Nargis Fakhri: With Lips Like That...

“I am sure many people want to kiss these lips,” she laughs. Nargis Fakhri, owner of the most delectable derriere in five continents is telling us about a joke she just heard – She had moved in with Shahid Kapoor and the guest bedroom was going to accommodate her lips. “I peed myself laughing when I heard the joke.” Ever since Rockstar, everything and the kitchen sink has been flung in the direction of Miss Fakhri – her acting credentials have been dragged over hot coals and her Hindi has been unilaterally dismissed as worse than that of ‘the pretty one who shall not be named’.

She has retaliated by taking time off, setting up house in Mumbai, tweeting about her failed attempts at making hummus, and harassing her maid. She has also spent the last half hour over lunch giving us hell about eating white rice and cottage cheese.

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“I should have moved in with Shahid, I would have saved all the money I spent on rent and buying furniture,” she says. In the couple of months since Rockstar, Miss Fakhri has been rather imaginatively linked up with the media rags favourite single boy toy, Shahid Kapoor. She is said to have thrown his birthday party in Goa recently where her mother is rumoured to have flown down to meet him. “I am all for being in love and I will scream from the top of a mountain if I am dating someone, but I am not right now,” she explains.

At 33, Miss Fakhri is by no means a regular girl. She’s lived in 11 countries, went through a phase in Chicago where she lived off food samples and raided gym toilets for toiletries, isn’t coy about talking about her love for meat, is not signing 3 movies a day and certainly doesn’t seem to suffer from a disease most girls her age do – obsessing about her ticking body clock.

Over lunch at a studio in Mumbai she looks up forlorn from a smoked chicken salad that has just been delivered. She takes two bites, dismisses it as boring and asks if she can try some of the white rice, sambhar, paneer and spinach we are eating. Did we mention she doesn’t like eating with her hands, “I don’t know where they’ve been,” she teases. Then one thing leads to another and we end up talking about crocodile meat. ‘Isn’t it like licking a leather bag?’ we say and she agrees. Miss Fakhri is what you’d call a little bit of a meat connoisseur, and has sunk her teeth into most of the animals that stepped off Noah’s boat. Plus, everything from birds too big to fly to bouncing marsupials and molluscs too slow to crawl away have all at some point or the other landed on her plate. She loves animals, “they taste so yummy.”

Don’t models survive on mineral water and an apple a day? “I eat everything that is not nailed down.” She’s actually had a denim button fall off while eating at a restaurant in Delhi. “I had to ask the waiter to get me some safety pins.” Even as we kick ourselves for not being present when button-gate occurred, she is telling us about the time she was up all night “puking her brains out” after she ate gajar ka halwa and kheer in Delhi. But it was worth it, she concludes. Of course when buttons go flying across restaurants, it asks for drastic measures like foregoing the bacon, egg and cheese she likes for breakfast in favour of oats.

Half an hour later, she is prancing about the studio in her bra and denim shorts wondering what kind of furniture she should get for her apartment. She has since then managed to get a couch that didn’t quite turn out as she had planned, so she needs to get rid of it. We offer to carry a picture with the shoot, she has another idea, “How about we do a really hot shoot on the couch and then sell it? Wouldn’t we get more money that way?” she pouts. She will. A lot more, and she doesn’t need us to tell her that, but what the hell, how often do stars discuss garage sales.

Among other things, Miss Fakhri is also a little bit of a cleanliness freak. “I have to lift up everything and clean every corner. I help my maid clean and am usually running after her with a cleaning cloth. Do you think she would get offended?” We ask her what she would feel like if someone started doing her job and she laughs. She then deftly changes gears and throws us another volley, “Am I boring you? I usually bore people to death talking.” Again she already knows the answer, but this seems to be the recurring theme with Miss Fakhri – she survives in a strange place between a tomboy and a superhot goddess with legs that go on for miles without letting it go to her head. She was always the skinny, awkward one growing up in a gang of super hot girls. She had nose rings, ear and tongue piercings, a lip ring, made her own clothes and coloured her nails black and had hair like Demi Moore’s in Ghost. And then she started growing up. “Look at me now, I am on the cover of FHM, bitch,” she says.

We ask her if she has a stalker fan yet – someone having candy delivered to her everyday, writing books for her in blood or ink – she doesn’t not yet. Though she does seem visibly terrorised with the thought, so we move onto chatting about her skills in the kitchen. Apparently, apart from having a Michelin star in making cuppa-noodles, she claims she can make really good Thai coconut curry, lasagna and the likes. A claim betrayed by her confession about the time she burnt chickpeas while trying to make hummus or the time she dished out ham and cheese omelettes without washing the soap off a pan. “Everyone kept saying there was something weird about the omelette, but I only realised there was something wrong when I put the plate to wash and saw soap bubbles on it… It was hilarious.”

When she is not trying to poison her guests with washing soap infused dishes, she is working on her Hindi and has already picked up some expletives. She knows kutta, bhenchod and the evergreen and massively multifunctional teri ma ki, as part of her quest to learn talking shit. She enjoys slang and rues the fact that while working on Rockstar she never got to pick up the street lingo.

And she’s made a rather drastic lifestyle change as well – “When I shot Rockstar, I was using a lip plumper that made my lips look bigger, but I never saw the shots and went by what people told me. I realise now that it might not have been working for me.” So next time you see her on screen, the lips she is sure people want to kiss might appear to be considerably smaller than her last celluloid outing. The question is – would it really be that terrible?

From the April 2012 issue of FHM India.