Daily Times

‘Saat Din Mohabbat In’ actor Mira Sethi announced her engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, to family friend Bilal. “In the spring of 2017, a tall, funny, curly-haired dude walked into my life. I’d known this curly-haired dude all my life — in the way you know your parents’ friends’ kids — but we’d never sought each other out. (Weirdly enough, Bilal and I overlapped at Oxford in 2008—he was doing his PhD, I was spending my junior year abroad. But we never looked each other up, never bumped into each other in that tiny cobbled town.) ?Almost a decade later, we met in Lahore on a warm February evening. We vaguely agreed to meet for dinner sometime,” she wrote. The actor then recalled being at Spice Bazaar and how she found herself answering Bilal’s questions with an “openness and ease” she hadn’t encountered in herself in a long time. “A few days later Bilal lost his mother to pneumonia (she’d had Parkinsons for a decade), and it was a wrenching, difficult time. Bilal and I would text. Talk about light stuff. He used the heart emoji unselfconsciously, as a friend might. The conversations veered from TV shows to politics to “plan for the day?” The few times we met before he left for DC, he talked openly about his regrets and hopes and dreams,” she recalled. Stating that “the next year was a whirlwind”, Mira said the two “travelled together to Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Islamabad, Reno, San Francisco”. She further shared how his love changed her. “A Mira more spontaneous, more adventurous, more open. Also vulnerable — and increasingly okay with the idea of vulnerability. This was new terrain for me,” she wrote. The actor also shared a few pictures from her engagement.

Published in Daily Times, November 21^st 2018.