BOOK EXCERPT: Unscripted; Conversations on life and cinema

VVC: Yes, my younger sister, Shelly. You may not know this, but I was an unwanted child because I was the seventh boy in the family, and my mother had really wanted a daughter. She had a close friend, a Mrs Darshana Kapoor, who didn’t have any children, so she told Mrs Kapoor that if she gave birth to another son, she’d give Mrs Kapoor the baby. But my father scuttled the idea. Today I could have been Vinod Kapoor instead of Vinod Chopra.

AJ: Was your father a disciplinarian?

VVC: He was very strict about his value system. We were shit-scared of him if ever he lost his temper. Did I tell you that I used to steal when I was young? I started stealing from the age of eight and this went on till I was fifteen. I used the money to buy things that I enjoyed eating. In our family, we had a tradition of sitting together at meal times. A couple of times a week, we would have lamb or paneer. My mother served everyone and we all got our fair share—typically two small pieces of lamb or paneer. We were given a fixed amount of food on a thali. And that’s all we would have. No second helpings. Even after all these years, I still think it’s fascinating I can now have as many helpings as I want, because that’s not how we were brought up.

AJ: So you stole to buy things to eat. Who did you steal from?

VVC: From the gods. When my mother prayed in our puja room, she put a few coins in a small tin of Lipton tea that she sealed with dhoop. Tea was sold in square tin boxes back then, so this was her kind of piggy bank. So with a thin bit of wire, I had mastered the art of prising a few coins out of the box. I became quite skilled at it. I was studying at DAV School in Amira Kadal, and during the lunch break, I would buy sweets and chole-bhature from the tuck shop with the money I stole. I did not take all the coins from her tin box in one go, so my mother didn’t realize for a long time what I was doing. But then I became greedy and overconfident and one day I took out all the coins and left only one coin in the tin box. That made everyone suspicious. The next day my mother and my elder brother, Vijay Praji, hid in the adjoining room and through a hole in the wooden slats watched me fiddling with the wire and the piggy bank. As soon as I prised out a coin, they came into the room and caught me red-handed. My mother slapped the hell out of me.