Mira's new muse Tanvi Azmi bags lead role in Monsoon Wedding director's documentary

Kshama Rao

What else do you call it but destiny when both your telephone lines are dead, you have a third line but since that's only for the Net you haven't circulated its number.

Not even your dad has it. Worse still, most often you get wrong numbers on that line and so when one fine day it trills persistently, you want to just dismiss it but hang on, you pick it up and bingo! An internationally acclaimed filmmaker like Mira Nair is on the other line.

She has a role for you, which she thinks only you can do it and the subject is the September 11 tragedy. Naturally, Tanvi Azmi says 'I do'.

Based on a real-life story of a Pakistani family settled in the US, the '11-minute, nine seconds and one frame' film is about a mother, Talat Hamdani who is in search of her missing young son who the government has labeled 'terrorist' and declared dead. 'Missing or hiding?' read a newspaper headline when the boy goes missing. Some days later the authorities find a body, which they say belong to Hamdani's son. They do some DNA tests and conclude that it is the body of that boy. While the rest of the family has accepted it, the mother refuses to do so. This is a real-life story.

Says Tanvi, "I met her before we began shooting and all she did was watch her son's videotapes and ask a complete stranger like me, 'Do you think he will come back?' Some people have been detained and the mother feels that her son is one of them."

The still untitled film was shot in "just four days. There was so much to do. It was sheer chaos. There was zero time for preparation. All I got to do was meet the family a day before we began rehearsals."

Ask her if enacting a real-life incident, which was filled with anguish and anxiety was difficult and she says, "There's a scene in the film where I had to give a speech and just then I saw the boy's entire family sitting before me. I went completely blank. I couldn't talk. I had to do some deep breathing and relax before I gave that shot. I just asked myself if it was right to portray someone who was real, whose trauma was real, was it morally right to do it? There were real people involved and the danger was always there to betray that trust the mother had placed in me. But after the shooting, she came up to me and hugged me tightly saying that I had rightly imbibed, absorbed everything she had told me, that I had captured her every emotion and her feelings. She felt hopeful that with this film she would have reached out to a larger people through me. And her reaction eased my pressure."

Tanvi belongs to that rare breed of actors who are "painfully choosy about the work I do. Offers to do daily soaps and theatre come my way every single day but I can't bring myself to accepting any of those. I have got many 'mother' roles but I just can't take them up. Maybe I'll wait for five more years and then probably do them. But with the on-screen mothers getting younger these days, I'd possibly play dadi [grandmother] five years from now," she laughs.

Needless to say Tanvi feels the few roles she did have been worth her while as young medicos still come up to her complimenting on her performance in Vijaya Mehta's TV serial Lifeline, in which she played a doctor. "Even 10 years down the line, if someone remembers me for my role as Talat Hamdani, it would be worth it. These are pay-offs for having done something substantial, satisfying and creative."

And that means much more to Tanvi Azmi than instant recognition but here-today-gone-tomorrow benefits.

She would rather wait for roles like Talat Hamdani. Despite being 'out of sight' there is an interesting story of how Mira Nair still managed to track down Tanvi and offer her that role. The director recently said in an interview that she remembered Tanvi's performance in the TV show Mirza Ghalib in which she played Ghalib's (Naseeruddin Shah) wife, 15 years ago.

Apparently Mira and her family got together for some Idd celebration and decided to see Ghalib and that's when she remembered me. The film was not even in question then. Later, when it came up she thought of casting me." And Mira seems to be rather glad about her choice as the 'Tanvi, tum is film ki jaan ho' [Tanvi, you are the life of this film] scribble reads in a book the unit gifted the actress as a memento.

India News Feature Service