Twenty years on, Konkona's double-barrelled surname is becoming famous indeed. As she sits in her room, four days after winning the National Award for Best Actress for Mr and Mrs Iyer, it is a fame she is getting used to. The bouquets are piled into a corner of her mother's immaculately kept drawing room, the phones buzz constantly and the offers are pouring in-from documentary filmmaker Manu Rewal's first feature Imaandar to screenplay writer Sonali Bose's untitled project, where she plays Shabana Azmi's daughter, to a possible cameo in her mother's forthcoming Hindi film, Gulel. And though she may still daintily wrinkle her nose at all the baggage that comes with stardom-the photo shoots, the interviews, the facials and even the gym she occasionally visits on her mother's prodding-Konkona is clearly delighted to be where she is. Even if at times, someone comes up to her and says she is much fairer off-screen than on film. "Yes, I want to tell them I use Fair and Lovely cream every night," she says spiritedly.

UNCOMMON SENS: Konkona with Aparna at their Kolkata home

The delight is shared by her mother, who directed her in Mr and Mrs Iyer. As she enters the office of Sananda, the fortnightly Bengali women's magazine she has edited since 1986 and which now has a circulation of 1.8 lakh, her Dhakai sari fairly crackles in the air. Call it what you will-Pritish Nandy, her long-time friend and a contemporary at Kolkata's Presidency College, says a "beautiful thinking woman like her is always a turn-on"-but Aparna's aura is very much intact even at 58. With three awards for Mr and Mrs Iyer (including for Best Direction), Rinadi as she is known to her legion of admirers, couldn't be happier. "I don't believe in political sloganeering and I don't have the commonsense required for activism, but I believe in doing my bit. We have to keep dissenting, otherwise how can we look at ourselves in the mirror every day?" she asks, spoiling the effect somewhat by quoting every knee-jerk liberal's pet pamphleteer, Arundhati Roy.

Yet, in the 22 years she has been director, Mr and Mrs Iyer is probably her most sophisticated political statement so far, unblemished by the heavy-handedness of her personal favourite Yugant (1995) and quite different from her intimate exploration of family dynamics such as Paroma (1984) and Paromitar Ek Din (2000). Shot before the Gujarat riots last year, it was also eerily prescient in its content, about Hindu fundamentalists who attack a group of Muslims on a bus journey. No doubt it added to its international appeal because since last year the film has won a series of accolades at film festivals from Locarno in Switzerland to Las Palmas in Spain. Now Konkona will travel with it to Fukuoka in Japan. "This is the life," she exclaims. "Make one or two great movies a year and spend the rest of the time taking it to festivals around the world. You get to watch great movies, eat great food, stay in some great hotels."

If only it were that easy. For Mr and Mrs Iyer, Konkona, a graduate of Delhi's St Stephen's College, went to Chennai for a month to research her character. Aparna is already working on her next film. As she gets ready to start shooting for Gulel (starring Ajay Devgan as a killer, Saif Ali Khan as his intended victim, Kareena Kapoor and Bipasha Basu as the love interests), her mind is buzzing with images. "No more acting for me," she says in her declamatory, theatrical way. She means it-this summer, she gave up the role of Mrs Bennett in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice because she wanted to travel to Kenya with her third husband, Kalyan Ray, an affable professor of English at the County College of Morris, New Jersey, who fortunately dotes on her daughters. "We haven't had a holiday in years," she says.

At the other end of the city, her daughter, who proudly and contrarily claims to be a slacker, has no such holiday plans. Konkana is getting ready to act in and co-direct a play at Kolkata's British Council (David Storey's Changing Room), preparing for Rewal's film and looking forward to three more Hindi/English projects. Her tiny frame, which lights up on screen in the part of Meenakshi Iyer, complete with Tamil accent and a baby with a formal name, Santhanam, is folded compactly on a window seat in a room that bears her mother's artistic imprint. Yet Konkona (or Coco as she is known) is very much her own woman. Her softboard, with its lovingly kept delegate cards (including one of the Moscow Film Festival, where she accompanied her mother as a nine-year-old); her books (from Zadie Smith's Autograph Man to William Dalrymple's White Mughals); and her strong ideas bear testament to that.

Yes, she is her mother's daughter-the slight curl of the lip, the inflexion in the refined voice and the laugh could not be more telling. But she is also an intelligent young woman who has managed to pack in a lot of living in her 24 years. Though her parents divorced when she was seven, Konkona says she was completely unaffected by it. "They remained great friends," she says. She is close to her stepfather (Ray) as she is to her sister, 10 years older than her, Kamalini (Dona), from Aparna's first marriage. Aparna's unconventional upbringing has stood her in good stead-having to write essays on Ayodhya when the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 and not being allowed to watch mainstream cinema may have seemed completely unreasonable to her as a child but in retrospect, she is grateful. "You know I could never play antakshari because I did not know film songs," says Konkona, trying hard to sound deprived. "But then Ma explained that Hindi films are anyway all-pervasive. I would get to see them sooner or later. She just did not want it to be my formative experience."

For Aparna, Konkona is a baby. "I had a very tempestuous relationship with my elder daughter, but now we are extremely close. With Coco, we never had any arguments," she says. "Yes," affirms Konkona, "Ma always said I was the chalu (smart) one. I would keep quiet and do exactly as I pleased." Aparna is not surprised by the choice of her daughter's profession. "She is extremely sensitive and has a lovely mobile face. When I was reading the script to her, I could see the emotions on her face. I knew she would be the one," says Aparna. Mr and Mrs Iyer co-actor Rahul Bose thinks it was an inspired move. "Konkona brought a confidence and an intuitive understanding to the part which was only matched by her exceeding humility. Plus, she's great fun," says Bose.

MUM'S THE WORD: Aparna (left) with Bose and Konkona on the sets of Mr and Mrs Iyer

High praise indeed but Aparna does worry whether Konkona has the tenacity it takes to survive in an often cruel film industry. Aparna certainly did, whether it was acting in Bengali films and occasionally and very uncomfortably in Hindi films. "But I had to do it for the money. I had to raise my children," she says. Unspoken behind it is the many years she was a virtual single parent. She always had the support of her parents, film historian Chidananda Dasgupta and mother Supriya, both of whom have won national awards for the Bengali film Amodini, but it must have hurt. She refuses to talk about it, her steely glare also forbidding any further probing on her first husband's suicide.

So if now Aparna laughs while relating her seven-year-old granddaughter's exploits and speaks proudly of how Dona wants to come back from Texas because she feels vehemently about "America's foreign policy", it is with the pride of a woman who has achieved much, entirely on her own terms. She has lived a progressive life and made unthinkable films-in Paromitar Ek Din, she delineated an almost lesbian relationship between the lead character Paromita and her mother-in-law whereas in Paroma, Rakhee's middle-aged, middle-class housewife was an unlikely adulteress.

But she has never screamed about it from rooftops, like some of her more media-obsessed colleagues. Perhaps she is too imperious, which may come from the fact that she has been a star since 15 when Satyajit Ray, one of her father's closest friends, cast her in Teen Kanya. She jokes that Bose calls her a prima donna. But it could also be as she puts it, a delicate shudder running along her elegant shoulders, that she hates all "dikhava" (show). In an unconscious echoing of that gesture, Konkona seems to put across that very same philosophy of life. "What scares me is having to do things like inaugurating boutiques and showing up at awards shows. But Ma always insists," she says. And Ma, the perfectionist, usually gets what she wants.