As a kid growing up in India, I remember going with my mother Leela Chitnis to the studios all the time.

In fact, I remember her at a time when she had moved on to character roles rather than leading roles. I was quite young at the time but I do remember her acting with Vyjayanthimala, Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Nargis and all those stars.

She was always very well thought of in terms of acting ability; she was very well respected. Unfortunately, I don't remember her talking much about the days when she was a leading lady, but she was very close to some of her compatriots -- Balraj Sahni, whose house I remember going to; Ashok Kumar, Lalita Pawar, Achala Sachdev. I know she respected them a lot.

I was always star struck, and I would go the studios with her and see Nargis, Madhubala and Meena Kumari; I couldn't stop staring at them. My brothers were in boarding school so they were not home much of the time, but I was in Mumbai and I was almost like her business agent in my teens, meeting with producers and directors.

She enjoyed working with Ashok Kumar and as they grew old together, they were very close.

I remember going to the movies with her and crying all the time because she would play the character of this Indian woman, the mother, who is treated badly by the daughter-in-law  -- that was in a film called Maa by Bimal Roy. I would think why is my mother always getting treated so badly, and I would cry.

But at home, she was an adoring, extremely loving mother; she loved all four of us very much. At the same time she was very career oriented, very professional when it came to her work.

As you know, she came into movies at a time when acting in films was still looked down upon. But here she was, one of the first women in films who had a college degree, who was educated. But it was a difficult time for her because of the image that the film profession had then.

Gradually, though, she started playing character roles and my perspective is that in India, the men can continue playing leading roles many, many, many years more than women can. There were persons like Ashok Kumar who continued to be leading men long after my mother had graduated to character roles.

In fact, my nephew and I were flying back recently and we were reading in Time magazine about Katherine Hepburn, who passed away recently, and both of us remarked that she sounded very much like my mother.

She didn't want any fanfare, was devoted to the family, was very well known, very well liked, very well respected, a very assertive woman, and she always got what she wanted.

As a friend of mine says about my mother, "She was liberated before it became fashionable for Indian women to be liberated!"

I remember she was very involved in writing for the Marathi stage, and she even published an autobiography in Marathi. Unfortunately, I can't read Marathi, so I haven't read it.

But she loved to write -- anywhere she went, she would carry paper and pen with her and constantly write. There are probably lots of papers lying around and I am planning to get them together, get someone to make sense of them and get them published. I would also love to build up a library of her films, and a friend and I have been building a list.

Right till the end, she kept doing what she wanted to, she was very fit. She was very much into taking care of herself and she did yoga for almost 30, 40 years. In fact, she outlived most of her contemporaries and she would wonder why.

She went very peacefully, of old age, of natural causes. She just stopped breathing, she had no problems, no high blood pressure, no cholesterol, nothing. In fact, she had none of the things that I have! And she had made it very clear that she never wanted to be put on an intravenous drip or on life support to keep her going. Her wish was to be cremated in a very private ceremony, with no fuss, no fanfare.

Her decline started with a fall at 5:30 am about a month ago which broke her hip. Subsequently, she had to have hip replacement surgery and after that, her condition deteriorated. At that age -- which no one knows exactly, not even she, but she was about 93 -- it is difficult to recover quickly.

She slipped into a coma about four days ago and never woke up. But a strange thing happened when I went to visit her on Sunday (at a Connecticut nursing home), a day after my daughter and my ex-wife did.

They say when people are in a coma, their hearing is the last to go.

I told her, "I am your son Raj, I have come from Atlanta, and it is time for you to let go, to go into the place you have wanted to go for some time, to your God." And though she could not respond, I saw a tear flow out of her eye. It was as if she could hear me, it was very strange.

We returned from there on Sunday night, and on Monday, at about 3 am, the doctor called from Connecticut and told me she had passed on.

It was as if she had been waiting to see everyone before she went.

Raj Chitnis, 64, spoke to Tanmaya Kumar Nanda

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