Without naming or shaming anyone, actor Shefali Shah looked back at her first marriage with actor Harsh Chhaya in her memoir-in-essays, The Audacity of Being, and painted a not-so-rosy picture of nuptial bliss. “Marriage may not necessarily pan out the way it is. And then, you just have no option but to deal with it,” Shefali Shah told The Indian Express about the reality of her first marriage.
Looking back at bygone days, Shefali Shah said that nobody's prepared for a divorce.
“I'm not naming anyone in the book. I'm not even getting into what happened or didn't happen. I'm just talking about what happens on a general scale when people get married and nobody's prepared for a divorce,” Shefali Shah wrote in the book.
Shah said, “There was nothing to really hide. I think I've written about it very respectfully. I'm just talking about any marriage falling off the brink. There's an entire thing about when you realise your marriage is falling apart. So it's, I think, about the failure of a relationship.”
Apart from her failed marriage, Shefali Shah's book also covers love and its familiar aches, divorce and remarriage, friendships and community, ageing as a Bollywood actor, creative self-doubt, body image and the trials of parenting.
Earlier this year, Shefali Shah had spoken about why she chose to walk away from the marriage.
“For me, this realisation came after my first marriage. A close friend once asked me, ‘What if you never find love again? Would you take that risk or stay?' I replied that I would still take the risk. If I have to spend my life alone, I would choose that. I cannot remain in a situation that doesn't bring me joy and confidence or make me feel valued.
“That's when I decided to move out and live alone for the first time, having always lived with my parents. As you age, you begin to care less. You become weary of trying to please everyone. That's when I reached a state of enlightenment, realising that I am not pizza; I can't satisfy everyone,” Shefali told Zoom.
Shah was earlier married to actor Harsh Chhaya. In 2000, she married filmmaker-producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah, with whom she has two sons, Aryaman and Maurya.
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