, the prolonged illness and death of their father, then later school scrapes and college romances, work offers dwindled and I was happy for it. The residue of my early fame still allowed me the occasional opportunity that kept my kitchen running, but without the scrutiny or intrusion of outsiders.

I'm not surprised, then, that my appearance on social media is being hailed as a 'comeback', some even referring to it as my 'second innings'. I, for one, do not see it as such. This is not a comeback. I never went away.

Gram by Gram