Birthday girl Nargis Fakhri all set for her acting comeback

Nargis Fakhri is the only actress who spoke about her breasts like any body part. I was as shocked as when Preity Zinta had spoken about her time of the month in the same matter-of -fact tone a decade before Nargis.

I had to gently reprimand her, reminding her that Indian actresses didn’t speak about their  breasts in public.

Her response was a classic. “But why?! If they are allowed to show so much cleavage on screen, why can’t they speak about their b..bs?”

Nargis Fakhri is much more diplomatic now. Bollywood was uncomfortable with her transparent, no-bullshitting behavior. They didn’t know where to slot her. Like she once said to me, it wasn’t what she did. It was what she didn’t do that did her career in.

When she made her  much-touted  debut in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, the very candid Nargis had  shocked me by confessing she was clueless about her character. She didn’t know a word of  Hindi. There were these long dialogues, pages and pages of them. She shocked me by confessing she delivered the lines without knowing what she was doing. To her doing a Hindi film at that point of her life was the same as doing a Chinese film.

The feisty, filter-free beauty also spoke to me about how let down she felt by the team of  Rockstar, specially Ranbir Kapoor and Imtiaz Ali, whom she considered her close friends and  almost family in Mumbai during the making of the film. But they vanished when the film was released.

Nargis’s non-conformism and her fierce individuality are her USPs. Being beautiful also helps. The period of exile after her debut in Rockstar was confusing for the beautiful foreigner. Imtiaz Ali, Ranbir Kapoor and the rest of the Rockstar team had taken Nargis under their wings during shooting. They gave her the impression they were friends for life. But after the release, when she and her performance were rejected, Nargis found herself isolated and disoriented in a city and profession she knew nothing about.

Nargis was was clueless. It was a disappointing time for her. She couldn’t share her agony with her mother. Mom would’ve just ordered her to come back home to New York. Luckily,  there was no dearth of work.

Bollywood dancing was as alien to Nargis as Hindi. I once caught her trying to keep pace with Varun Dhawan. Nargis enjoyed mastering the slinky moves. But in her characterically filter -free style, she grumbled that there was a lot of heaving and b..b-thrusting, which she found  difficult at first. But she was okay after a while.

Gradually, Nargis found her groove in Mumbai. The city was culturally very different from everywhere else that Nargis had lived. It took her much more time to adapt herself to Bollywood’s heaves and thrusts than Katrina Kaif. But now, Nargis is ready for her second innings. She has signed some new films in Mumbai and she replaced Jacqueline Fernandez in a big Telugu film with Pawan Kalyan.

Nargis enjoys travelling. Living her life the way she want to is most important to her  happiness and wellbeing. She promises she would definitely never move on from Bollywood. But at heart, she would always remain a nomad.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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