Dear father

she's better known as raj kapoor's daughter and amitabh bachchan's samdhan. yet, in her own way, ritu nanda is buzzing with creativity, whether it is launching an insurance portal or providing a corporate art service. kaveree bamzai meets the woman of spice and substance. imagine. a giant ruby ring encircled by diamonds. a choker of precious pearls.a bottle blonde hairdo that artfully conceals grey hair. not what you would expect from one of the country's most successful lic agents, one among a 800,000-strong workforce, and who's sold 20,000 jeevan dhara policies. but that's ritu nanda, whose eyes smile at you with an eerie resemblance to raj kapoor, a father she says she never really knew. "it was only when i was working on a book on him that i discovered him." her most precious find: that despite his well-publicised affairs and all the pain she had seen her mother go through, "papa really loved her". and more than that, "papa really loved us, the children". growing up in the rk house in chembur, mumbai, being part of the first family of filmdom, was never easy. "there was never any thought that the girls, rima (her sister, younger by eight years) and i, would go into films. bebo and lolo (kareena and karisma kapoor, her nieces) are now distinguishing themselves, but for us it was unimaginable. the only time i was allowed to act was with chintoo (rishi kapoor) and daboo (randhir kapoor) when i had to cross the road in shree 420. it was a rain scene and i was given a free umbrella. i was ecstatic." with six months still to go for her arts degree at st xavier's college, at 20, she dropped out of college, and married rajan nanda, heir to escorts. she decided she had to work if she wanted the companionship of her marriage to endure. "my husband is a workaholic. i had to earn his respect. i had to start working," she says. in 1980, after 11 years of marriage, she started, with nikitasha, a kitchenware company that grew too fast. "the bottom fell out," she now recalls. the company went kaput and nanda became — of all things — an lic agent. "many laughed. but it was my mission to give credibility to the profession of an lic agent." which she's done with her insurance portal and her five insurance training colleges. though her childhood must have been painful — "papa had no time for us," she says — it left her wiser. "i see so much of myself in my daughter-in-law shweta," she says. shweta, daughter of amitabh bachchan, married her son nikhil in 1997. they now have two children, and nanda couldn't be happier. "the book helped me get over my father's death. my mother had been my real parent, she still holds the family together. of course, there were moments that i remember with papa. he would like the mogra and harsingar flowers. i would keep them by his bedside. and i would write him little notes as we'd never see him. his life was his work," she says with the pain of a neglected daughter. and yet when he died in 1988, she says, he had nothing. "you know, he hadn't come to delhi only to get his dadasaheb phalke award. he had come to get amnesty for his tax liabilities. his lifetime's income had gone in taxes. he was an artiste, not a commercial man." which is why even at 52, one of her most prized possessions is the piano her father got her from the song in sangam: dost, dost na raha. "who knows what trouble he went to to get it," she wonders. being the daughter of a showman, and surviving with your soul and spirit intact is something even raj kapoor would doff his lal topi at.