Of course, he did not give it any thought then. Much, much later, during the shoot of Black Friday, when he was completely absorbed in the monitor scrutinizing the scenes, he agreed that it was really so. That my eyes were indeed beautiful. Sometime over the years, he began saying, ‘Tu toh meri item girl hai!’ (You’re my item girl!), and he continues to tease me thus, till today. ‘Badi zabardast shaadi hoti hamari!’ (We would have had a great marriage!) We keep clowning around, but seriously, if either one of us was a girl, we would have married each other. I am his muse, he says, and he is mine, I tell him.
I had always taken the ‘item girl’ tag in jest. I had no idea that the bugger had plans of casting me in an ‘item number’ from the very first time he met me. But then, that’s Anurag. The predictable thing about him is his unpredictability of thought. He always thinks differently. Look at all the roles he has made me do. Every single one of them is not only novel in Indian cinema, but also challenging enough to make me push my boundaries as an actor, again and again.
With Raman Raghav 2.0, we especially had enormous freedom to do this, because it was financed by Anurag’s Phantom Films, so we did not have to meet any financier’s or producer’s needs. For a film-maker, this is like winning the jackpot of creative expression, which is why we decided we would not repeat ourselves. We would do something we have not done before.
We had about three weeks of extremely intense shooting for Raman Raghav 2.0. Without realizing it, I pushed my boundaries to such extremes that I, who claim to not know fear, began to be afraid of myself. While doing such a character, you cannot help but lose yourself in multiple labyrinths and fall into abysses in your mind blacker than black holes that you did not even know existed. How else do you play such a dark, deranged psychopathic serial killer who will murder, just like that, at any time, with something as guiltless, legitimate and mundane as a steel rod? Who will murder his own chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed, cute-as-a-button nephew and inform him shortly before hitting him that he will call him ‘pocket’ for being so tiny? ‘Koi poochega kahe ko maara tujhe, toh main bolega maine toh pocket mara, bas.’ (If somebody asks me why I killed you, I’ll say I just picked a pocket, that’s all.) But he also has a drop of the innocent angst of a child—like losing his cool over a guy who was unaware that Ramanna, while walking on the road, was following the black-and-white square tiles, drawing a strict pattern of them in his mind, and he stepped on the black one. Many of us have felt that tiny frustration as a child but, of course, that never merits violence, leave alone brutal murder, like the levels this lunatic takes it to.
There were times when Anurag would get quite angry during the shoot. I was running a very high fever and did not tell the team. My reality had blurred so much with this manic murderer’s character that I was barely even aware of my own existence. During the shoot, I had hurt my leg while doing a scene at a rocky site and so the limp you see Sindhi Dalwai (Ramanna) portray on screen is real. Then I fell so sick that I was hospitalized; I was hallucinating in my unconscious state as I was still very much inside the character. The emotional turmoil Ramanna created within me I had never experienced before. I wanted to finish the shoot as soon as possible and get this lunatic out of my system. Aaliya was unaware of this intensity and so naturally, she completely freaked out when she heard me mutter softly things like eating my own skin while lying unconscious on the hospital bed. She immediately called up Anurag, equally petrified and angry at what he was doing to her husband. ‘Kya film bana rahe hain aap log?’ (What kind of a film are you guys making?)
I don’t think I’ll go the Ramanna route again.
Coming to think of it now, Faisal Khan was so much easier. Many think that I delivered an astounding performance in Gangs of Wasseypur. But the truth is that I had almost ruined the character of Faisal Khan—by trying too hard, way too hard to exude power, because, well, isn’t a gangster supposed to be powerful? Should he not display power to invoke fear wherever he goes? ‘No way, Nawaz!’ Anurag quipped. ‘Just calm down. You are a gangster. They are already afraid of you, dude. You don’t need to do anything.’ Those were simple words; simple words are often the most powerful. I was so perplexed that I was unable to do the one thing I knew how to do—I could not sleep for two nights. Then, the next evening in Benares, I made myself some green tea and as I sipped it silently, I sipped in his words as well. It took a while but finally I could sink into the skin of Faisal, and that is how I delivered those lines, which later went on to become legendary: ‘Ma ka, Baap ka, sab ka badla lega tera Faisal.’ (Mother’s, Father’s, your Faisal shall take revenge for everyone.) I said it with total mildness, utter calm, no drama. Anurag was like, ‘Yes! That’s it!’
Many elements of Anurag’s cinema are
