At 10 in the night, her voice is at first a blur. But then it takes on that casual easy tone we are used to, in her movies, her interviews, her ads. Kalki Koechlin might as well be talking to an old friend, tired after a long day of work, and not taking an interview. There is no long pause to think of careful answers, no erms and hms between her lines, it’s all just straightforward conversation. “It’s a comedy, a comedy on death,” she says of her play The Living Room that she is bringing to Kochi this Sunday. Not that Kochi is new to Kalki. She had visited the place a lot as a child, and her last release Waiting was mostly shot in Kochi.
“I like Kerala a lot. The beautiful beaches there, the backwaters, I have good memories of the place. I also really enjoyed the Biennale when we were shooting for Waiting. It’s really amazing, that kind of art, and that it’s accessible to the public. The food in Kerala, especially the fish curry, was also very nice,” says Kalki. It’s been a while since Waiting, but she still remembers the way Malayalis said enthaaaa with that stretch in the end, meaning ‘what’. Her role in Waiting as a young wife upset by the sudden accident and comatose of her husband, had earned Kalki a lot of appreciation. Not that it comes as any surprise from the actor who has won a special jury award at the national awards for her role as a disabled girl in Margarita with a Straw, and got critical acclaim for her varied roles beginning with Chandramukhi in Dev D.
The Pondicherry-born and raised girl of French ethnicity who spoke good Tamil, tutored herself to learn Hindi for two months before Dev D. She has to know the language, and the ‘little little things’ you pick up for a character, she says. So in Waiting, there is a scene of Kalki nodding vigorously to a nurse and her Mumbai friend telling her, ‘You’ve become quite a Kochi girl’. But then she’s not too familiar with Malayalam cinema. “I am always open to any film from any place, given the role and the script is interesting.” Right now, however, all she could think about is her play. The Living Room will see death as a character visiting an old woman, who refuses to go with him. “Initial reaction in life is to reject death, we are all afraid of it. So it is with this old woman when she tries every way to not die. Through that process she lives her whole life again, remembers the past and eventually comes full circle. And then she accepts she has to die,” says Kalki, who has always been fascinated by the subject of death.
Still from the play
This play had begun as a two-page conversation she wrote one day, between an old woman and death. And then she just built it up into a play. Even the play she wrote before this — The Skeleton Woman — is about a woman who dies. “It must be a running theme. What makes us really human is it’s in the presence of death that we start valuing life.” It’s been more than a year since The Living Room got made and she’s taken it to over 10 stages across India. Turning a director had been a traumatic transition for Kalki. “I have got so much more respect for directors and I will be a much better behaved actor when I go back to acting. A director’s job is like parenting. You have to look after your actors like children, pay attention to each of their different abilities. Plus you are dealing with technicians, musicians, artistes and designers, you really have to multitask.”
On the day her play had opened in Bengaluru, Kalki was backstage sewing pillows, which were to be used for the play and which had broken. “Outside people wanted to do interviews, and inside I was screaming for lace and thread!” she remembers. But then she never screams at her actors. “They all think I am really sweet and lovely. The way I don’t get angry. But if I feel they are not making an effort, I am like ‘Ok, let’s not work, let’s not do anything, forget it’. And then they are all like ‘Oh no, please tell us what to do’. I play that sad card,” says Kalki, laughing, in that casual tone of hers that makes her so approachable and so opposite the stereotype of a great artiste with an attitude. Her play will be staged at JT Pac Hall on Sunday at 7 pm.
