Ankahee 2006

Sheena Saxena, Hrishitaa Bhatt, arrives home when her mother, Nandita Saxena, Ameesha Patel, tells her that her father, Shekhar Saxena, Aftab Shivdasani, is dying from illness and wants to meet her. Sheena refuses to see him, because he abandoned her and her mother for sixteen years when she was just six. Yet, as her mother gently presses, she eventually agrees and finds him in a frail state, cared for by a devoted nurse. Unable to express his feelings, Shekhar passes his diary to Sheena, a private record of the events that fractured the family, and invites her to read the truth behind his break with them. What follows is a careful, wrenching unraveling of a family’s past, told through the diary’s pages and the aching silences between a daughter and her father.

Sixteen years earlier, a smiling life for Shekhar and Nandita seems nearly perfect—until an attraction tests the foundations of their marriage. Shekhar meets Kavya Krishna, Esha Deol, an actress and former beauty queen, after she arrives at a hospital with a slit wrist and a fragile sense of loneliness that resonates with him. Kavya’s presence unsettles Nandita, who notices her husband growing distant. A friend, Kunal Mehta’s confidant and psychiatrist, is wary of the affair, hoping to shield the marriage from further fallout, and Amin Hajee plays Dr. Kuna Mehta, the friend who intervenes with a wary, practical voice. Yet the pull between Shekhar and Kavya deepens; Shekhar returns from a Goa press conference with Kavya in tow, and Kavya insists that happiness lies only with him. The pair’s bond intensifies, while Nandita tries to grapple with the creeping sense that her husband is slipping away.

When the affair becomes public, a Mid-Day journalist’s inquiry jolts the family into crisis. Nandita, shocked and betrayed, confronts Shekhar and even slaps him in a moment of fury, though she soon apologizes and vows to salvage the marriage. She plans to protect her daughter by confronting Kavya directly, urging her to let the family be at peace. Kavya, feeling cornered, presses Shekhar to choose between them, and the conflict escalates until Shekhar, overwhelmed by the competing loyalties, tells Nandita that he regrets the life they built together and proposes a severed, painful split from both of them.

As the strain lands on Sheena, the school principal and classmates begin to notice the changes in the girl—her withdrawn behavior and the shadow of her father’s infidelity affecting her sense of security. Kavya’s manager, blamed for brokering trouble, is told to stop publicizing the personal drama, but Kavya’s anger only grows. She blames Nandita for the trouble and, in a dramatic confrontation, refuses to let Shekhar visit his daughter unless the family’s life is altered to suit her. The rift widens into a volatile confrontation in which Shekhar erupts, labeling Kavya as unstable and driven by loneliness. Struck by pain and fear, Kavya grabs a gun and shoots herself, a moment that suddenly reorganizes every prior decision.

In the wake of Kavya’s shooting, Shekhar seeks forgiveness from Nandita, but she declines to return to the past and instead anchors herself to protect their daughter. With the diary’s pages open to her, Sheena reads the truth of the years—how love, desire, betrayal, and fear coexisted within these walls—and she finds a path toward reconciliation with her father in his final days. She wraps her arms around him as he apologizes, and in the quiet aftermath, she anchors herself to the possibility of healing.

The very next day, Shekhar passes away, leaving Sheena with a heavy, humbling truth: forgiveness can come at a cost, and memory can offer both comfort and sorrow. In the diary’s last pages, Sheena makes a quiet, compassionate choice to forgive her father, recognizing the complexity of his humanity and the fragility of a family’s ties. The story closes on a note of bittersweet closure, as Sheena honors her father’s memory by embracing the possibility of peace, even as grief remains a constant companion.