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Just weeks before her 50th birthday on January 31, Preity Zinta was an eyewitness to a scene of cosmic destruction as wildfires ravaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles where the Indian actress relocated in 2016, after marrying Gene Goodenough, senior vice president at a US-based hydroelectric power company. "I'm heartbroken at the devastation around us and grateful to God that we are safe as of now," she wrote on X on January 12.

This is not the first time Preity has been in a life-threatening situation. On December 11, 2004, she was in Sri Lanka as part of the Temptation concert tour, with Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Saif Ali Khan, Celina Jaitley and Zayed Khan, when a bomb exploded less than six feet from the stage during the evening's last performance at a local sports stadium.

Still reeling from the shock of the tragedy that claimed two lives and injured more than a dozen, she reached Phuket a fortnight later, on December 25, for a much-needed vacation. A few hours later, a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean swept 14 countries, including the coast of Thailand, killing over 2,30,000 people, and taking away many of her close friends. Preity was the only one in her group who survived.

Having escaped death twice, in quick succession, Preity returned to Mumbai after eight days on the island, grateful to be alive, with a survivor's determination to do something meaningful for others. It had been her dad's dream to start a sports school, but she soon realized it was too expensive a project to embark on alone. So, instead, she ventured into the just-launched Indian Premier League, invested some of her own money to become part owner of a cricket franchise. Over the last 16 years, during the annual T20 League, one has seen her enthusiastically cheering for Kings XI Punjab. In 2017, she added another team, Stellenbosch Kings, to her investment portfolio and entered the South African T20 Global League. Both the leagues have thrived and nurtured many young sporting talents, thereby realizing her dad's dream.

Durganand Zinta had been a major in the Indian army who died in a car accident which also left his wife, Nilprabha, bedridden for two years. Their first born, Deepankar, who was just 14 then, later joined the army. Manish, two years younger, has since settled in California. Preity, who was 13 then, continued with her studies, graduating with English honours, followed by masters in criminal psychology, then surprising everyone by becoming an actress.

Films happened quite by accident. When she was 21, Preity bumped into an ad-filmmaker at a friend's birthday party who persuaded her to audition for the Perk ad and she ended up as the Cadbury Perk girl. More commercials followed. Then, one day, she accompanied a friend to an audition and was cast by Shekhar Kapur as one of the leads in his musical romance Tara Rum Pum Pum.

The film didn't take off, but on Shekhar's recommendation, Preity landed Mani Ratnam's directorial, Dil Se..., which he was co-producing. Even with just 20 minutes of screen time, the dimpled beauty caught the eye in the romantic thriller, the first Indian film to enter the UK's Top 10 chart. After the blockbuster Soldier, Preity Zinta was heralded as the most promising debutant of 1998.

Having celebrated the awards and accolades that came with Dil Se... Preity didn't anticipate getting haunted by the film years down the line. The film ends with a blast as Shah Rukh, who plays her fiancé Amar, chases after Manisha Koirala's Moina, a suicide bomber who has come to Delhi to disrupt the Republic Day Parade. As they embrace, the bomb denotes, blowing them up together. At the Colombo concert, Preity, waiting in the wings to come on stage, saw a man sitting in the front row go flying through the air. Then, as she wrote in the BBC column, while being hustled out of the venue by the security, she saw a woman who had lost an arm in the blast, screaming for help.

A more terrifying film is Sangharsh, with Preity as a CBI officer Reet, determined to stop a religious fanatic, Ashutosh Rana's Lajja Shankar Pandey, who on the quest for immortality has already killed several young children, from making the last ritualist sacrifice. What makes it doubly difficult is that Reet has to deal with her own demons triggered by childhood memories of her terrorist brother being gunned down by the cops in their home. She put all her knowledge of criminal psychology into living this role.

Only PZ can be a Zaara and a Romila Dutta with equal conviction

One also remembers her as Priya, the unwed teenage mother in Kundan Shah's Kya Kehna, who boldly decides to keep the child in the face of social stigma and ostracism, in the end even turning away the father for not standing by her when she needed him most. It's a role not many actresses at the turn of the century would have accepted, but it was the obvious choice for Preity whose father would tell her that while most Indian women are dependent on their fathers, husbands and sons, he wanted his daughter to be the master of her own destiny.

When she had decided to become an actress, her friends back home would tease her saying she would soon be wearing white saris and dancing in the rain. But trust Preity to go beyond the age-old cliché to give mainstream Bollywood heroine more agency, be it as the prostitute hired as a surrogate mother in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, the only female journalist covering the Kargil war in Lakshya or the feisty Pakistani woman who waits all her life to be reunited with her Indian lover in Veer-Zaara.

The experiments and lessons in stagecraft continued with Rituparno Ghosh's English language film, The Last Lear. Preity then went on to conquer new worlds with Deepa Mehta's Canadian film, Heaven On Earth, which required her to shed everything that was Preity Zinta, to play the victim of domestic abuse. She was rewarded with a Genie Award nomination and the Silver Hugo for Best Actress at the 2008 Chicago International Film Festival.

After this, she sprung another surprise, giving two of her best years to her cricket team. In 2013, she returned with her first production, Ishkq In Paris, which she also co-scripted. The romcom was delayed by almost two years after fellow writer and director Prem Raj was diagnosed with cancer. Instead of replacing him, Preity stayed by him for almost two years till he recovered.

The film flopped and in the last decade, one has seen Preity only in the long-delayed 2018 action-comedy Bhaiaji Superhit, and an episode of Vir Das's American sitcom, Fresh off the Boat. Her priorities had changed as she busied herself with other roles, that of a franchise owner, wife and mother to twins Jai and Gia.

But now, Preity Zinta is readying for another comeback. Later this year, we will see her in the Aamir Khan production, 1947 Lahore. Directed by Rajkumar Santoshi and co-starring Sunny Deol and Shabana Azmi, the drama unfolds immediately after the Partition, with a Muslim couple from Lucknow moving into a haveli in Lahore and having to share a roof with the previous owner, an elderly Hindu lady. It could just be the beginning of a new innings for the actress whose father, during a hike in Aurangabad, would not let his young daughter rest till she had climbed to the top of the tallest peak which perhaps explains her never-say-die spirit. No mountain is too high for PZ to scale.