In the landscape of Indian cinema, Deepti Naval has always been something of an anomaly. To the viewer of the 1980s, she was the quintessential “girl next door”aka Miss Chamko, whose smile could light up a detergent commercial. An actor, painter, poet, photographer, and director, her personal narrative, revealed through her interviews and her 2022 memoir A Country Called Childhood, paints a picture of a fiercely independent, and deeply sensitive soul. Deepti’s story begins in the narrow lanes of Amritsar, a city still breathing the heavy air of post-Partition history. Her father was an English professor and her mother a painter and teacher. By the age of ten, she knew she belonged to the screen. Driven by a childhood obsession with the Kashmir she saw in films, a thirteen-year-old Deepti once staged a daring escape. “My head was so full of those songs that I felt I just had to go to Kashmir. I actually left home. I didn’t reach my destination; instead, after a slap or two from the police at night, I was …