This was the family in which Nargis grew up, acquiring a carefully polished Bombay education even as she began an acting career, first as a child actor in her mother's films and then, when she was 14, beginning her career as the female lead with Mehboob Khan’s Taqdeer.

And Darlingji is really the story of this intelligent, affectionate and altogether remarkable woman. In the course of her career, Nargis would play both the westernised woman and the conventional Bharatiya nari, but her iconic role would be Radha in Mother India. In her life after cinema, she would involve herself in meaningful social work, a tradition that Sunil would continue after her death (the Nargis Dutt Critical Care Centre at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, a project of the Nargis Dutt Memorial Foundation, has benefited innumerable cancer patients). Desai’s book shows how, despite the sceptics, Nargis and Sunil Dutt went on to build a happy and lasting partnership that would endure the ups and downs they would face in their life together — including Sanjay’s drug habit and Nargis’s battle with cancer.

One of Desai’s main sources of information, and a most interesting one, is the Dutt family archive. For this is a chatty, communicative family, whose members are constantly writing not only to each other but also for themselves, especially as a record of memorable times — on postcards, letters, telegrams, diaries, baby books and more. Sunil and Nargis were writing little notes to each other all the time, addressing each other in different ways: often playfully, as “Pia” and “Hey There”; occasionally decorously, as “Dutt Sahib” and “Mama”; and once, days before their wedding, deeply hurt that she had not told him about her Filmfare Best Actress Award for Mother India, Sunil wrote a letter addressing her as “My Dear Padma Shri” and signing as “A Junior Artiste”.

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