Unfinished

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

  Over time my relationship to the Internet changed. When the World Wide Web came into being, I saw it as a thrilling opportunity to connect with people everywhere. I got onto social media early on—I was one of the first actors in India on Twitter—and I loved the direct access to fans and well-wishers without anyone in the middle. I had a great time doing interactive sessions and talking to fans regularly. After negativity and attacks came my way for multiple years, though, a relationship that had once been enjoyable and positive eventually transformed into one of mistrust and fear. I’m not alone in feeling this way, I know. We read about the very dire consequences of hate and negativity expressed directly over social media all the time. Once I felt that it was unsafe to show myself in all my vulnerable humanity, I pulled back. It was instinctive.

  This evolution of my relationship with social media has been sad for me. Cancel culture and social media shaming have in many ways stopped me from having the meaningful conversations I used to have, and still want to have, with followers. For now, what seems to work best for me is to engage with online negativity or controversy as little as possible. If I feel that I’ve done something out of ignorance that could have been avoided, I will apologize. If I feel that I was wrong—for whatever reason—I will apologize. On those occasions when I’ve made a mistake that I can fix, I will try to fix it. But when rage spews without any form of fact-checking, it just seems futile to engage. I’ve come to see that there are times when you should speak up, and times when it’s better not to. So I’ve started picking my battles.

  I take seriously the responsibility of having a career in two polar-opposite countries and cultures. They both matter to me; I’m an amalgamation and a product of both. I wish there were an infallible guidebook for how to keep different cultures and peoples calm and open and willing to look for common ground simultaneously, not just in India and the U.S., of course, but all around the world—and all over the World Wide Web, too. Like all of us, though, I’ve yet to find that guidebook, so I’ll continue my quest for it, as I genuinely hope all of us will. I’m concerned that we have all become so afraid of our differences that we step back every time we encounter them. If only we could strive to take small steps toward ideas and people that are different in order to understand them. When I say “we,” I’m including myself: I’ve just acknowledged, after all, that I’ve taken a step back from the Internet. My hope is that we can all work to find ways to be curious and kind, which would be a step toward bringing us together in spite of our differences, rather than letting our fears and insecurities become shackles that keep us apart.

  * * *

  I WAS ON a steep learning curve my first few years in the States, dancing as fast as I could to learn what I needed to as I traveled back and forth to India for work and personal reasons. Once I established myself in the U.S. with Quantico, the crazy pace continued. At that point, though, all of the long days may not have been solely about getting the work done. I was running as hard as I could toward a goal, but I didn’t realize that I was running away from something just as hard.

  Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

  TO UNDERSTAND WHAT I was running from, we have to rewind a bit.

  At the dawn of 2005 my career was finally starting to take off. Bluffmaster!, in which I played opposite Abhishek Bachchan, was soon to be released and I was shooting Krrish, with Hrithik Roshan, which was a sequel to Koi…Mil Gaya. That had been a very successful movie, and consequently Krrish was seen as one of my biggest movies so far. Both of my parents were working as part of my team, even as my father continued the job of medical administrator at a Mumbai hospital, which he’d accepted shortly after moving there. Sid was in high school, and we were all living together in Mumbai. At twenty-two, I felt a glorious sense of optimism and excitement; I was ready for anything!

  Except what came next.

  My mother and father had their annual checkups that year in February, as they always did, and when the radiologist spotted something on the scan of my father’s liver that he identified as a fat-sparing area, he said, “It’s nothing. Tiny. A half a centimeter.” Dad knew it wasn’t nothing, and went on to have further imaging that showed he was right. The correct diagnosis was cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Within a week he and my mother had arranged for what turned out to be a nine-hour surgery to remove 80 percent of the right lobe of his liver. Mom was in the operating theater the whole time observing, and she reported that the surgery went beautifully. But when the surgeon stepped out to talk to our family, a junior doctor nicked Dad’s intestine with some rubber tubing as he was closing the incision. Apparently it didn’t look bad at the time, but within a week my father had developed peritonitis, which was somehow misdiagnosed as pancreatitis. Dad remained in the hospital for about six weeks, deteriorating faster and faster, until he had to be put on a ventilator. It was a grave mistake that the surgeon was somehow unwilling to acknowledge, and he refused to take the steps that would have stopped my father’s decline.

  “Get him out of that hospital,” my mother’s brother Vimal Mamu said. My mom had been keeping Mamu, by then an anesthesiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, closely informed, and he’d been keeping his friend Dr. Mark Callery, the chief of general surgery and a specialist in pancreatic and hepatobiliary surgery there, closely informed. It was decided that if my father could be transported safely, he would be moved to Beth Israel. But how could we get Dad halfway around the world safely? The challenge felt impossible given his dire condition, but we had to try.

  Every day I’d been going from the set of Krrish straight to the hospital, so my co-star, Hrithik Roshan, was aware of what was happening with my family. Incredibly, Hrithik, who is hugely successful in the Hindi film industry, got on the phone and used his connections at Air India to arrange for my father’s immediate flight to London. My mother had to sign numerous waivers and disclaimers and arrange for Dad to be accompanied by another doctor (in addition to my physician mother) and twenty small cylinders of oxygen. The final obstacle was acquiring the surgeon’s sign-off on permission to fly—which he refused to grant. We couldn’t let that stop us, and so I showed up at his office at 6 a.m. the day after his refusal, before I went to the set. My memory of the encounter is clear: I told him that I would go public if my father died on his watch unless he gave us permission to fly. After an unpleasant few minutes the doctor signed the orders. Then he threw the paperwork in my face.

  But it was done. We had permission, we had a seat, we had a doctor and oxygen and a handful of frightening waivers that basically said we understood that my father could die en route and we wouldn’t hold Air India or anyone else responsible. The ten hours of that flight to London, with Sid and me on the ground in India, and Mom and Dad in the air with no way to be in touch, were the longest, most excruciating hours of my life.

  They made it to London, where he was immediately transferred by a waiting ambulance onto a flight to New York, complete with a fresh supply of oxygen. From New York he was whisked onto a medical helicopter so efficiently, my mother says, that the chopper was able to take off with him within a minute of the flight door opening on the runway in New York. By the time my mother arrived in Boston—dear Vimla Mami, the Pied Piper of children when I was a teenager living with her and Mamu in Newton, drove the three-plus hours to meet my mother and then turned around and drove Mom the three-plus hours back to the hospital in Boston—my father was out of surgery.

  If we hadn’t had people around us who were so kind and so willing to act on our behalf—Hrithik and his father, Rakesh Sir, who was the director of the film; our family in Boston—I doubt that my father would have made it. There’s no way I can ever express my gratitude adequately to them, but it is d
eep and it is enduring.

  My energetic father, the eternal life of the party who’d always been strong and fit and active, had wasted into skin and bones. He remained in the ICU in Boston for six weeks and in the hospital for six months, and the nurses and staff there were better than angels. It would be the first of many close calls before Dad went into remission.

  Having been so close to death, Dad, once he regained his health and his strength, jumped back into life with all the gusto that he’d always had. He and Mom started socializing again. He invited musicians into our home so they could jam. Dad had an incredible voice but he’d never played an instrument—except the table. Not the tabla, but the table, as in any desk- or tabletop, which he would slap and pound and drum on with his hands like a percussion instrument. “Dr. Chopra plays a mean tabletop,” all of his musician friends would say. And he did.

  He resumed his pro bono work. He started sketching again, something he hadn’t done in years. He and Mom traveled to Europe to visit Sid, who by then was in a hospitality school in Switzerland called Les Roches. And Dad gave up the job in medical administration that he’d taken upon moving to Mumbai, putting down the paperwork to pick up the scalpel again. In early 2009, after traveling to Italy, Israel, and Colombia for training, he and my mother opened Studio Aesthetic, a cosmetic clinic in Juhu where he performed liposculpture and she performed all the nonsurgical procedures. My dad was a man in love with life.

  I’d thrown myself back into work again, shooting several movies a year, including Fashion, Drona, Kaminey, 7 Khoon Maaf, and Don 2. I’d also signed my agreement with Desi Hits to record an album and was flying back and forth between the U.S. and India regularly. When they weren’t working at their clinic or traveling elsewhere, both of my parents came to visit me in the U.S. when I was recording, and Dad was in heaven visiting sets and studios where he found himself surrounded by so many talented musicians.

  But in 2011, Dad started to feel weak. He’d been having regular scans and his radiologist, a friend, told him after each scan that everything looked good, nothing to worry about. When Dad’s sister-in-law, Badimama, a radiologist in Delhi, finally discovered the six-centimeter mass buried deep in his liver, there was plenty to worry about. Because the radiologist, my father’s friend, had repeatedly missed the tumor, it had grown and spread and was now stage 4.

  For the last two years of his life, my father fought incredibly hard against a disease that was unrelenting. Mom and Dad came up with a game plan, which included traveling back and forth to Beth Israel in Boston, and also to Rochester, New York, in the northwestern part of the state, where they explored the possibility of a liver transplant but ultimately opted for stereotactic radiation followed by surgery. The team in Rochester at Strong Memorial Hospital was magnificent—caring, compassionate, and highly skilled, and my parents were fortunate to be hosted in that city by Dr. Randeep Kashyap, who performed the surgery, and his beautiful wife, Dr. Rupa Kashyap. Thanks to the friendship and graciousness shown to them by the Kashyaps; Dr. Ashwani Chhibber, a friend of my father’s from medical school; and Dr. Vikram Dogra, his radiologist, the emotionally draining time my parents spent in that city was made as comfortable as it could possibly be. In my years of travel around the world, I’ve noticed that South Asians so often come together for their own, whether they know one another or not. There is something powerful about belonging to this community, and my parents’ experience in Rochester, thousands of miles from their home, was a beautiful demonstration of that.

  Both my parents had spent their lives wanting my brother and me not to see any of their perceived weaknesses, and it was no different with this illness of Dad’s. When they were in India, if I arrived for a visit with Dad in his hospital room and he had been expecting me, he’d be sitting up with his hair combed and wearing cologne, somehow always managing to look fresh. If I stopped by without warning, he immediately pulled himself together, sat up, and put on a strong front. He knew how much I’d always looked up to him, and he was determined not to let his illness get in the way of that.

  He was also determined not to let his illness get in the way of my career. Throughout most of my father’s hospitalizations—and there were many during the two years that followed his remission—my mother always said to me, “Just go to work. He’ll be fine. He wants you to work.” And I knew that was true. If I visited him in the middle of the day, he would say to me, “Why are you here? Why aren’t you on set?”

  Time passed with few bright spots in my father’s situation. Early in 2013, I was nominated for a TOIFA—Times of India Film Award—for Best Actress for the role of Jhilmil in Barfi! The awards ceremony was to be held in Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada, that year on April 6, and while I hadn’t won any other awards for my role as an autistic young woman in that movie, I thought I had a reasonably good chance of winning this one. More than anything, I wanted my father to be there to share in the recognition. He had been my biggest cheerleader my entire life, voicing his encouragement loudly—sometimes embarrassingly loudly—every time I won even the smallest award from the age of two on. And he had earned this celebratory moment, if indeed I were to win, with all the help and support he’d given me along the way, and all the sacrifices he and my mother had made on my behalf. I knew he couldn’t travel easily—he was weak and in pain, and had to wear bile duct drainage bags inside his shirts—but I also knew that he had to make a trip to North America anyway, for treatment in Rochester. And I thought the awards ceremony might be a bright spot for him. So at dinner one night I casually mentioned the idea of combining the trips to Vancouver and Rochester.

  Immediately, Dad was hell-bent on going. “Yes! I’ll come for the TOIFA ceremony, and then I’ll go to Rochester for my treatment, and then I’ll take a break and come home!” As if it were all very casual, this trip between continents, when of course it wasn’t casual at all. It would be grueling for him. When the time came, he and my mom left days ahead of time from India so that they could build in breaks on the long trip west across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, and then all the way across the North American continent to British Columbia. Then Dad rested for three days in the Vancouver hotel before the actual event.

  When I walked into his hotel room for the first time after I’d landed in Canada, I took one look at him and said, “You don’t have to do this, Dad.”

  Seeing him lying exhausted on the bed, with all his tubes and bags, it was impossible to imagine him having the strength to get dressed, much less make it to an awards ceremony. Mom waited for the right moment, then took me aside and said she agreed with me.

  “I’ve come all this way for exactly this and I’m going to be there to watch her win this award,” he called from his bed, knowing exactly what we were talking about even if he couldn’t actually hear us. Mom tried to argue with him but he would have none of it.

  He made it there. He wore a suit and tucked his drainage bags under his shirt and tie. We used a wheelchair to get him through the hotel and then the theater, where he sat next to me in the front row. When the Best Actress category came up near the end of the ceremony and my name was called, he radiated joy. I could literally feel it emanating from him. I had thought I might ask him to come up with me if I won, but I hadn’t said anything to him, not knowing if he would be able. Now it seemed only right to accept the award with him at my side. “Will you come onstage with me?” I asked. And he did. It took what felt like an eternity for him to walk to the stage, but he made it. In my acceptance speech I thanked all the people I’d worked with on the film—including, of course, my director, Anurag Basu, and my co-actors Ranbir Kapoor and Ileana D’Cruz—and with my father standing next to me, I thanked him, too, “for teaching me to take chances and to stand up for what I believe in: for truth.”

  And then my beautiful father gathered his strength and spoke to the audience: “I thank you a lot from my heart for your love and blessings. You have truly recogn
ized a true actor; I am so very grateful.” My father was alluding to the fact that while I had received great critical acclaim for my unusual, unglamorous role in Barfi! I hadn’t received major award recognition. That was Dad, standing up for me one last time.