I Was Thinking Of Quitting Acting

I hadn’t worked for three-and-a-half years. I felt the industry was based on who you knew. I didn’t belong to a network.

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Nearly 25 years ago, Mira Nair made a joyful film celebrating North Indian Punjabi and the NRI culture.

Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and introduced us to the charming, petite actress Tillotama Shome. She played Alice, the domestic help of a rich Punjabi family, who falls in love with the street-smart hustler PK Dubey (Vijay Raaz).

After the success of Monsoon Wedding, Tillotama spent a few years in New York honing her acting skills and then decided to return to India. She got work in international productions like Waiting City (2009), Gangor (2010) and Sold (2014) but they were barely seen in India.

During her years of struggle, Shome managed to get some challenging roles in Shanghai (2012), Qissa: A Tale of the Lonely Ghost (2013), A Death in the Gunj (2016) and Sir (2018). But it is only in the recent years that she has finally established her presence in films and OTT, with Web series like Delhi Crime (2022), The Night Manager (2023), Lust Stories (2023), Kota Factory (2024), Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper (2024) and the recent Paatal Lok 2 (2025).

In February, Shome was at the Berlinale for the premiere of her new Bengali film Baksho Bondi (Shadowbox), directed by the couple Tanushree Das and Saumyananada Sahi. In one of the strongest performances of her career, Shome plays Maya, a lower middle-class woman struggling to keep her family, including husband Sundar afloat. The film has 19 producers attached to it, including Shome herself. “I had to be in my 40s to play these women in their 40s. You wouldn’t have managed to explain that to me in my 20s and 30s.