Subbulakshmi unties her hair and ties it again. There is just no time, she says, finishing a phone call. She’s just got back to her home in Thiruvananthapuram from a shooting location, and will have to go out for a function in another hour.
The next day she has to take a train. But even now, if she gets a phone call asking her to board a plane to Punjab for another project, she would not think twice before saying yes. At 81, Subbulakshmi R. has few doubts about grabbing whatever little joys life throws at her. That’s how she went to Mumbai and shot an ad with Ranbir Kapoor, with little idea about who he was.
“I didn’t know he was so big. All I knew when the ad company called me was that they are good, and that they will take care of me,” she says. It is at her daughter’s house in Mumbai she heard more about Ranbir. “They said I have hit the jackpot!” She was nervous of how it’d be like, but found him to be a “very nice boy, polite and respectful”. “I had asked to take a snap with him, he said why not, and took many.” The ad saw her appear in different costumes, including Spanish attire.
Earlier, she had appeared in another ad with Sridevi, about whom she knew very well. “She was very nice to me. I had asked if we could take a photo after work. But the shooting had gone on till 10 pm, so I wasn’t sure about troubling her. And then I see her come to me and ask about the photo. These people are so great and so humble.”
It never occurs to Subbulakshmi to say “can’t do”. Age can stop you only if you let it. “I would go on like this as long as I could. I don’t think of obstacles.” She had no qualms going to Chandigarh to shoot for the film Rani Padmini last year. “It was such a beautiful place, and all the flats are of the same level, the roads clean, and the people quiet.”
Some of these observations she would come and make pictures of. With Subbulakshmi is a big book of doodles, where she draws with her pens and the colour pencils her granddaughter gifts her, pictures of gods and houses and birds and love. After all that, she still gets time for Carnatic concerts. Singing is something she had always done, becoming the first lady composer in South India for All India Radio in 1972.
It is when she turned 80 that she turned heroine in a Tamil film called Ammini, a hunchback octogenarian walking the hot streets of Chennai with no footwear. That came at the right time, like everything else in her life, believes Subbulakshmi who began acting in her 60s and has more than 60 films to her credit now.
