THE MAKING OF THE IMPORTED HEROINE - katrina kaif

HOW KATRINA KAIF CAME TO LIVE AN UNLIKELY DREAM

BY MAYANK SHEKHAR

Zoya Akhtar's story in the short film anthology Bombay Talkies (2013) is about a little boy from a middle-class Mumbai home who wants to be Sheila from the song "Sheila ki Jawaani" when he grows up. This ambition is hard enough to comprehend, and much less likely to find empathy from a father who otherwise detests his son's lack of interest in all things manly'. One night, the little boy cosmically connects with Katrina Kaif (the actual "Sheila") while watching an interview with her on a television show. Lightning strikes; Kaif drops a precious secret"her life's lesson"into the little boy's head: "Sometimes in order to achieve what you want, you have to hide, nurture and protect your dream. If you let others know about it, they may not get it, or they may just laugh, or pull you down." After this Eureka moment, the boy transforms himself the next morning onwards, bubbling with energy and the notion that this is the way to achieve his ultimate fantasy. He plays football to please his dad, never losing sight of his eventual goal.

Akhtar had earlier directed Kaif in possibly her best performance yet, in the coming-of-age rom-com Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011). When I asked her about why she cast Kaif as a fairy in her short film, she said she needed somebody who had genuinely lived an unlikely dream: "You can't just take any actress and ask her: How did you make it?'" Akhtar said. "She knew absolutely no one when she came to Bombay. She didn't even know a word of Hindi. I can't think of anyone who has taken this kind of a jump."

A couple of years ago, Salman Khan, while he was still dating Kaif (or wasn't; who knows?), told me, "One day, Katrina was watching something on TV, and she frantically called asking me to check out this guy: There's this new kid who wants to be you. Just look at him. Poor thing, he'll never make it.' She was watching Maine Pyar Kiya [Salman's first major release, from 1989]." It's usually hard to tell when Salman is serious. He goes off on tangents when asked any question during interviews. We were talking at the time about his movie Andaz Apna Apna (1994), which is now considered a cult comedy, but had originally opened to an indifferent response in theatres. "We were watching that film a few years ago," he said. "It was really funny because Katrina was watching it, too, and she was watching it just like that. Everyone around was laughing, and she had just started learning Hindi, I remember, she just wouldn't laugh. She didn't understand it."

Until two years before she came to India and made her screen debut with Kaizad Gustad's Boom (2003), Kaif hadn't watched a Hindi movie, let alone an Indian one. This is not so hard to imagine, she said. Growing up in different parts of the world, she never came in contact with Indian diaspora communities. "How would I know about Bollywood?" She was born in Hong Kong. She's lived, for the most part, in China and Japan, moving home to wherever her mother's short assignments as a charity worker would take her: parts of Eastern Europe, Switzerland, Belgium, and Hawaii, among other places.

While in London in 2001, she went to a theatre with her mother to watch Santosh Sivan's Asoka (2001). It was the rare Indian film at the time to get a mainstream theatrical release in the UK, playing at regular multiplexes rather than ones mainly devoted to South Asians. This is how Kaif first learned the name Shah Rukh Khan'.

Cut to 2005, four years later, I am in a crummy bylane of Patna surveying the only cubicle at a fertilizer company's tiny sales office. The computer terminal lights up with an image of Kaif as its wallpaper. In that Patna room, a couple of centuries away from Piccadilly Circus, she is already the much-loved local Bollywood heroine. How does this happen? "A lot of people do one film and they become the next big thing, a star, and they carry on. Every day, I've got a little more," Kaif said. Okay, no. Seriously. How does someone quite suddenly, coming out of nowhere, and with no initial access to stars or filmmakers, become a top Hindi movie star in Mumbai? This is the only question, as if posed with a primer in mind, that I asked Kaif when we met on a Friday afternoon at her Bandra apartment.

"I am driven, in a healthy, positive way"have always been," she said, making light of the improbability of her success, adding that once she had found a foot in the door, a lot of work was coming her way, the job merely had to be done, and she had to concentrate on delivering.

"IT IS JUST HER FOCUS," Akhtar reasoned. "And she is a foreigner!" She is half-British by origin. In the early years of Indian cinema, that would have been a calling card for women to enter films in Bombay, when it was considered taboo for Hindu and Muslim women from respectable' homes to perform in public.

"There was also a belief that exposure to the camera lens would impair one's health, which was strong enough to keep women altogether away from cinema in the first few years," writes film historian ST Bhaskaran in the journal Cinema Vision India. The first Indian heroine was a young boy called Anna Salunke, who played the queen Taramati in Raja Harishchandra(1913).

This isn't to say there were no Indian female actors in the initial years. There were the likes of Gauhar Jaan, Zubeida, minor actors like Lalita Pawar (then called Amboo), or Gulab, Bibbo, Jilloo, mostly drawn from among nautch girls'. The audiences, newly addicted to unique vaudevillian entertainment, were accustomed to seeing Anglo-Indians in female actor credits: Thelma Wallace, Dorothy Kingdom, Blanche Verni, Albertina, Miss Williams, Lilian Fox"they held no cultural prejudices against joining the film industry. Some, like Patience Cooper, became stars in their own right. Many others took on Hindu names to fit in. Marien Hill, a top silent heroine in the South, went by the name Vilochana. Bombay Talkies' Renee Smith, better known as Seeta Devi, was the star of Himanshu Rai's crossover hits Light Of Asia (1925) and Shiraz (1928) (two rare Indian silent film prints that still survive because they were Indo-German productions; so their reels remained preserved in Munich).

Imperial Film Company's Ruby Meyers (Sulochana), silent cinema's first sex symbol, was a Eurasian of Jewish descent, though she was born in Pune. Her career took a hit when talkies began in the mid 1930s. Her diction in Hindustani was no good. Even the birth of talkies didn't entirely transform the multi-ethnic galaxy of female stars. One of the strongest draws among leading ladies in the 1940s was Wadia Movietone's stunt queen "Hunterwali""Fearless Nadia, a blonde Australian, born Mary Evans. She would play realistic roles of a city-bred Indian girl speaking in Hindi, and the audience wouldn't question it. The black-and-white screen didn't give her colour away.

For a more direct inspiration, Kaif needn't have looked beyond Salman Khan's home. Salman's step-mother, Helen Richardson, a dancing sensation for about three decades starting from the 1950s, is half-British, half-Burmese. Kaif is still close to Salman's family. I could somewhat tell this from the next visitor at her house after our interview was over. A distributor walked in with a gift, "Oh, Salim Uncle [Salman's father] sent him over," she said before greeting him.

As Bombay's professionally run studio system collapsed during World War II"among other reasons due to the cost of importing raw stock becoming prohibitively expensive"the film industry over generations gradually began to merge into a joint family of freelance producers and star-actors interconnected by blood, personal friendships or marriage. The patriarchs of these families, while preferring their sons to take on leading roles, didn't usually approve of their daughters or their wives (often former actors themselves) to work in movies. Lineage in film-star dynasties was usually traced only between father and son.

Women from outside the industry once benefitted from this scheme, gaining relatively easier access to it than men. This isn't so much the case anymore: actors like Sonam Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha are the daughters of former leading men. The hero on the poster is still the prime bait for audiences. Casting debutants as female leads has always been perceived as less of a risk. This explains why there are always far more heroines than heroes to talk about.

The Indian heroine that emerged after independence"Nargis, Nutan, Meena Kumari, Madhubala"was usually demure, almost divine in her characterisation on screen. She would come from Muslim or Hindu families, although, in most cases, from less affluent homes. The Jewish Florence Ezekiel (Nadira) would fill up the more tantalising slot of the smoking, dancing, sensual vamp'. Despite over 500 films to her credit, and a large following still, the Anglo-Burmese Helen could never really make it as a heroine; she remained the cabaret queen in public imagination.

Kaif followed an equally conventional route to the top. Playing it safe, a lot of the characters she has portrayed in films, she admitted, had "closed mindsets: shy, quiet kinda girls." She doesn't name these parts, but it's easy to tell that she is talking about most of her romances, where she plays a delicate damsel (Jab Tak Hai Jaan, 2012; Humko Deewana Kar Gaye,2006), waiting for the hero to take her under his wing (Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani, 2009), or show her the way (Namastey London, 2007). She found it hard to empathise with many of her characters, given her own "headstrong personality" she said. "I've led a much harder life," she would tell herself. "What's wrong with this girl?" On the other hand, she could slide down a pole, shake it up and let her hair down as a strong sizzling item girl', a contemporary version of the 1960s cabaret queen.

The audience doesn't see a contradiction between these two character types anymore. She is a bona fide Bollywood leading lady. Industry number-crunchers estimate she charges upwards of C4 crore for a film, making almost a third of that for an item song', and up to 70-90 per cent of the figure to endorse a product. She endorses over a dozen products.

A British national with no experience in acting or a knowledge of Bollywood suddenly cracking into a lucrative labour market in the mid 2000s didn't quite end recession in the West. But it did offer a strange hope of sorts to women from various nationalities to take a shot at this success model in a developing country None of the imports into Bollywood, since Kaif, have managed to upset the top order yet, though they've certainly enlivened the demographics of a typical basement party in Juhu and Andheri.

Vikas Kumar, a dialogue coach, who's worked on Vidya Balan's Bhojpuri dialect for Ishqiya (2010) and Kalki Koechlin's diction in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, said every other day he gets calls to help out South African, German, Brazilian models with Hindi so they can audition for Bollywood parts. Vikas is a full-time television actor, and he is unable to keep up with the huge demand. As a side profession, he is setting up a full-fledged Hindi training school called Strictly Speaking for similar aspirants.

So far, Vikas has tutored Yana Gupta (Czech), Jacqueline Fernandes (Sri Lankan) and Angela Jonsson (half Icelandic). They have all appeared in Bollywood films and have been sold to audiences as Indian heroines. Director Imtiaz Ali cast Brazilian Giselli Monteiro as a Punjabi girl from a village inLove Aaj Kal (2009), following it up with Nargis Fakhri (half-Czech, half-Pakistani, all American) in a lead role as a Delhi University student alongside Ranbir Kapoor in Rockstar (2011).

Miss England runner up Amy Jackson debuted in Bollywood last year as a Malayali Christian opposite Prateik Babbar in Ek Deewana Tha: "Both my parents are from Liverpool. ... An Indian director found me on Google ... I hadn't been to Asia, let alone India ... I first did a film in Tamil, which sounds like gibberish. ... I've now taken up a flat in Mumbai, there's (another) huge Bollywood film I am going to star in," Jackson, 20, told the BBC recently.

Then there's South African Playboy Playmate Candice Boucher, who starred in a C60 crore film Aazaan (2011), British pin-up Aruna Shields who debuted with the Vivek Oberoi starrer Prince (2010), Brazilian Bruna Abdullah who was recently seen in the sex comedy Grand Masti, Swedish Elli Avram who's a contestant in the latest season ofBigg Boss and has a film called Mickey Virus coming up... It's hard to keep count. What connects most of these crossover starlets"with long dark hair, light skin that looks decidedly desi rather than Caucasian, and relatively petite features"is that, from a distance, in a long shot, they could all pass off for maybe Monica Bellucci, definitely Katrina Kaif.

I see a white German blonde, Claudia Ciesla, morph over months into a slightly tanned, brunette version of herself in her Facebook profile pictures. Claudia featured in an item song in Khiladi 786 (2012), an Akshay Kumar film. Vikas said he'd observed a lot of firang (white-skinned) girls being easily made to look Indian with minor make-up: "And then they have the genetic advantage of height and slimness."

This was hardly the prototype of the Bollywood heroine from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, when shorter, suppler Sridevi, Jaya Prada, Madhuri Dixit and Kajol ruled the silver screen. From the late 1990s onwards, leaner, taller models, many of them Miss India pageant winners, became more obvious recruits for Bollywood, starting with the 5'10" Sushmita Sen (opposite a 5'7" Salman Khan) and going on to the 5'9" Deepika Padukone and others, several of whom stand taller than their leading men, even without their illegally high heels.

This gradually changing template of the Indian leading lady had a lot to do with the audience's exposure to foreign television, films and the Internet, argued Nonita Kalra, who as editor of Elle in 2002 had worked on Kaif's first mainstream photo shoot for an Indian fashion magazine. Kaif was still a model then. Her entry into films, Kalra said, also coincided with an emerging consensus on the global image of beauty: "It was in 2003 that Newsweek had put Saira Mohan (Canadian model of Indian, French and Irish origin) on its cover as The Perfect Face'. Kaif signified that same international look and heritage." This transatlantic standardisation that has evidently had an impact on Bollywood also quite often makes it hard to tell one female actor from another on blurry advertising hoardings or fuzzy film posters when you're slightly near-sighted. The figure and airbrushed look are roughly the same. In 2011, toy manufacturer Mattel modelled its Indian range of Barbie dolls on Kaif.

A more buxom female form with a proud girth, in a saree or ghagra, modelled along the lines of Khajuraho sculptures, it could be argued, continues to whet Indian male fantasies. It's still possible to find leading ladies clearly more inclined to skip the gym in mainstream South Indian cinema (actors like Kajal, Namitha, Nayantara, Charmee), or among Bhojpuri stars (Mona Lisa, Nagma, Rinku Ghosh), and inevitably in the cult Malayalam soft-po*n industry, with actors like Shakeela, Sharmili and Devika.

WHEN KALRA SAW THE RESULTS of Kaif's first photo shoot at Elle, she said, "My breath was taken away." She wanted to put her on the magazine cover, but it was the model's debut assignment, so she couldn't take that editorial call. Kalra knew Kaif would get noticed in a big way when she eventually landed the Lakme contract the following year: "Iconic brands tend to do that. Aishwarya Rai was the Lakme girl before. When you think of Liril, even now, you recall Preity Zinta."

Kaif was 18 when she came down to Mumbai for a couple of weeks in 2002. She had already started out as a freelance model in London. She did what she calls the usual "networking" in the ad world: getting in touch with model coordinators who would book shows and fashion photographers for catalogue shoots, passing on her portfolio to agencies O&M and Lintas, being referred to editors at magazinesElle and L'Officiel. She was only testing the waters, she said: "Things start getting problematic when you have something to lose. There is no fear when you have an x' amount of money, no support of family that you can fall back on, you need to earn y', and there is a modelling industry out there..." It was during these rounds that she heard about the film Boom. One of the lead actors, model Meghna Reddy, had walked out only a few days before the film's shoot. A replacement was urgently required. Kaif auditioned and got the part.

The English-language Boom was possibly the most anticipated Indian movie of 2003. For months before its release, mainstream newsprint had psyched up audiences with stunning images of the newly opened hotel Burj Al Arab in Dubai; Bo Derek stepping out of the ocean in an ode to her iconic moment in Blake Edward's Ten; Amitabh Bachchan sporting a silver Mohawk and green lenses; Zeenat Aman reprising the Dum Maro Dum' song in a comeback role; and three supermodels in various stages of undress: Padma Lakshmi (then Salman Rushdie's girlfriend), Madhu Sapre (best remembered for controversially posing nude in a footwear ad in the mid 1990s), and the newcomer Kaif.

As the film"a bizarre mash-up of the underworld meeting the world of underwear"finally opened in theatres in September, instantly panned by audiences and critics alike, dubbed as a new benchmark in low, all but two of the top names associated with it decided to disown it. Jackie Shroff, who had starred in it, and his wife Ayesha, who had produced it.

There were issues with financiers. On television, Bachchan asked for the cast's outstanding dues to be cleared; in magazine interviews, he apologised for having played the male chauvinist mafioso's role; Rushdie lashed out at the director on behalf of his girlfriend, the Shroffs got into debt, had to sell off personal assets"it was a mess. Nobody remembered Kaif. Few would have watched the film save for certain "unseen clips" with her and villain Gulshan Grover on YouTube that have garnered several million hits. Kaif told me she still hadn't seen the film. She doesn't remember her first shot either.

She continued her run in modelling thereafter, "travelling to small towns for shows, working 14 to 16 hours a day, shooting for three South Indian films [Malliswari, 2004; Allari Pidugu, 2005; Balram Vs Tharadas, 2006], that is 220 days of the year. ..."

She would also wake up early to get to her six-hour non-stop dance class, and had begun her formal lessons in Bollywood dancing alongside. While the base of the dance form she was learning was kathak, she essentially needed help in mastering stock expressions of the Hindi film heroine""the ada," as she put it. "A lot of people trivialise the role of dancing in the repertoire of a mainstream Indian actor. At the end of the day, barring a few exceptions, let's not be mistaken, we make musicals."

Dharmesh Darshan"an old-time director-producer, whose brother Suneel was making a film called Barsaat"put her on to a dance teacher called Guru Viru Krishna. She went to a fabric shop on Linking Road, picked up a salwar kameez and tied a dupatta around her waist. Every morning she would report to school not a minute later than 7 am, or she would not be allowed in. Her classmates were Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta and Sameera Reddy.

"We would be in this really tiny room, just about this small," Kaif said, pointing to half the space between her door and the couch in the average-sized drawing room of her sixth (top) floor apartment. It is in a tony neighbourhood, but looks rather underwhelming for the home of one of India's best-known Bollywood stars. The drawing room is partitioned by a small lounge space with a home-theatre system. The bedroom is by the entrance. The building, in shades of cream and pink, kisses the pavement of the perennially congested Waterfield Road in Bandra. A name-plate in the lobby suggests Rajkumar Hirani"director of blockbusters 3 Idiots (2009) and Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006)"occupies the first floor. This perhaps says a lot more about Mumbai's unreal real estate prices than about the actor's earnings, which may well have risen in the last year, given her dream run in 2012.

Her last film, last Christmas, was director Yash Chopra's swan song, Jab Tak Hai Jaan: a long-drawn-out romance with Shah Rukh Khan. She had begun the year dancing to Chikni Chameli' for Agneepath, a sequel of sorts to her Shakira-like Sheila Ki Jawani' item song from Tees Maar Khan in 2010.Agneepath's promotions mostly focused on this dance track. Both Jab Tak... and Agneepath got into the coveted "C100-crore club", a crop of films that earn that much and more, from their audiences. It's the ticket sales' number that pops the champagne corks in Bollywood, and according to popular film trade site Koimoi.com, Agneepath collected C123 crore and Jab Tak... C120.65 crore. In between, her romantic thriller, Kabir Khan's Ek Tha Tiger, opposite Salman Khan, where she played the more substantive role of an ISI agent in love with an Indian spy, became the second-highest-grossing Indian film of all time, at C198 crore. She'll finish 2013 with the much-awaited, massively budgeted Dhoom 3 opposite Aamir Khan, before she appears with Hrithik Roshan in an action adventure Bang Bang, for which she was preparing to go on location in Thailand around the time we met.

DURING THE FIRST TWO YEARS OF HER CAREER, Kaif would get home from work and cry every day, she told the audience at the Hindustan Timesleadership summit last year. Though she didn't quite specify why, she did say that "it was an overwhelming experience". Her Guruji's dance classes may be producing results now, but they didn't get her the lead role with Akshay Kumar and Bobby Deol in Darshan's Barsaat (2005). Priyanka Chopra got that part. Producer Mukesh Bhatt cast her in a supernatural flick, Saaya (2003). Within a couple of days, she was kicked off the set and replaced (by Tara Sharma). Her Hindi apparently wasn't good enough. Producer-director Subhash Ghai probably felt the same and chose not to consider her for a role.

Language, an important tool for an actor, has rarely been a barrier for leading ladies cast in popular Indian films: Bhanurekha Ganesan (or Rekha), Shree Amma Yanger (better known as Sri Devi), Hema Malini Chakravarthy (Hema Malini in short), stars from the South, have had some of Bollywood's longest innings, despite their obvious discomfort with Hindi"at least in her early films in the case of Rekha, and forever for the other two.

A lot of female leads are dubbed by professionals in movies, regardless of their command of Hindi, presumably because filmmakers don't approve of their real voices. Perhaps Rani Mukherjee was too harsh (for Ghulam, 1998), Ameesha Patel too squeaky (for Kaho Naa Pyar Hai, 2000), and Bipasha Basu too hoarse (for Ajnabee, 2001; Raaz, 2002; and Phir Hera Pheri, 2006). And almost every Hindi movie heroine who does a stint in the South uses the support of dubbing artistes"Aishwarya Rai, for one, when she made her debut in Mani Rathnam's Iruvar (1997).

One of the tricks of the trade for which Kaif can't thank actor Jackie Shroff enough is that he asked her to crack the Devanagari script. He warned her that dialogues were written on the set; she would feel genuinely in control only if she was able to read them. After her dance classes, Kaif would get on with Hindi tuitions in the afternoon, learning to read, write and speak the language.

The big budget Hindi films that finally kicked off her career were Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya (2005)"David Dhawan's version of the Walter Matthau starrerCactus Flower"with Salman Khan, who, according to tabloids, was dating her at this time, and Humko Deewana Kar Gaye (2006). This was an NRI (non-resident Indian) romance"a Bollywood sub-genre of its own"set in Canada, starring Akshay Kumar, who's a big draw in the Punjabi outpost. The second film was labelled a "flop", which is defined in trade-speak as a movie that doesn't recover its total cost ("average" is a film that does). The first was a moderate commercial success or what trade pundits call "in the plus""a project that brings in profits.

(A "hit" in box-office dialect doubles its money in theatres, and works up from there into the even more profitable "super-hit" and "blockbuster". Some of these definitions have been changing of late ever since long theatrical runs stopped being the only, or even the main, source of revenue for films. Television rights can often rake in about half a film's cost. Earnings from theatres, given a wide release and backed by a marketing blitzkrieg, are concentrated on a film's collections in the first week, or weekend, alone.

Kaif made her next outing in North Indian cinemas in 2005, after Boom, in a cameo in Sarkar"Ram Gopal Varma's version of The Godfather"reprising Diane Keaton's role as Michael Corleone's girlfriend and looking stunning in the sepia tone employed. In her films so far, she had spoken through the generic voice of a professional artiste, ghosted by Mona Ghosh, who's now the go-to person for Angelina Jolie, Kirsten Dunst, Halle Berry, Carrie-Anne Moss, etc., in the Hindi-dubbed versions of Hollywood movies. Ghosh had also dubbed for Deepika Padukone in her debut Om Shanti Om (2007). More recently, she played the voice of Nargis Fakhri's character in Rockstar (2011).

The first time Kaif spoke in Hindi on screen was in Vipul Shah's Namastey London, another Akshay Kumar Punjabi diaspora film. Her accent, which sounds globish', leaning more towards American than British, was still strong, but this time it added authenticity to her character, who is born into an Indian family but has lived all her life in the West. Her performance stood out in this fairly common role that every other actor had played with a thick desi twang in the past"think Kajol or even Shah Rukh Khan as born Londoners in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). With Akshay Kumar as a flag-bearing patriotic Indian in the melodramatic mould of a Manoj Kumar from the 1970s, Namastey London became a major mainstream success in 2007. This was Kaif's first genuine hit, and also the first time, she said, that she had been noticed as an actor"Akshay Kumar showed her a review in an afternoon tabloid that went: "Watch this film for Katrina Kaif."

A heroine in a hit mainstream Bollywood film becomes a safe accessory for a leading man, so far as subsequent producers/financiers are concerned"unless she has fallen out with the star, since the hero more often than not takes the final casting call. Over the next five years, Kaif established herself as a marquee name. She stopped using voice support for the most part. Subhash Ghai was now happy to have her in his film with Salman Khan (Yuvraaj, 2008"Rain Man in the garb of a Bollywood musical set in Salzburg, which tanked). Yashraj studios and director Kabir Khan approached her to take on a more challenging role in New York, a post 9/11 film that tackled racial profiling and terrorism in America. Kaif would play John Abraham's love interest in the movie. Abraham had supposedly supervised her exit from the sets of the flick Saaya, and Kaif didn't want to step into a role opposite him now. Alluding to Abraham in an interview to NDTV, she said it was Salman who persuaded her to go by the merits of a script rather than who the co-star was, even if that star had been mean to her in the beginning of her career.

I asked her about some of the challenges she's faced as an actor. Kaif told me she was once having trouble expressing affection on screen with a co-star she really didn't like. She took acting advice from an "industry veteran" who said to her: "When you're looking at him, treat him as a child, find one good thing about him, and express maternal love."

New York (2009) was both critically acclaimed and a box-office success in multiplexes and metropolitan cities. As a solo lead, she followed this up by playing an earthy Catholic girl in a run-of-the-mill romance with Ranbir Kapoor in Ajab Prem Ki Gazab Kahani. Ajab Prem... struck gold in small-town theatres, bringing her probably closer to what she had wanted to be: "a Hindi film heroine that everyone would know in small villages: a family film star'."

Paying tribute to leading ladies in Bollywood at the Filmfare Awards this year, hosts Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan devoted skits to heroines from various decades. The 1970s were represented by a Hema Malini clone dressed as Basanti from Sholay, and as Zeenat Aman from the song Kya Dekhte Ho' in Qurbani. They took digs at Sridevi for the filmHimmatwala from the 1980s. As for the "young modern heroine", the woman on stage in a white shirt, hat tipped low and tie hanging loose was clearly a parody of Kaif as Sheila.

Shah Rukh Khan also referred to this newly empowered woman, mentioning Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra. "If you take them in your movie, their luck comes with it," he said, emphasising a rule of thumb in box-office trade that the hero alone ensures a film's multi-crore success, the heroine is at best a lucky mascot"Kapoor, Kaif, Chopra, newcomer"rotating between any of the reigning Khans (Salman, Shah Rukh, Aamir), Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan, and so on.

Kaif counters this theory. She points out the theatrical success of a film like Yashraj Studios' Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2010), in which she shared screen space with Imran Khan: "I would get 50 per cent of the credit at least, because my co-actor didn't have a huge body of successful work behind him yet. The same for New York, or Rajneeti." The latter was Prakash Jha's ensemble cast political drama, which was furthest away from her comfort zone, where she played an outsider to Indian politics who rises to the top through marriage and personal misfortune, a character vaguely based on Sonia Gandhi. Rajneeti was one of the biggest money-spinners of 2010.

Trade pundit Vinod Mirani says on any given year, only 10 per cent of films recover their costs in Bollywood. As per figures on Boxofficeindia.com, of the 18 films that Kaif has starred in, 15 have turned out to be profitable for their investors (including lesser known ones like Apne, 2007, and De Dana Dan, 2009), deemed anywhere between "in the plus" and a "blockbuster". That's a strike-rate of 83 per cent in close to 10 years, unrivalled among her current contemporaries. It's something that escapes box-office analysis only because that analysis centres on the male lead alone.

Kaif said she closely followed the numbers game"the Friday footfall figures and opening weekend collections of every new release, "though not as much as before". On the day of her own film's release, she anxiously awaits the 2 p.m. phone call for summaries of all box-office analyses. Her personal assessment of movies is roughly guided by the same indicators: "If 80 per cent of people love a character or actor, then it must be a good film. You can argue with critics, you can't argue with the majority." As to what makes a star, she said: "The audiences either relate to you or they don't. It could be for any reason: honesty, screen presence, smile ... It's destiny," a word she used quite often in the interview.

WHEN SHE WAS GROWING UP IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD unrelated to India, did she, in any of these places, have an inkling of where destiny would finally take her, I asked. "Yes," she said. Where did she think of it? As a kid in Japan? "Not exactly. My ambition was a little vague in terms of achieving something big," she said.

When she first moved to Mumbai, she found it to be "a magical world, an unattainable pure fantasy ... Way out of reach." She would walk around like "Alice in Wonderland". She had lived in developing countries before, she said, and so the city's poverty seemed normal to her. She had brought her sister along as well, who left in two weeks: "My sisters haven't had the same upbringing. They settled down in London by the time they were 16. I've been used to waking up in a different country every other morning."

In a more Indian setting, Kaif's quasi-nomadic upbringing connects her to a huge number of female actors in Bollywood: Priyanka Chopra, Anushka Sharma, Preity Zinta, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen, Chitrangada Singh, Gul Panag, Celina Jaitley, Neha Dhupia, the list goes on. All of them, coincidentally, come from Army or Service backgrounds, their parent's job taking them to various towns or closed cantonments while they were growing up.

In an essay in his book Mother Pious Lady, the author Santosh Desai branded this female phenomenon the "Freedom of Army Daughters". The fact of being raised without the roots of a permanent home, away from neighbourly tongues and prying eyes, Desai argued, helped them grow up "not knowing too well what being a girl in India usually meant. The freedom to live in the present and to be who you are is perhaps the reason why army daughters constantly display the easy confidence of those who do not see the world as a place full of invisible constraints but one of frequent opportunity."

Kaif said her early years of living in different places gave her an extremely adaptive personality. "I could just fit in anywhere." Sitting in her couch in a comfortable t-shirt and jeans, discussing the lead actor of the film Rust And Bone, whom she particularly loved, teasing her maid in Hindi, she comes across as a typically unintimidating, chatty sort of Bandra expat. The entertainment she consumes hardly matches her own body of work. I see a copy of Spielberg's Lincoln lying on the coffee table. She said her friends download for her most of the television shows she's hooked on: Game of Thrones, Bones, The Killing. This isn't uncommon among many actors and filmmakers you meet in mainstream Bollywood who rarely let their personal tastes get in the way of a prevailing perception of what audiences want.

She said she picked up her acting know-how on the sets, patiently following her director's instructions, doggedly rehearsing her material before the shot and observing her colleagues: "seeing Govinda's improvisations; Salman's brazenness in bringing out his own personality and making that something the audience connects to; Akshay's professionalism and intense discipline in an industry that by its nature doesn't encourage discipline, you just have to find it within yourself."

The first time Kaif met Salman, she was too new to the city to be able to tell apart a celebrity whose pictures appear in newspaper supplements from someone who was more popular. She knew he was famous, but had never heard of him before. This is hard to believe, I told her. She said it took her a week to figure out that he was a major superstar. By the time Boom had released, they were already friends. They've done four films together (including David Dhawan's mad-cap Partner (2007), lifted from the Will Smith-starrer Hitch). She's been paired with Akshay Kumar five times (with hits Singh Is Kinng, 2008; Welcome, 2007; and the disaster Tees Maar Khan).

There is a formula, Kaif admitted, and she has learned and followed it. "This is the way it's been done, so I must, but that's not to say it should always be that way. I want to get a chance to do something different now," she said. When she entered Bollywood, almost all the scripts offered to her were in the form of screenplay narrations', where the director would broadly tell her the story and outline what happens to her character: "Boy and girl fight, she goes off to London, he follows her, they make up, and this is the end." It's only lately that she has begun reading scripts, many of which don't cater to only the masses at large, multiplexes having made "niche films" possible and profitable in the last few years. This is the stuff that she says interests her more.

Any change of course in her career is difficult to ascertain at this point, though reports suggest she was in talks with the relatively off-beat director Dibakar Banerjee to star in his detective flick based on the Bengali Sherlock Holmes, Byomkesh Bakshi. She has signed up with Abhishek Kapoor"whose last filmKai Po Che! (2013) intimately recounted the Gujarat riots"besides teaming up again with Kabir Khan and Zoya Akhtar, both blockbuster filmmakers who are capable of making a statement through their films.

At 29, she is aware of the unpredictability of showbiz, where two huge hits by someone else put your own stardom under question: "At any point in time, you just cannot stop needing to be at the forefront of the profession, being involved with good scripts, good filmmakers and good performances. Few years down the line, no matter how intelligent, hardworking and talented you are, there will come a time when things will change, they won't be in your control anymore. How you deal with it is up to you."

DESPITE HAVING LIVED ALMOST A DECADE under severe tabloid scrutiny and the paparazzi spotlight, Kaif has managed to intensely guard her personal life. It's remarkable that there is still so little known about her family"her years before movies are a blur. Producer Ayesha Shroff, who introduced her withBoom, supposedly outed' her non-Indian antecedents inMumbai Mirror in 2009, revealing, seemingly against Kaif's will, that her last name is Turquotte"which is what she goes by on her British passport.

Kaif' was a surname Shroff had given her after Mohammad Kaif, a popular Indian cricketer at the time, she told the tabloid. Shroff refused to be interviewed for this story, as did director Kaizad Gustad, who according to Kaveree Bamzai's profile of Kaif in India Today in 2011, was prone to "drop dark hints about her past". Gustad recently announced a film with Indo-Canadian po*n star Sunny Leone. If released, it will be his first film since Kaif's debut Boom (in 2004, his movie Bombay Central was shelved because of an accidental death of an assistant director during the shoot).

Here's roughly what is publicly known about Kaif, then. Her British mother, Susanna, who raised her, is a relief worker based in Chennai. Until recently, she used to work for a mercy home for children in Madurai. I asked Kaif if I could interview her mother. A few days later, Kaif texted to say that her mother would rather not participate.

Kaif chooses not to talk about her father, who left the family when she was very young. She has mentioned in past interviews that he is of Kashmiri origin, and that his name is Mohammed Kaif, though this is hard to verify.

In her defence, she said, "Just because I've chosen to be under the spotlight doesn't mean my whole family ought to face the public. It's their right to ask and my right to answer with as little information as I desire." When paparazzi shots of her holidaying with Ranbir Kapoor in Ibiza went viral after gossip magStardust ran them in July this year, she sent out a press note complaining against the invasion of her privacy. Much like Salman, she rarely, if ever, issues clarifications to rumours and reports about her personal life. This sets her apart from a lot of her contemporaries"Kareena Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, etc."whose personal quotes on love, life, co-stars, and pot-shots in general have regularly lit up headlines in fanzines and tabloids.

Kaif's guardedness, in contrast, has spawned a series of celeb-spotting snaps and hush-hush reports on her daily routine. On the very day I write this story,Bombay Times found her partying at a Mumbai nightclub before she flew off to London to attend her sister's wedding; alongside the same report, in the same edition of the paper, is a snippet on how she was in Sri Lanka with Ranbir.

In press interactions, she never shoots her mouth off, and is almost bland in her repartee, forcing you to read between the lines. She says, "People who accuse me of being diplomatic don't understand my history and my life. That's made me least judgmental as a person. I have seen the extreme"the most unimaginable situations. These aren't things I would discuss. That's just between me and my world and my family."

Kaif has seven siblings"six sisters and a brother. She told me she was financially responsible for her family. (One of her sisters, Isabelle, who trained in acting at New York's Lee Strasberg Institute, is currently auditioning for debut roles).

Kalra, the former Elle editor who met Kaif before she became a star, said that what she liked about her is she rarely lets on what she's thinking: "In a world of too much information, she came across as someone who doesn't assume closeness, is polite, well-behaved. I never asked her anything personal, because it's easy to tell with her that it's not your place to."

Including the hour-long conversation for this story, I've so far interviewed her thrice, clocking in time longer than the average Hindi movie. Yet, the self-effacing, two-dimensional picture that emerges is a distant, impenetrable snapshot. Somehow the mystique around the unlikely imported star, at least in the public mind, endures, as she dreamily reflects.

"A million people can use a million lines to describe me," she told me. "One thing that won't fit is that I didn't imagine this life. Since I remember having a brain, I've always had an outrageous, outlandish imagination, fantasies, dreams, and that is all that I do to this date." This self-portrait tallies beautifully with the magical fairy that she plays as herself inBombay Talkies.