Actor and filmmaker Pooja Bhatt recently shared a darkly humorous slice of family history during an appearance on Cyrus Broacha’s podcast. Recalling an unusual incident involving her maternal grandmother, Betty Bertha Bright, Pooja revealed that the family was once made to attend a formal funeral service for her grandmother’s amputated leg—while the matriarch watched carefully from the sidelines.
Describing her grandmother as a “tough as nails” woman of half-Armenian and half-English/Irish descent who grew up in Kolkata during the British Raj, Pooja explained that she developed severe diabetes later in life, which eventually required a leg amputation.
Rather than quietly recovering, her grandmother insisted on organizing a proper burial ceremony for the severed limb at St. Andrew’s Church.
The twist? Her grandmother was very much alive, present at the church, and using the event to gauge the family’s loyalty and emotional investment.
“All of us had to go to St Andrew’s Church while she was present as her leg was being buried,” Pooja recounted. “We were looking at each other and saying, ‘What’s this? This is a run-up to the final day.’ She was watching everyone’s expressions to see how they were behaving, who showed up, and who didn’t.”
When host Cyrus Broacha jokingly noted she was testing “the depth of your affection,” Pooja agreed, calling the bizarre gathering a classic example of her family’s characteristic black humor. “We were like, ‘What are we doing?’ but then we’re like, ‘Shh, let’s go through with it,'” she added.
Pooja Bhatt, a prominent figure in Hindi cinema since the 1990s, was most recently seen on the screen in the young-adult drama web series Big Girls Don’t Cry.
