When Meena Kumari spent her last days alone, with only her diary for company in which she wrote her world

Meena Kumari

Meena Kumari was adored by millions, but when the lights dimmed and the curtains fell, the Paakezah actress was left with no one, except her diary.

India’s beloved “Tragedy Queen” breathed her last at just 38, penniless, heartbroken, and surrounded by the silence of a room that had witnessed her pain.

Born Mahajabeen, she had carried the weight of her family from childhood, stepping in front of the camera when she should have been playing outside. The glamorous career came, but at a steep price. Success brought heartbreak, a troubled marriage, and an escape into alcohol. Her diary became her last refuge, a secret companion where she poured what the world could never see.

“Leaves from my diary” in the July 1957 issue of Filmfare magazine, penned by Meena Kumari, revealed her side  that audiences never saw, a sensitive, self-critical, deeply poetic thinker.

She recalled her shy childhood vividly: “I was very shy and thin at the time, and I suffered from a self-consciousness which remained with me for years.”

Nicknamed “Chini” in her younger days because of her delicate looks, Meena Kumari  confessed that the teasing only deepened her sense of inadequacy. The actress admitted to carrying this fragility well into adulthood.

“When I was six, my younger sister Madhuri also started working in films. Since nobody called her ‘Chini’ either in the family or outside it, my inferiority complex continued to live with me.”

Her writings also capture moments of youthful rebellion. When pressured to act as a child, she once protested with fiery resolve:

"A director had to rush onto the set and remonstrate with me in a high voice, maintaining and threatening my mother. The director shouted at me and said, “You fool! Do as you’re told or I’ll shoot you dead!” I refused point-blank, indignant at the idea of enacting the rusty floor for no reason that I could see."

Meena Kumari

A girl, who wanted to go to School

In a deeply personal reflection, Meena recalls how her childhood yearning for education was repeatedly crushed by circumstance and father hesitation, "Desire to be educated and to live like other children was throttled in the bud."

"Later, I began to demand to be sent to school. Reading fascinated me, and I also began to loathe my work and everything connected with it. My father continued his persistent pleadings, but to no avail. After a little persuasion, he more than once, at his successful best, took me to school, fixed up my admission. But father, being too indulgent and therefore weak, invariably brought me back. Thus the desire to be educated and to live like other children was throttled in the bud. I went on, nevertheless, and my fondness for reading increased and a bitter longing for education grew sharper and stronger. My wish was never gratified and I lost myself in a dream," she wrote.

A broken marriage

When she wrote about her marriage to filmmaker Kamal Amrohi, her diary carried a mix of hope and irony: “My life, such as it is — and it is breathtakingly lovely — completed a full circle in 1953 when Kamaal and I were married.”

But in one chilling entry, found years later, she admitted: “I have never loved Kamal Amrohi.” Those words, written in solitude, spoke volumes about her strained marriage to the filmmaker. According to Vinod Mehta’s biography, when Kamal Amrohi secretly discovered that line, it widened the rift between them. The diary, in many ways, was her silent rebellion.

When her mother died

Meena Kumari’s words carry the weight of loss, as she looked back on the fleeting happiness that slipped away too soon, in her diary she recalled:

"But life goes on and death comes inevitably with it. Nothing of real joy stays the way it is. After a year of unforgettable happiness in our new home, mother died.I was heart-broken. I felt alone again, as I had done when I used to go to work and other children went to school."

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"My motherless complex returned, fed by my loneliness and by my desperate longing for her continued guidance. My mother had been my confidante, friend, guide and solace."

Loneliness and Reflection

Her films—Pakeezah, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Aarti, Parineeta—turned her into an immortal face of sorrow. But her verses showed another Meena. A poet who longed for peace, who questioned love, who felt crushed by the demands of a film industry that celebrated her tragedies but forgot the woman behind them.

Lyricist Gulzar, who shared a deep bond with her in her final years, became the custodian of her words. As her health collapsed due to cirrhosis of the liver, she handed over her diaries to him, perhaps the only gesture of trust left in her fractured world. After her death in 1972, Gulzar compiled her poems into Tanha Chand (Lonely Moon), a haunting book that still resonates with anyone who has ever felt abandoned.

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“She lived her cinema,” one old filmmaker once remarked. Maybe that was true. Her real life often mirrored her on-screen roles—tragic heroines caught in webs of loneliness. But when the applause faded, it was her diary, not people, that stayed by her side.

Today, more than five decades later, Meena Kumari isn’t just remembered as the star of Pakeezah. She is remembered as a poet, a woman who turned her suffering into art.