In her feelings

Having hung up her It-girl shoes, Lisa Haydon has built a formidable arsenal in defence of her wellbeing. Between gulps of khichdi and gasps of air, the model and actor takes MEGHA SHAH through her inner workings and ruminates on the unexpected turn her life has taken.

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Within the first few minutes of our lunch, Lisa Haydon tears up. Twice. Three things become immediately clear. First, she's extremely likeable, a real girl's girl with the kind of disarming sincerity that makes you want to root for her and hope you can be friends. Second, in the almost-decade that she's largely stayed away from the public eye, she's been through significant turmoil and transformation that have changed her foundationally. And third, this is going to be a challenging interview.

I'm waiting for Haydon in the maximalist parlour of Scarlett House, Malaika Arora's buzzy Indo-Portuguese restaurant in Mumbai's Pali village. "Hey," she says upon arriving, upbeat but apprehensive. "I'm Lisa." I'm expecting a glittering, jet-setting former It girl to show up and, instead, a goofy mom of three sporting printed tights and a body-morphing tee plops down on the chair opposite me, her eyes brimming with tears.

"I'm so sorry," she purrs in an accent I can't quite discern.

"My agent sent me your questions on the way here. They're deep, and the answers run deeper. I don't know if you're ready for that." She wipes away the moisture from her eyes as she observes my surprise. "I thought you would just ask me about my skincare," she laughs, lightening the tenor. "No one in the public has ever wanted to know me in this way." At 39, Haydon looks refreshingly like herself with ebony hair, face wash-commercial skin and no apparent makeup. Unlike many of her contemporaries, not to mention much younger actors, she doesn't seem to have plumped her fine lines into the atmosphere. Her face, youthful in its planes and shadows, the near-perfect symmetry accentuated by the ambient light of the restaurant, is made for the screen.