Different people have different ways of mourning. When Moushumi Chatterjee lost her 46-year-old daughter, Payal, between the night of Thursday the 12th and the wee hours of Friday the 13th, how was she expected to show her grief?

How does a mother who has watched her highly diabetic daughter slip into coma for two-and-a-half years supposed to exhibit her sorrow? Moushumi herself wasn’t a diabetic, her husband, Jayanto Mukherjee (alias Babu), has been the one with a sugar and insulin problem. But with her daughter in coma, the actress too found herself joining the growing ranks of diabetics in the country. Her blood pressure was also shooting up, leading to doctors advising her against going to her daughter’s cremation.

Would a scene where she collapsed have been preferable to her being at the funeral? There can be no definitive answer to that.

What cannot be debated is that parents go through their own trauma. As this column disclosed way back in November 2018, Moushumi (called Indu by friends) and Babu went through heartbreak when they realised why Payal had landed in the comatose state: it was as if she had secretly nursed a death wish after unexpected turns in her marriage and life.

There is an old saying that there are always three sides to a story: his, hers and the truth. So there will always be a version that son-in-law Dicky Sinha will put out — as he did soon after Payal’s death when he gave statements like, “Moushumi didn’t even see her daughter’s face after she passed away.”

There will always be her version as the mother who knew that the end was nigh. After two years of hope, when she would convince herself that Payal was getting better, Moushumi did have a sinking feeling the last few weeks — especially after Payal was shifted back to the ICU from her husband’s house and the doctors said that her condition had worsened. So there will be Moushumi’s point of view, which will run contradictory to Dicky’s. And there may be a mid-path where an objective perspective would preside.

But the loss of her daughter opened the actress’s eyes to how the world moved. Friends, ostensibly concerned, would drop in solely at their convenience, linger on for hours, and even wait for peak hour traffic to die down, for an easier commute back home. It was all about their convenience and not about the person they were going to condole with.

And, of course, the media flooded her with messages asking her the most intimate of questions. They did have a job to do but was Moushumi expected to get into a slanging match with her son-in-law or be allowed to mourn privately for at least 13 days?

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said, as she sat in her bedroom. And we talked about her hilarious encounters with her heroes. How Rajesh Khanna would lay out an elaborate lunch and then tea during a shoot, and be surprised that she preferred to have a quiet meal with her staff. “Or chai with the spotboy,” she said wickedly.

We carefully avoided talking about Payal’s last days. RIP Payal, one of the most well-brought-up star kids I have ever known.

Let’s really talk about something else? These days even putting out a trailer in the theatre has a story of its own. As a close friend of Salman Khan’s, Ajay Devgn got the privilege of attaching the new trailer of Tanhaji to Dabangg 3. David Dhawan, with whom Salman has done several films, got his son Varun’s new film Street Dancer 3D tagged to it too. Soon, Katrina turned up wanting to attach a new commercial of hers and she got the post-interval slot. Since only two trailers normally go with the original print, Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak had to wait its turn.

By the way, there was an error in this column last Sunday where it was stated that Renuka Shahane’s Tribhanga will be Kajol’s first film with a female director. Kajol worked with Tanuja Chandra more than 20 years ago in Dushman, and later with Rajinikanth’s daughter, Soundarya, too. So I stand corrected.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author