Gita Prakash went back to work as soon as she could after having kids. She started by working only two hours a day at a school so she could be home when her babies got back from kindergarten. As they grew older, she started working afternoons as a visiting GP at the offices of two banks to earn some additional income for the family. Tarun, her husband, was still travelling for his navy career and with a family of four, money went fast.

Gita also worked with the UNHCR to treat Afghan refugees for a decade. She had a translator sitting with her initially but she was eventually able to pick up their language and now speaks Pashto. Many of the cases within the refugee community were psychological issues and the women, in particular, preferred seeing a female doctor who knew their language and could relate to their culture. She became known in the Afghan refugee community as the doctor to visit. Funnily enough, when Gita moved to the Max Super Speciality Hospital in Saket, they followed her there. She became known for this specific clientele and every time these patients showed up, the other doctors would joke: your baraat has arrived.

In a time when simply working outside the home was an achievement for women, Gita went above and beyond to live life to the fullest. She refused to be put in a box and is the original multi-hyphenate. This vivacious woman took every exciting opportunity that came her way and turned them into side hustles! Her appetite for adventure and new experiences is insatiable even today.

Take her career as an RJ for instance which started in her forties once her kids were older and settled in school. One evening in 1996, an acquaintance of her husband’s came home and asked her to be a guest on a radio show. Gita had no idea what the world of radio was like but she was only too happy to find out. So off she went to an all-women radio channel called Meow as a guest on someone else’s show.

But she was so good that the station decided to give her more airtime and created a new show for her called Medical Meow. And after merely three episodes, the sponsors started pouring in! Gita was initially intimidated by the RJ console; it looked like an alien spaceship to her and even speaking in pure Hindi took some learning (her convent upbringing kept cropping up in her diction). For the first two weeks, she had a co-host to help her learn the ropes but within a month she could use the console, take phone calls and lo and behold, Gita was suddenly an RJ managing her own radio show. “I used to curate specialist doctors for the show,” she elaborates. “So, if I was talking about diabetes, I would invite a diabetes specialist; if I was talking about psychiatric problems, I’d invite a psychiatrist. It was a one-hour, live, dial-in show that would run only twice a week but it was so exciting to me. We don’t realise how many people want to talk about their illnesses but they are too embarrassed to openly admit them. You see, today we have ‘Google Aunty’ to flood us with information but in those days, we didn’t have that. My listeners actually learnt something from my show and I’d get 50 to 60 calls in that one hour. Sometimes we didn’t have enough time to get to everyone!”

In 2012, Gita pioneered the movement of older, grey-haired fashion models in the Indian modelling industry. After her Tarun Tahiliani campaign, a friend of hers who worked at Fab India asked her to model expensive Kani shawls which would likely appeal to older women. More assignments began coming her way but since Tarun, her mother and her mother-in-law were all ailing by then so she also had to be around as a caregiver. So initially, Gita agreed to those modelling gigs where the brands were willing to shoot inside her own home.

Her daughter Aditi, who lives and works in Mumbai, flew to Delhi once to be with her father so Gita could participate in Dove’s Real Women campaign. She was selected to be one of the faces for Dove’s social media campaign that went viral, eventually leading to Gita being on the cover of Femina magazine. She celebrated her 57th birthday on the Dove set and her 65th birthday on the Fab India set. Today Gita has modelled for major brands like Vivo, Amazon, Myntra, Tanishq and also smaller boutique brands that take her all over the country from Jaipur to Goa to Kochi. She has been featured in major newspapers and media outlets for her work. “Meet the 67-year-old doctor-model who is breaking stereotypes,” said The Times of India. “A doctor at 21, model at 57: Gita, a beacon of ageless beauty,” proclaimed the Hindustan Times. “This 67-year-old doctor has modelled for designers, been featured in top fashion magazines,” the MoneyControl website said.

“Initially, my kids were very surprised at what was happening,” she says. “But they took it in their stride and thought this was another one of their mom’s crazy fads. To be honest, by that time my daughter had gotten married and moved away and my son was studying in Pune so they weren’t really aware of all the craziness that was going on. When my modelling career started taking off in a big way, they realised I was pretty serious about it. And then they were really supportive. They said: it’s okay, just keep doing what you’re doing because you seem to be managing remarkably well, looking after old parents and an ailing husband, practising medicine and doing modelling on the side. I still practise medicine at Max Hospital, JNU, India International Centre and the Standard Chartered Bank, so my schedule is insane. I often have to juggle a lot to squeeze in a modelling gig.”

It seems very glamourous to be featured in fashion magazines and have your face up on billboards, but the reality was a bit different. Gita was modelling through some very tough years of her life from 2012–22. Tarun fell ill with Parkinson-Plus syndrome at the same time as both her mother-in-law and her own mother got dementia. So, Gita spent a decade doing two things: working and being a caregiver.

She would wake up, get ready and shave Tarun with utmost care. Before leaving the house, she would bathe and dress her mother-in-law and feed both her and Tarun breakfast. On the way to work, she would stop by her mother’s place (she had moved Nishchint to a place nearby so she could care for her, too), dress her and have a cup of tea with her. Then she would work at the hospital all day and be home by 5 pm to spend her evenings with Tarun and her mother-in-law. After sitting with her husband and mother-in-law for an hour, she ran a charitable clinic for underprivileged people from 7 to 8 pm every day. People would bring flowers and eggs and bread when they couldn’t afford to pay even the two rupees for treatment and Gita would accept it all without a fuss. She was bone tired at the end of each day and would completely knock out at night. But the sheer number of things this woman managed to do with a 5 pm deadline is simply incredible!

For ten years, this routine remained unchanged. Seeing her intelligent and talented mother give up her daily practices of crossword, sudoku and knitting was a shock for Gita because her mom had always been her inspiration for life. But what really broke her heart was to see Tarun grow silent. He had always had a larger-than-life personality but for two years before he passed away, he never said a word. He couldn’t even turn on his side so every night, Gita would set alarms for 12 am, 3 am and 5 am to physically turn him around. And to this day, she wakes up at 12, 3 and 5 am out of habit.

Her mother-in-law’s dementia was even worse than her own mom’s; she would speak a lot of gibberish and ask Gita to hold her hand through the night because she was afraid of sleeping alone. She would often throw away or spit out food, and in a few instances, even bit Gita’s hand when she tried to feed her with a spoon. Her illness manifested a lot of anger and despite that, Gita looked after her till the end.

One particularly tough day, Gita had woken up as usual and was going through her morning routine. She had hired a young man as a caretaker for Tarun, but she liked to shave him herself. As she and the caretaker were getting ready to bathe him, suddenly Tarun fell against her leg and Gita fell with him.

“Hold him, hold him!” she said to the caretaker, panicking.

Her leg was in searing pain and Gita herself needed help to get up and walk. She sat on the bed with an ice pack, but her knee swelled up, so she took the day off from work to rest, hoping an anti-inflammatory pill would do the trick.

“Ma’am, are you not coming today?” her mother’s maid called within the hour. “Aunty is refusing to get out of bed. She is saying it’s not morning because Gita is not here. She’s refusing breakfast also …”

“I can’t; I’ve had a fall,” Gita explained. “Please try and convince her to eat.”

“Bhabhi, you need to go to the hospital,” Tarun’s caretaker insisted after a few hours. “Your knee is turning black and blue!”

He helped Gita get in the car and asked the driver to take her to the hospital where she worked. She was taken for an X-Ray as well as an MRI scan and afterwards, her colleagues attended to her.

“Gita, I’m sorry to come with bad news but it looks like you’ve torn all the ligaments in your knee,” the orthopaedic doctor said. “You’ll need surgery.”

“Impossible,” Gita replied. “I can’t have knee surgery. I’ll be out of commission for weeks and I have my husband, mother and mother-in-law to look after.”

“That is certainly no reason not to do it,” he said astonished at her reply. “You’ve had a bad fall and you need to seriously consider surgery. You don’t want to be stuck with a bad knee for life.”

“But I can’t,” Gita smiled softly. “I’ll wear a splint and my ligaments will heal; don’t worry. When can I get discharged?”

The doctor simply shook his head in disbelief and for the next three months, Gita wore a splint under her saris all the way from her thigh down to her ankle. She carried on working and caregiving. She had hired staff, but she didn’t trust them to look after her family members with the same care and attention as she did. Fortunately, her knee healed in a few months and the doctor even commented on her excellent muscle tone, which had allowed her a full recovery with just a splint and no surgery.

On top of all the caregiving, Gita also had to continue working actively during these years because she was supporting her family financially, too. She is grateful to her mother for instilling in her the desire to be financially independent early on in life. Thanks to that attitude and perseverance, Gita was able to look after three family members who fell ill at the same time, hire the required staff and pay off some fat medical bills.

Despite having become a known face which is literally everywhere from Mumbai’s billboards to her friend’s mobile phone apps, Gita wears her modelling fame lightly. Somewhere, she is still the disbelieving girl who was surprised that Tarun could be interested in her, and that lack of vanity is both apparent and refreshing. More importantly, she believes beauty is only skin deep so not worth getting fixated on, whether feedback comes in the form of compliments or hate.

Excerpted with permission from Bullet Nani: And Other Badass Indian Grandmas, Jasreen Mayal Khanna, Panmacmillan India.