Sonali Bendre Behl on her cancer scar: “I don’t find it ugly anymore”

“I’ve probably endorsed every haircare brand there is in India at some point in my life,” recalls Sonali Bendre Behl as we sit down to chat in her Juhu home. “In fact, my first movie came after shooting the Parachute hair oil commercial.” It’s mid-January, and the Behls are having an extended Christmas—a smattering of pine cone ornaments and mistletoe wreaths stand out in their beige living room. Amidst throne-sized armchairs, vintage spotlight lamps and a heavy wrought iron centre table, Bendre, dressed in black sweat pants and T-shirt, looks diminutive, almost sinking into the oversized sofa as Icy, her beloved Golden Retriever, finds a cosy spot to keep her feet warm.

Bendre’s signature coiffure is gone. Instead, she is sporting a short crop today with the confidence she must have had in her modelling days. Most of us will agree that haircuts possess a transformative quality. In movies, they work as a powerful visual device to denote personal transformation; in real life they signal a fresh start and often come documented on social media with the hashhtag #NewMe. However, cancer shaves are a sobering moment. And even as we find ourselves surrounded by more and more bald icons in the 21st century— Sinéad O’Connor, Amber Rose, Adwoa Aboah and even Mad Max’s Furiosa—the mane, for most women, acquires an all-encompassing life of its own. “I’m okay with it now… I don’t even miss it,” says Bendre as she runs her hand neck upwards. “Yet it [my hair] was the be-all, end-all of my life. It was this stupid thing that I was hanging on to,” she shares. “My instinct was to wear a cap, a scarf or a wig—but these things are so ugly. I knew that if I had to accept it [going bald], I had to put a picture out there. Because once you share it on social media, you can feel the release.”

Rock steady

Last year, on July 4, as Americans around her were celebrating their 242nd Independence Day, Bendre, too, decided to set herself free. She posted a candid confession on Instagram, revealing that she was in New York seeking treatment after being “diagnosed with a high-grade cancer that has metastasised.” She explains the progression of her endometrial cancer almost as if she is talking to her 13-year-old son, Ranveer: “It was all over. My scan showed the cancer spread across like fairy lights, lit and twinkling.”

Parenthood has had a stabilising effect in her dealings with cancer. “Ranveer was at a summer camp in Austria when we found out. I knew I had to begin treatment soon and that would mean missing his 13th birthday,” she says, unable to hold back a tear. “I had to tell him but I knew I wanted him with us so we could deal with it as a unit.”

Upon receiving the news, Ranveer started attending his mom’s appointments, asked the doctors “a hundred questions,” kept track of her diet and ensured her surroundings were sanitised. “Frankly, it was such a relief telling him. Just having him playing around us made it all normal.”

And even though everyone’s cancer experience is individual, cancer itself is not an individual battle—it’s as difficult on the family as it is on the patient. Bendre calls Goldie Behl her “rock” and “strength”—the past year, her filmmaker husband split his days between New York and Mumbai, as he juggled his roles as husband and dad. “I couldn’t have done it without him,” she says. “Through cancer, I saw my son and my friends’ kids grow up,” says Bendre, who dismisses any reservations that parents face in having open conversations about illnesses.

Head strong

“My first thought was to hide it because it was a disease. I thought my ‘brand’ is over—all along I had been endorsing healthy eating and health-focused products, and suddenly it was all gone,” she sighs. Like most mindful people who have never led a life of excess, Bendre couldn’t look beyond the niggling question: Why me? “It was only when my oncologist said that I had fourth-stage cancer and a 30 per cent chance that my whole world view changed.”

Some people become their illness, while others hide behind it. Bendre has found a path between. “Suddenly I didn’t see any reason not to talk about it. I had done nothing wrong; it was not my fault I had cancer, so why was I hiding it?”

While positive hashtags like #Switchonthesunshine and #Onedayatatime are part of her coping mechanism to move on every time she feels overwhelmed, Bendre agrees that it’s okay to have an off-day. “It’s unreal to remain positive all the time. There will be overcast days,” she notes. “I wanted to tell anyone who was feeling low that it’s okay to have negative emotions. We will feel high and low, and our job is to just try and prolong those highs.”

She recalls the day a sudden paroxysm took over and she decided to shave her head in the bathroom. “It was that very typical meltdown-in-a-shower scene. There was nothing new about it—it was exactly how you see it in books and movies, where the protagonist takes a razor and shaves it off…” It was nothing like she’d imagined. “I wanted to write a new story, but it was the same old scene. My idea was to go for a haircut with my girlfriends, open a bottle of champagne and toast to the one glass I was allowed to have before I shaved my head! So that scene remains.”

Was there a moment when she looked at the mirror and couldn’t connect with herself? “No,” she says, “I’ve always liked looking glamorous. Who doesn’t like looking good? And I remember looking at myself and thinking, I don’t feel ugly.”

Second life

But the physical and emotional changes and their acceptance has been gradual. Today, Bendre has moved from her pathology of perfection—the obsession to have a perfect body and other such unrealistic ideals and insecurities are all stubborn relics of her past life in the glamour business.

The illness caused a stir in her work-life balance—on the outside she had to cut short the shooting of her reality television show, India’s Best Dramebaaz, and internally she had to form a new bond with her body. “I have a more loving relationship with my body for what it has gone through. I started thanking it for what it was doing… how it was healing itself and taking me forward. I’m more comfortable with my body now and I don’t want to unnecessarily stress it or have unrealistic goals,” she tells me. “I’m okay with some saggy, loose bits here, some cellulite there.”

At the shoot, Bendre wears her scars proudly. “I don’t find it ugly anymore. In fact, I find it beautiful and I don’t know when that shift happened,” she pauses, only to add with her signature humour, “And one side of me is really relieved; I don’t need to stress about a two-piece anymore or the fact that I don’t have a flat stomach.”

Besides the physical transformation, the cancer has also brought about other realisations. “I thought I was a loner, but during my time in New York I surrounded myself with family and friends. When I thought about what I’d miss and why I wanted to stay alive, it was always a relationship that was holding me,” says Bendre. She compares her couch to a confession box where visitors pour in with stories and secrets. “I knew all these friends for so many years, but I really got to know them well now when they shared their own stories.”

Online, equally engaging conversations on cancer have helped her gather information and knowledge on a subject she didn’t know much about. Social media—that much-maligned space known as the birthplace of trolls—has ironically been a source of joy to her. On Instagram, her admission was met with a torrential response by wellwishers. “Sharing the news lightened my burden. I learned how common cancer was—people reached out to me from different towns and cities, different stratas, they spoke in different languages and came from different age groups. It taught me that I was not alone.”

Additionally, her popular book club (on Facebook, Sonali’s Book Club boasts of over 14,686 fans) continued to inspire. “Just keeping that book club going gave me a lifeline,” she confesses. “I couldn’t read dark and difficult books during my treatment and my fans came together with light reading recommendations. My book club became a support group of sorts because of how invested its members were in my life,” she tells me.

So surely, when the time came, she didn’t shy away from sharing her cropped hair look with her fans. She posted a photo thanking her friends Sussanne Khan and Gayatri Oberoi, while also noting that “nowadays, I spend far less time in getting ready because I don’t have to fuss on my hair.” Through her journey, the old cliché about laughter being the best medicine turned out to be true. “Goldie and I found a way to laugh through the cancer. We love New York, and we decided to treat my time there as a holiday with a few days of chemotherapy. We even came up with code words for my life—AC (after cancer) and BC (before cancer),” she smiles.

Yes we can

Her overall outlook is refreshing considering that even today the taboo around cancer remains intense. With questions of mortality looming, the grim prognosis that haunts many cancer patients while measuring their progress on the Kaplan-Meier Estimator and the mental, physical and emotional effect it leaves on them is terrifying. The statistics, too, are far from uplifting—in the last 26 years, cancer has more than doubled in India. Today it is the second most common cause of death, after cardiovascular disease. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) estimates over 17.3 lakh new cancer cases (and over 8.8 lakh deaths) by 2020.

And though once seen as the great unmentionable C, today curable cancer is providing a new lens that allows us to see it as any other form of illness. Take it from our new poster girls of resilience—Sex And The City’s Cynthia Nixon to musicians like Kylie Minogue and Sheryl Crow and, closer to home, Lisa Ray, Manisha Koirala and Tahira Kashyap; they all prove that it’s possible to live a full life with (and after) cancer. Like Bendre, these are women who are shifting the conversation around cancer by moving it beyond surviving to thriving and dispensing the vocabulary that sees them as survivors and fighters. “I’m not going to be a martyr or a victim,” she tells me. “And brave? When I walked out of the airport showing my bald head, everyone said, You are so brave. Why is that so brave? I think people have done far braver things,” she adds.

The Vogue shoot marked her return to the studio, and a commercial project is up next. For now, she has no plans to write a book, but she’s bent on returning to work. Ask her if there’s one thing she looks forward to in 2019, and she doesn’t take time to reply: “A blow-dry!”

Photographed by R Burman. Styled by Anaita Shroff Adjania

Assistant stylist: Priyanka Parkash. Makeup: Divya Chablani. Production: Ankita Chandra, Danielle Pereira. 

Also read:

Sonali Bendre’s message to parents who are battling serious illnesses

Her daughter’s brush with cancer made this woman create a superhero

Ways to bring positivity and happiness into your life every single day