August 2, 1999

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Surprise Surprise

It's theatrical. It also comes naturally to her. Ayesha Dharker widens her pretty eyes and gestures dramatically as she talks about the success that has come to her, suddenly, unexpectedly. When she was cast in Santosh Sivan's film Terrorist as Malli, a human bomb, all she wanted was the chance to act in a quality film. When she accompanied Sivan to the Cairo Film Festival recently, she had just one wish: to bump into her hero Omar Sharif. But in the days since Terrorist got her the Best Actress honour at Cairo and opened up a whole new world, Dharker has had little time to do anything but deal with her disbelief.

It's not just the award. Or that, despite the absence of any masala and mayhem, Terrorist has already enjoyed a five-week run of box-office success in Mumbai prior to its release next month in the other metros. It's also that actor John Malkovich, head of the Cairo jury, offered her an audition opposite Hollywood star Nicolas Cage in a period film set in Luxembourg. And that Salman Rushdie was so impressed with her during an audition for the screen version of Midnight's Children (the project is now off) that in the foreword to the now-published Screenplay of Midnight's Children, he writes: "Ayesha's sensational voice stunned us all, when in the middle of a read-through she burst into unaccompanied song ..."

It's the way she's always worked. "Ayesha was painstaking and yet approached every rehearsal in a spirit of spontaneity," recalls noted stage actress Pearl Padamsee under whom Dharker trained in her early years. She was nine when she was picked from the J.B. Petit School in Mumbai to play the lead in a French production, Maneka, The Girl Who Lived Twice, a story of reincarnation set in India. She was 13 when she acted in the film version of Dominique Lapierre's City of Joy. Today, at 22, as she awaits the release of her next film, Split Wide Open, directed by Dev Benegal of English, August fame, Dharker adds: "My life has been quite strange so far, but I've chosen eclectically and am happy with the choices I've made." They've worked out, so she would be.

-Nandita Chowdhury