Kalki Koechlin

She makes you want to delay magazine editions and feel guilty that photo-spreads are accompanied with interviews because you had to bombard her with a barrage of questions even when she was ill. Kalki Koechlin is the kind of a girl who bates your hook for you – she makes you want to put everything aside just to make her a cup of tea, bring her a tissue and love her unconditionally despite the snot, the buckteeth and the permanent pout. But you aren’t complaining. Not even when you imagine her as the sort of girl with a pea-sized bladder making her the one who always has to pee three minutes into a road trip or as soon as you’ve pulled out of the parking lot. And then she snogs a girl on camera, you forget everything else and suddenly realise she’s the sort of girl you ought to marry. Only you can’t, because Anurag Kashyap beat you to the finish line. So you settle instead for holding out an eternal flame for her and end up becoming a ‘real good friend’ who goes lingerie shopping. And she’ll even make you love that.

Kalki Koechlin has malaria. Actually, everyone in Mumbai has the flu, but our heart goes out only for her. You almost quiz her about what medicines she’s taking and tell her you can do the interview later if she’s really not up for it. She soldiers on and you are lef taking constant pauses in between the questions to ask if she needs some water. But she has “been sleeping all day,” so it’s okay. You blame the illness on Andheri where she’s going for her play rehearsals and shake your head about the sort of roles she’s being offered: “Teenager who’s messed up in the head and then sleeps around,” she laughs. She’s been offered 3-4 scripts on the same lines. Bloody perverts, you think.

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“I have been offered roles for the sake of being bold.” Item numbers, you ask? “Naah No one has offered me item songs till now. Maybe because the first thing I tell them is I can’t dance.” But by then you are already thinking about the ‘uncensored’ rushes of That Girl in Yellow Boots – her next movie. “It’s about a British girl who comes to India looking for her father and the exploitation she goes through and how people in India look at and treat white girls.”

Something she relates to at a very personal level, “Throughout my life I have been stared at. It’s something that I have grown up with. People still think I arrived in Mumbai two years ago.” She didn’t. She was born in Pondicherry.

Despite critically acclaimed and commercially successful Dev D, Shaitan and now Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara in which she plays an insecure fiancée – Kalki Koechlin is still categorised under the “bold actress” category alongside the item gals and their ilk. “I think we are so used to bubblegum, safe commercial stories that when we get dark movies we look for something eye-catching.” She struggles to find a stronger word and then diplomatically settles for ‘eye-catching’. According to her, we’ve always been comfortable with our movies, so when we get uncomfortable – we think bikinis and girls playing tonsil hockey with each other like she did in Shaitan. We still aren’t sure what we think about that kind of stereotyping, but we do enjoy both the bikini and the tonsil hockey.

While you may not think so, she’s the girl who doesn’t mind being a 28-year-old. And one that has consciously only appeared in three movies thus far, the latest of which was her big banner Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.

Since Shaitan though, a lot has changed. Tabloids started talking about the kiss between her co-stars Katrina and Hritik in Zindagii, started speculating about a fight between her and Katrina and then about her being preggers. “The pregnancy questions have beaten the questions about the kiss.” And what about the ‘catfight’ with Katrina – The FHM Sexiest Woman in the World 2011? “Katrina and I get along very well, we talk on the phone and stuff, so I really don’t know where the press gets all this from.”

Kalki is currently working on an adaptation of a play called The Real Inspector Hound and is worried about how she will perform at the show that weekend without proper rehearsals. That’s Kalki Koechlin for you. She gingerly becomes part of a hit commercial movie and then promptly goes back to where she’s more comfortable – the alternate performance world.

She arrives at the shoot wearing a green sweater and a pair of noise canceling headphones. Not earphones, the proper ones because she means business. She props her legs up on a chair and nods off to sleep. But you can’t take your eyes off her – she’s the only person worth watching.

When she wakes up she tells you about this new band she’s just discovered called Neutral Milk Hotel. “You should hear them out. They have a very 60s sound to them,” she says. But by her own admittance, she is fickle, at least when it comes to music and hears everything from Björk to Nina Simone and even Kanye West. You shake your head in disapproval, but she’s moved on to talking about her play. “It takes the piss out of the artificiality of theatre and the fickleness of theatre critics,” she laughs.

In between all this, she also manages to find the time to call us ‘cynical’ in some context or the other. We turn around and ask her if she’s one of those who were braying for the blood of politicians on Twitter after the recent Mumbai blasts. She wasn’t. “Personally I don’t think you can get rid of politics and politicians. Democracy is not a democracy without politicians… I think the problem is that we are always looking for someone to blame without ever doing anything about it ourselves.”

“I think Twitter is very dangerous,” she warns. “No matter how harebrained what you write or say is, you will always have people supporting you and retweeting it.”

Ask her about the superficiality in cinema and she accepts it’s there, “I know a lot of celebrities who’ve put up a superficial face as a line of defence, but are actually really honest people.” None of it for her though, she’d rather sit at home, order a pizza and read a book than go out with a fake smile plastered on her face.

“Home is the place I relax in,” she decrees. And lest you write her off as a lazy bum she explains, “I do find baking very therapeutic.” She has a sweet tooth and makes a killer chocolate cake and apple pie. Which one is her specialty we ask? “I’d have to say apple pie, since it’s my grandmothers recipe.”

We make a very conscious attempt to not talk to her about her love life at all. Because seriously what could be worse than seeing her go on and on about how fabulous a fella Anurag Kashyap is and who the man in the relationship is. Or how she has been involved with him for a couple of years and has associated with him on both Shaitan and Dev D. So you can imagine our relief when she shows no signs of talking about it – apart from the pregnancy rumours that she squashes donning a bustier and skirt.

From the August 2011 issue of FHM India.