My mom, my lifeline: Juhi Chawla

It’s not every day that actor Juhi Chawla opens up about her mother. She talks a lot about everything but it’s seldom that one hears her talking about Mona Kapoor – who died in a freak car accident in 1998 in Prague when Juhi was shooting for the movie Duplicate with actor Shah Rukh Khan. Juhi recently opened up about her mother when she was talking about her association with a luxury hotel, Colaba. She revealed that her mother Mona joined the hotel as a house-keeper and rose to the position of an executive director before she died.

“I remember that I used to come and sit in my mother’s office pretending that I had the day off from school. I used to study in a play-school which was just a few blocks away from  Colaba.  I remember that there used to be a big golden emblem of the hotel on every napkin and I used to sit there in my mother’s chamber colouring them with my colour pencils,” says Juhi.

Juhi says her mother was her constant companionwho traveled with her from one city to the other“I was travelling to one place to the other. My most memorable travels were of course at the Udaipur Palace and the Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad where the hotels were set up. I remember once I had wandered off in Udaipur looking for peacocks and my mother panicked and she set off a whole team to look for me. I can’t forget the scolding  I got after they found me. Those trips with my mom were the most memorable of all,” she adds.

The actor adds that she still has a stack of neatly folded sarees that her mother used to wear at work. “I still have them (sarees) but I didn’t have the heart to give them away. I still look at them and I feel that it belongs to my mom. I can still picture my mom wearing one of them and walking down the corridor of the hotel,” she ends.