Sushmita Sen has been one of the actresses who won hearts not just for her beauty or acting skills, but for her personal choices and heartwarming gestures. Fresh out of the pageantry, while finding a footing in Bollywood, at the age of 21, Sushmita Sen decided to embrace motherhood. It was a bold and courageous decision, which was ahead of its time, especially because she wanted to be a single parent. She legally wanted to adopt a girl child, and she was so determined that she told her father to keep the car running and run with the baby if the judge didn’t rule in their favor. Fortunately, the matter never escalated to that level, as the court’s ruling was in Sushmita’s favor, and that is how she adopted her first child, Renee.
Sushmita Sen was ready to ‘run away’ with her baby from the court
The ‘Aarya’ actress started the procedure of adoption when she was just 21 years old, but the system did all the due diligence, and the final verdict came in when Sushmita was 24. Speaking about the same in an interview with Dr Sheen Gurrib, she said, “When I legally became an adult at 21, I knew this was what I wanted to do. So, from 21 to 24, the legal battle began. Once it started, at least I had my daughter with me under foster care. But you live with the constant trauma of ‘What if the family court does not pass this in my favor? They’ll take the child back, and now this child has started calling me Ma.’ I had a plan.”The plan was to run away with the child if things went sideways. Her father tried to tell her that’s not how things should be done, but the actress only knew one thing back then: she couldn’t lose the child. “I told my dad at the hearing just to keep the car running; he would take her and drive away. My father said, ‘Now we are really pushing it. We’re not going to do any of that.’ But I was adamant – they couldn’t take my baby away from me.”
Sushmita Sen shares how, without her father’s support, adoption would not have been possible
Speaking about her father, Sushmita Sen shared how her father’s support helped her adopt her children. She revealed her father signed over half of his assets in the name of Renee when the court asked him to show financial intent for child support. “I’m so proud of my father. I have my children because of him, in a country that requires either a father or a father figure to adopt a baby. He was told by the court that he had to show financial intent to support my child, and that he had to sign over half of his assets. But my father told the court, ‘I am not a very rich man, so if you take half of that, it will be nothing. I have come to unconditionally sign everything I own in her name’,” she shared.Though her father was warned that no one would marry a single mother, he replied that he didn’t raise Sushmita to be just someone’s wife. Thereafter, when Sushmita went to the court for the second time, for the adoption of Alisah, she confessed it was nothing short of a cakewalk for her. Go to Source
