Celebrating Konkona Sen Sharma, actor extraordinaire, on her birthday

I next got a chance to meet Konkona seven years later, in the last week of May 2019. Death in the Gunj, her much talked about directorial debut was turning two, and she agreed to meet me at a Mumbai café to talk about the film. It was afternoon. I was running 10 minutes late but by then I’d interviewed and waited for enough stars to know not to worry. Even if I were late, I knew I’d be the one doing the waiting. But just then, my phone beeped. It was a text from her, saying, “You’re late.”

That afternoon played out like a dream. After a brief reprimand for making her wait, she quickly got down to business and chatted away about the film, her career thus far, her upcoming projects, and what she thought about it all. I have been writing about movies and talking to the people who make them for years now. It’s difficult to get me star-struck. But with Konkona, there was something more, something different.

At the end of the interview, I surprised myself when I asked her if I could get a picture with her. As she stood beside me for the photo, I couldn’t help but think about when I saw Page 3 years ago and considered out loud for the first time what it would be like to be a journalist like Madhavi. I thought about the countless times I’d watched Wake Up Sid and took comfort in how Aisha was so much like me. I would return to her every time it got difficult in a new city and each time she made me feel less alone. It was not just Wake Up Sid’s Aisha, I have always marveled at how I invariably find a little bit of me in most of Konkona’s characters, whether it’s Luck By Chance’s Sona or Life in a Metro’s Shruti, or Omkara’s Indu. That’s the brilliance of her craft.

One of the questions I asked Konkona that afternoon in Mumbai was why she wasn’t doing more mainstream Hindi films. Her answer brought to light how ageist Bollywood is. She said, “This is not a question to be asked to me, because I am not saying, ‘Now don’t come to me anymore.' In an ideal world, I would like to be offered many interesting kinds of roles so that I can choose. But in most Bollywood films, the protagonist is a younger woman.”

“Now I can’t play women in their early 20s all my life. I am interested in playing women in their 30s. But we don’t talk about them as much. You will still find women in their 50s or 60s in the very stereotypical role of a mother. But women in their 30s and 40s don’t exist. In the web space, maybe. But not in films yet. Except for the peripheral roles of a mother or a bad sister-in-law, we are not really interested in older women’s lives,” she added.

Her response also reminded me of all the convincing it took to get the interview greenlit from my editor. Today on Konkona’s 41st birthday, I wish for her ideal world. A world where good actors get the work they deserve irrespective of their gender or age. And a world where women’s stories don’t need coercion to find their rightful space.