Shashi Kapoor's 1973 film Aa Gale Lag Jaa baffled the nine-year-old me. In it, Sharmila Tagore and Shashi Kapoor's characters visit Shimla and she catches cold and is in danger of hypothermia, so he uses his body heat that night to save her life. Surprisingly, nine months later she gave birth. How could that happen, I asked a teenaged cousin who was a girl, which meant she knew. She matter-of-factly told me that when a man and woman slept together, it made a baby. What nonsense, I said. I've slept next to cousins and aunts, none of them made a baby. (It now occurs to me that only those who did not sleep next to me got pregnant.) "No," she insisted, "that's how it happens." She mumbled something about clothes, but I dismissed that as linked to the Shimla snow and hypothermia, etc.

Shashi Kapoor continued to tutor me in sexuality in Satyam Shivam Sundaram