Tahira Kashyap Khurrana believes she is a storyteller at heart, the medium does not matter. The writer-filmmaker, whose latest book The 7 Sins of Being A Mother is being talked about, is now focusing on Sharmaji Ki Beti. The multi-generational story — featuring Divya Dutta, Sakshi Tanwar and Saiyami Kher — is her debut feature film after short film Pinni and a segment in Feels Like Ishq. “It took four years [to see the film through]. I fell sick, and then the two lockdowns [delayed matters]. But through it all, the thought of abandoning the project never came to me,” says the director, asserting that every hurdle “made my film better.”

Kashyap is currently riding high on the praise her book is receiving. Through the 145-pager, she talks about the unreasonable pressure new mothers face to get back in shape, the raging hormones, and underlines that mothers are not the superhumans that society expects them to be. “I am unapologetic while writing. I am done with the effort to be pretentious; I don’t want to be holier-than-thou. Whenever I write, my idea is that people should evolve. My way of conveying messages is through quirkiness and humour. When people laugh, the taboo becomes less of a stigma. When I write about how I forgot my baby at a restaurant, I am trying to reduce the judgment and make people realise it’s only human to slip. There is no correct version of being a mother.”

Is there a tendency to practice diplomacy in her writing, since husband Ayushmann Khurrana is a leading star? Kashyap says, “He reads all my material; I read all his scripts. But we don’t need each other’s permission or validation. We don’t impose our ideologies on each other.”