Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; November 8, 2017)

On October 6, 2015, Kalpana Lajmi had admitted to fighting a spirited battle against a kidney tumour with the film fraternity rallying around her. Talking to Mirror while undergoing dialysis, the writer-producer-director had informed that a kidney had been removed, along with the lymph nodes, but there would be tests every three months for the next two years. “Till the last day of my life, I will have to undergo dialysis three times a week and it doesn’t come cheap. But thanks to the generous Aamir Khan and his wife Kiran (Rao), my dialysis bills have been covered for the next six months,” she had said, going on to thank Rohit Shetty for his Rs 2 lakh contribution, Vinta Nanda for lending a helping hand and Ashoke Pandit for setting up a corpus fund to help her tide over the medical crisis till she could work again.

Two years later, Kalpana was back in a suburban hospital on Sunday after she collapsed following a trip to Vashi the previous day to attend a memorial function on the occasion of her late partner, singer-composer-musician-filmmaker Bhupen Hazarika’s sixth death anniversary. “I’m still unwell and I have been falling ill frequently. My potassium level shot up on Sunday and I suffered a kind of a cardiac arrest at around 7 am. I got my driver to take me to a nearby hospital where I’m being treated by Dr Gini Dayal and Dr Niranjan Kulkarni. I’m hoping to be discharged today,” she informed Mirror from the ICU, lauding the efforts of her brother Devdas Lajmi and mother Lalita Lajmi, as also uncle Shyam Benegal and friends like Vinta Nanda, Amit Khanna, Neena Gupta, Shalini Pradhan, Mahesh Bhatt, wife Soni Razdan and their actress daughter Alia for being extremely supportive in these troubled times.

Once she is back home, Kalpana plans to start work on an exhaustive 75,000-word memoir which will chronicle her journey with Hazarika. “I’m writing the book myself. I have a publisher in Harper Collins and we are hoping to release it next year on on September 8, Bupenda’s 92nd birth anniversary,” she maintained, adding that she has also found a producer for a film based on the book. “Sanjeev Narayan who runs a channel in Assam has come forward to make the film. I’m in talks with Prosenjit Chatterjee to play Bhupenda. The body may have grown weak but the mind is strong and the heart is willing. With God’s grace and everyone’s support I hope to live these dual dreams soon,” she signed off on an ebullient note.