I’m not a morning person but she’s leaving to South Africa to a shoot for an American TV series she is not allowed to talk about. She refuses comment when I bait her. Homeland? That’s currently being shot in Cape Town.
“Stop playing detective,” she texts back.
Thanks to her army background, 9.30 a.m means 9.29 a.m. I’m about ten minutes late and consumed by guilt. I’ve kept the gorgeous heroine of The Lunchbox waiting.
Nimrat Kaur, the girl who redefined the art of eating Dairy Milk chocolate, has settled in with breakfast by the time I reach Café Moshe’s, Juhu Church Road.
I apologise and ask her how she copes with a city and business that’s rarely on time. “Sometimes, it gets to me. I feel like it’s okay if you don’t respect your time but don’t disrespect my time. But that’s how our country works. Unless things go ridiculously late, then it takes some amount of self-control to not let people know... I’m pretty patient too. I would feel awfully off if I were impatient AND punctual.”
You can’t miss the Arabic tattoo on her wrist. “It says Zainab that means daughter who brings glory to the father’s name or father’s precious jewel.”
Does she feel alienated in the big city, like her character in The Lunchbox ? “Not at all. The core of that kind of an existence comes from not being financially independent. For a housewife in India, half the stuff they deal with – ridiculous men or abusive relationships – come from not having the money to support yourself. Bombay has done the opposite for me. It’s given me a sense of belonging, identity, so many lessons, friends… It’s actually given me everything.”
The Lunchbox has worked around the world; people do find themselves lost in their own boxes, right? “It’s a big city problem, the bigger the city the more the alienation… But when you go to smaller places, it’s different. One of the film festivals I went to was in a town called Bled, a small Alpine lake town in the middle of nowhere with a population of 6000. That’s like one building here (laughs). I realised that everybody knows everyone there. The further you are away from a hectic city, I think the more warmer people are. But there’s so much to do in Bombay. People are always running late,” she looks at me and laughs again. “Now that I know you feel guilty, I’m going to keep rubbing it in.”
Ritesh Batra’s film has literally taken her to places she could barely pronounce. Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Ljubljana to name a few. “ The Lunchbox is one of those right trains to be on with no wrong station so far.” The one common reaction she’s got is how much younger she looks (than the film). “Mostly nine out of ten times, that’s the first reaction.”
That’s true though. She looks radiant sitting across with no make-up at all, a stunning picture of grace.
Didn’t she have any reservations of playing someone older? “Maybe ten years ago, when I had just moved to Bombay. When you are in your twenties, you are worried about the worst kind of stuff. You might have passed out on some opportunities. I would have hated to pass up on this.”
She did it without make-up too. “I would have hated it if somebody who looked fetching was writing those letters that go: I think my husband is having an affair… but (laughs) I look so hot. Mujh main kya kami hai …”
“I haven’t understood the destiny and design debate very well,” she admits when I ask her if believes she was destined to do it. “Was my life always leading up to this? The what-ifs of it are endless… Films are a fickle medium. Things change overnight. One day you could be the flavour of the city and the next day, someone else is the flavour of the country. You are the most dispensable person as an actor when you are starting out.”
But now, having done The Lunchbox , maybe critics wouldn’t like it if she ran around trees and did mainstream cinema. “They would be like: What have you done? And I’d be like: Have you seen my house? Do you know where I live now?” she laughs again.
Doesn’t she want to be known as a thinking actress? “Who is a non-thinking actress? It’s more about what you are after. You are very intelligent if you are doing a film for money, or for content or just to have fun and to travel. So what is intelligent and who is unintelligent, I don’t really know.”
Bombay is a tough city and acting a tough profession. “You need to make hay and whichever barn you choose, it’s your choice. The world will go on. Actors will perish. We are not required, we are not flying planes and doing surgeries.”
So is she a believer? “I go to God when I’m in crisis, when I don’t understand entirely or don’t know who to thank… I thank Him. He’s easy guy to ask for forgiveness from, crib to. Yes, hard work pays off and you make your own destiny but somewhere, it is important to respect the power above you that you don’t have to believe in. I’ve seen extraordinary things. Good and bad.
He’s probably someone with a sense of humour, sometimes vicious, something there that likes to put people to test and has made the strongest ones survive.” Just as we put this story on the page, I get her email with the official leak of her casting with a note: “Didn’t I tell you about God’s sense of humour?” Homeland has Nimrat in a guest lead part – she plays a high-level ISI operative. “I don’t know if it’s a recurring part yet or they will kill me off. The privilege of doing a mini series is that you can die any time,” she laughs again.
