THE JOY CHAPTER

With the best years of her career in front of her and a daughter she hopes to give the world to, Kiara Advani is stepping into her most intentional era yet: present, luminous and unmistakably herself.

- By MEGHNA PANT. Photographed by YUNG HUA CHEN. Styled by SAMAR RAJPUT.

JOY, I'VE LEARNT, is rarely the fireworks we're promised. It slips in through the cracks instead: the soft exhale of a child drifting off to sleep, the quiet of a set after the last light is adjusted, the moment a woman stops asking for permission to be who she is. It is not spectacle as much as it is stamina, a tenderness that shows up when the day has scraped you thin.

It is this kind of joy I am thinking about on a blush-gold November afternoon at Mumbai's Mehboob Studios. The building has seen everything—heartbreak and heroism, reinvention and ruin, comebacks and collapses. But as I push open the heavy metal door of Stage 2, the air seems to vibrate with something gentler. Not the manic, adrenaline-fuelled energy of a blockbuster set, but a softer hum.

Inside, 30 people are choreographing the kind of chaos that only looks effortless in the final frame. A stylist balances a tray of bubblegum bows like a Parisian patissier. A production assistant yells for safety pins, someone else for more blush. The lighting crew wrestles a massive diffuser that sways like an indecisive cloud. In the centre of it all, calmly seated in a pastel chair, serene amidst the storm, is Kiara Advani, in her first photoshoot since becoming a mother last July. But make no mistake, this is not an actor 'coming back' from maternity leave—her most recent film, War 2, was one of 2025's most anticipated releases, and an ambitious bilingual film is slated for a March release. Advani's work has continued, the momentum never fully broken. Her life, it seems, has widened, and her selfhood has expanded to make room for it.