“When I grew up a little and began to understand the world around me, I saw a queen in my mom!” That is how Boman Irani remembers his mother Jerbanoo Irani, who passed away recently at the age of 94. The 63-year-old actor’s heartfelt tribute to his mother that he shared on Instagram touched a chord with many.

Boman says, “My idea was to celebrate her life. So many have lost their dear ones during the second wave of Coronavirus, I didn’t want to add to that sadness. I made sure that what I wrote was inspiring rather than tragic. No matter what your age is, when you lose your mother, it’s going to be difficult, but what a wonderful life she has had. She lost her husband and daughter, yet she was all about the spirit. She exuded an attitude of ‘Okay, let’s get this done’. My mother took care of everything — handling children, business, day-to-day problems and to top it, giving us a good time. I don’t know where she found the resilience to do that.”

For someone who was not well-versed with banking work, the prospect of taking up the responsibility of a business and bringing up four children single-handedly must have been terrifying. But the actor says that’s exactly what made his mother tick. “She became a hero not because she was fearless, but because she was afraid of what was going to happen to her four children after her husband’s death,” he says.

Boman calls himself an extension of his mother, especially when it comes to their shared love for cinema and the arts. “She would make me write down the names of movies she had seen and encourage me to watch them, too. She helped me break out of my shell of shyness, by putting me up on the stage, where I had to act and sing. She was thrilled when I joined theatre and later, on cloud nine when my film Munnabhai MBBS (2003) released. That was pretty late in our lives. I became an actor when I was 44 and she was in her 70s. She came for almost every performance of mine in the play I’m Not Bajirao, which ran for 10 years,” he recalls.

There is one piece of advice that always stayed with the actor when he entered showbiz. His mother would often tell him, ‘You are not an actor for people to praise you. You are an actor, so you can make people smile. Make people happy’. Boman says, “We tend to get caught up in our own talent. But talent is a gift and what’s the gift for? It’s not for your ego to be fanned, but it’s to be put out there as part of the entertainment. It is that simple, but profound!”