The Life and Times of India’s Greatest Tragedienne Vinod Mehta’s riveting account of Meena Kumari’s life begins with her death, weeks after the release of her swan-song Pakeezah. He goes back in time to Meetawala Chawl in Dadar East, where she was born, and to the flats and mansions she lived in, the studios where she worked, the hospital where she died and the cemetery she was cremated in. Having never met the star, Mehta talks to all those who were close to her – her much-maligned husband Kamal Amrohi, her sisters, her in-laws, her colleagues and co-stars – to create a complex portrait of a woman who carefully cultivated the image of someone ‘unfairly exploited and betrayed by her lovers and lady luck’. It was a picture that blended with her on-screen persona. The media had, after all, already anointed her Hindi cinema’s ‘great tragedienne’.