Glimpses from Anshula Kapoor’s emotional speech — where she remembers her late mother Mona Shourie — at the Spoken Fest 2024 have been winning the internet for two weeks. Both Janhvi Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor gave Anshula a shoutout on their social media handles for her moving speech, reminiscing about Mona and the life lessons she imparted to the 33-year-old entrepreneur.
Now, Kommune India has released the full video of Anshula’s speech on its YouTube Channel, which left many teary-eyed. While performing at the festival on February 3, coinciding with Mona’s 60th birth anniversary, Anshula recalled how her late mother would always end a phone call with ‘Rabb Rakha (May God protect you)’. “Endings have always been difficult for me. I’m bad even at ending a phone call, but my mother had it figured out. It was her habit to end every phone conversation with ‘Rabb Rakha,’ which was her way of saying ‘I’ll see you soon,’” shared Anshula, adding that the words gave her hope and strength. The video also shows Arjun wiping off his tears. After battling cancer, Mona passed away on March 25, 2012.
Anshula Kapoor remembers the time when she learned about her mother’s deteriorating condition, narrating, “In Feb 2012, I was in my final year of my Bachelor’s degree, studying in New York when the doctors told us that mom’s cancer had spread to her brain and her spinal fluid, and that she may have had five months to a year left with us when I flew back home.”
Even with her poor health, when she momentarily regained her ‘lost’ voice, Mona gave Anshula a list of things to finish on a phone call. “Beta, make sure to pay the Tata sky bill and refill the MNTL account. Bhul na jaao isliye likh lena (write these down lest you forget it). Don’t forget to pick up Arjun’s curtains from the laundry but even then, her once vivid, vicious voice had already started feeling and sounding so much more timid and sunken.”
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A visibly choked Anshula said she tried to remember her mother’s every breath on that call not knowing that Mona was counting her last ones on the hospital bed. “I went over this last conversation of ours over and over again in my head trying to memorize every detail, remembering her high notes and her pauses,” she shared.
Addressing the grief she suffered after her mother’s demise, Anshula Kapoor said she felt like her world had collapsed and as “if her spinal cord was getting detached from the rest of her body”. “I remember frantically trying to search for any last message, a letter, an SMS, or even a list of tasks that were incomplete and left for me to finish, from my mother. I was convinced that this is not how Maa would say goodbye because she was always so good with endings and this was the most final of all ends so where was the love and hope I was supposed to find with this story during those two months,” expressed Anshula, stressing that one of her worst fears—forgetting what mom looks like when she was happy—was almost becoming true.
“I realised I no longer remembered her voice. I couldn’t hear one voice I heard most of all for 21 years of my life, the voice that put me to sleep, the voice that asked me every day ‘khana khaya kya khaya?,’ the voice that took away all my insecurities and fears, the only voice that always said the right things, in my head,” she narrated.
She wondered how she could live in a world where she could no longer see her mother or hear her voice again. “I kept wishing that we had more photos and videos of her but ours wasn’t a generation of selfies or an Insta Story. I was not the kind of person who was constantly recording everything happening around me. I rushed through all the family albums that I could find—any little video footage that we had collected over the years for that one glimpse of maa, just one but maa is nowhere to be found. Her voice was still missing for five long months of breakdowns and constantly berating myself for not being able to keep my Maa’s memory alive,” Anshula revealed.
Anshula, then, shunned herself from spending time with her friends, family, and from the world because she thought everything was a distraction from hearing mom’s voice. “I remember wishing Maa to help me make this ending better. I kept rummaging through all the video footage that I could find over and over and over again trying to find that one glimpse of my mom and I never succeeded because I was doing it all wrong. One day, sitting on the bed, I decided to try again and I opened my laptop and went through every folder that had any video in it, and there it was… that elusive five-second voice clip of my Maa talking to our dog,” said Anshula while fighting back tears.
“Hi baby!” echoed the voice played on Anshula’s phone. “Her voice brought back 21 years of my mom back to me. It was like a beacon of hope for a ship that had been sinking for far too long. I remember sharing the clip with my brother immediately because I found Maa. She was always there with me. When I look back now, I see that my grief was so heavy that in order to protect myself from feeling any more pain that I perhaps would not have been able to handle, my brain locked me out of accessing any memories of my mom,” she recalled.
Anshula recalled how the voice gave her hope and inspiration, “I was now ready to listen to whatever it was that she had to say. “Tujhe Jo banana hai, tujhe jo karna hai tu, kar bas khush reh (You do whatever you want, be what you want to be, just be happy),’ she always said this to me. She stressed, ‘What do you do with your life just make sure your heart is singing.’ I never understood what that meant. I just hadn’t understood how powerful a song, a laugh, or voice can be. Today is her birth anniversary. She would have been 60 today,” said Anshula before signing off with ‘Rabb Rakha!’
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