“We hear so much about glowing faces and dreamy nursery colours, but my first reaction was the cold clock in my head—they don’t tick the same after you cross thirty-five,” Richa told Lily Singh, taut and unsweetened.The confession hung there without the marshmallow gloss. Who hasn’t felt the shame of not being ecstatic when everyone else is humming pastel lullabies? Outside, sirens and headlines remind us the planet is not in nursery mode. Richa’s sleepless nights started not with baby cries but with replays of floods, bombed homes and the presidential candidates list. “You question everything you once loved about your own free life: is my goat cheese subscription worth this? Will there be a planet for the goat?” Thirty-seven boxes of organic wipes will not prepare anyone for the rolling, infinite question: “Do you really get a second human a seat?” The mythical “how cute” brigade didn’t hear the “what if” first. Richa, lipstick barely applied, told a room of laughs that she wrote her daughter’s future resignation letters with a purple crayon the moment the stick turned pink. “You think of her and the earth’s bandwidth and your Netflix password and you quake.” So before the sequined baby jacket and the happy single-shots, there was a fierce, trembling ledger: every carbon menu default and dumpster fire and every hour she will miss when the world is flapping and she is a half-breath late. Richa Chadha’s gender is not a season and she is not allowed to cry glitter. The question remains: is a planet this cracked a good home to commission another ship? Maybe, she decides, but only if you take the oar and don’t Twitter about the oar.One day, the world is all about you, then suddenly you’ve got a tiny person relying on you for everything. That off-season plot twist registered like a cold splash: “I’ll tell you honestly, my first thought was pure terror,” Richa recalled. “The minute the test said yes, my brain went straight to is this the end of my freedom?”And then she found out it was a girl. The fear slipped Twitter-smooth into something sharper—a protective fire so hot she half-laughed about signing up for “gun safety classes, because you know, it’s a girl in this country.” Chasing the punchline, she added: “But really, she’ll never walk into a room without the crystals of her own power lighting it up. Strong like her mother, double-strength.”Zuneyra Ida Fazal arrived on a Sunday morning, July 16, 2024, and was immediately counted in the family story. Richa and Ali quietly posted the baby’s name, sprinkled a few baby feet emojis, then tucked their daughter’s face into a privacy vault—unimpressive for a selfie-obsessed timeline, brilliant for a family search party.Professionally, Richa just wrapped shooting Lajjo in Dharm’s Heeramandi for Netflix and is dusting off her stand-up mic for a winter tour. But truthfully her toughest job description now is “mother.” The script’s a work-in-progress, full of spilled water and sleepless laughter, and she’s already proud of the first, un-erasable draft.Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal welcomed their daughter, Zuneyra Ida Fazal, on July 16, 2024. The couple marked their little one’s first birthday with an Instagram post that wove together tender family clips, accompanied by a note from Richa that glowed with the sort of joy only first-time parents know. In that post, Richa opened up about the seismic shift motherhood has brought. The hours of labour melted into a brisk, twenty-minute delivery that she called natural. While she meant it simply, a handful of strangers questioned the phrasing, each seeing a different truth in the same moment.
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