Actor Manisha Koirala, who beat cancer a few years ago, has now written about her journey in a brutally-honest book
Labonita Ghosh (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 16, 2018)

In the Spring of 2019, Manisha Koirala plans to climb Mount Everest. This isn’t a metaphor for the actor having overcome insurmountable odds when she beat late-stage cancer a few years ago. Koirala and two friends have made all the arrangements, booked their flights and now are training hard for their mission. “We’re only going till Base Camp,” she says. “Anything higher would be challenging for me.”

Those who knew Koirala from her Bollywood days, where she has often played delicate but steely-eyed characters, might not recognise this new Manisha. Having survived against considerable odds, Koirala now has a new philosophy (“cherish every emotion”), new commitments (“more family time”) and even a ‘new’ body. “It’s just missing a few organs,” she says with a laugh, demonstrating that her sense of humour was not surgically removed along with her organs. “But I’m educating myself about my condition, and learning to live with my changed body.”

In 2012, Koirala’s body was battered by ovarian cancer and painful treatments. She has now co-written a moving, brutally honest book, titled Healed, about how she got past this difficult phase of her life, and will be released later this month. Unlike celebrities who are extremely guarded about their lives, Koirala lays out her pain, her doubts and fears, in raw, disturbing detail. For instance, she describes the experience of her first chemotherapy as a bunch of wolves tearing her insides apart. She also describes how she goes to pieces on learning that she has cancer, and talks quite openly about her alcohol dependence, the string of failed relationships that ended in betrayal and heartbreak, and how her desperation to start a family pushed her into a brief, unhappy marriage and IVF treatments that may have brought on the cancer. “I didn’t want readers to feel cheated when they read about my life,” Koirala says. “I don’t want to portray it as perfect, but I did want to present myself honestly and earnestly through my writing. So whether you love me or hate me, you will know the real me. There are so many versions of me which have come out over the years, and all of them have deviated from my ‘essence’.”

Koirala also wears her survivor’s courage lightly. “All of us have faced unimaginable situations and unimaginable pain,” she says. “Whether its illness or heartbreak or death. I remember Anupam Kher once told me that all of us are survivors. We all live through the pain, anguish and horrors of life.” Koirala’s anchor, apart from her family, has been her spirituality. “I was a total nonbeliever, but cancer (like all fatal diseases), teaches you to be reflective. You wonder ‘why me?’ or ‘what have I done to have brought this upon myself?’. And all that waiting — waiting to know for sure, waiting to see if the treatment will work, waiting to find out if the cancer has metastasised — forces you to learn patience.”

Today, Koirala really believes in pushing herself to do all the things she enjoys but never got time for when she was working 18-hour shifts and shooting for 12 films in a year. Like trekking and hiking, as she recently did while on location in Shimla during the shoot for her 2017 film, Dear Maya. Or taking on more motivational-speaking assignments (she has been doing quite a bit of that lately) where she relives her cancer journey. But as far as films go, she promises to be more choosy than she was during her last innings in Bollywood. “I’m only going to do the films I like,” she says. “What I would really like to do, is direct movies instead.”

That might have to wait. Koirala’s already onto her next book, written in Nepalese, about her politically-renowned family (her grandfather B P Koirala was a former Prime Minister of Nepal, and her father is also active in politics). “I’m tentatively calling it ‘Conversations with my Father’,” she says. “I will also write my memoirs at some point, and that will have all the details about my growing up years and my life in Bollywood [which are glaringly absent in her current book]. And maybe cancer will be incidental in that one.”