Kathakali eyes that do the talking

A young Shetty boy obviously a Bunt from KarnatakaMangalore left his home at a really young age by himself boarding a train to Bombay to build a life in the big city As could be quite common within the community he found himself doing odd jobs at one of the Udupi restaurants that dot the workingclass metropolisOnly his interest lay elsewhere More specifically in playing football How does he get spotted for this talent Inevitably with a stroke of luck by a keen eye who was watching this kid randomly hitting around a tindabba of dalda a type of ghee out in the open The skill was too obvious to ignoreRight thereafter the boy found himself training and later playing professionally for the soccer team Mahindra United FC competing then at toptier football leagues This is how actor Shefali Shah neacutee Shettyrsquos poor father found footing in Bombay in order to raise a middleclass family in a city he knew no oneAs Shefali was telling me this anecdote about her dad sometime ago it occurred to me how we make journeys of individualsmdashwhether in their personal triumphs or tragediesmdashso much about themWhereas the story so often starts before them In effect nobody is really selfmade isnrsquot it We like to assume so because it fits well into our theories on successgreatness in generalWe know Shefali 49 because Shersquos an actor Something she chanced upon because a teacher involved in professional theatre suggested she give Gujarati stage a chance Language is not an issue because Shefalirsquos mother is Gujarati Her mother would tag along on multicity tours with the plays because she was still too young to travel aloneTelevision in the early rsquo90s naturally followed These are also the initial years of satellite TV in India when the quality of soapsdramas were of sustainable quality before they slipped southward to daily gruntwork for TRPsratings alone But filmsBollywood was still the sole big league in the rsquo90s noWhere could we have first recognised Shefali from in Bollywood It couldrsquove been Ram Gopal Varmarsquos Rangeela 1995 Only that Varma offerednarrated her a part that was turning out very differently on the shoot Not her thing she bowed out When Varma was making Satya 1998 he sent over writer Anurag Kashyap instead to convince her to play gangster Bhiku Mhatrersquos Manoj Bajpayeersquos wife PyaariYou canrsquot credit New Yorkbased director Mira Nairrsquos eyes enough eithermdashfor spotting in Shefali as the yappy lower middleclass Maharashtrian wife in Satya possible glimpses of a rich upperclass girl in Monsoon Wedding 2001 whorsquos been through child sexual abuse from within the family Take that aspect out of MW itrsquos just highheel Delhirsquos Hum Aapke Hain KounLikewise the point of Satya is a gangster whorsquos outwardly just any regular bloke in the citymdashsomething that only gets established with Bhiku as a family man and his adorable wife Shefali These are landmark rolesfilms Only that it didnrsquot do so much for her evidentlyWhich is strangeShe famously played mother to Akshay Kumar in Waqt 2005 whorsquos actually five years older to hermdashhaving hopped on chiefly to ldquowork with Amitabh Bachchanrdquo who plays her husband in the filmSurely she somewhat regrets that odd call Turns out she declined powerful mom roles in Neerja 2016 and Kapoor amp Sons 2016 only because shersquod played the mother in Dil Dhadakne Do 2015 her Bollywood comeback of sortsWhat happened for a decade in the interim Shersquod practically disappeared Missing pretty much Was that a different world of filmsBollywood What matters is she totally returned with Richie Mehtarsquos Delhi Crime 2019mdashIndiarsquos first Emmy Award winning show because global OTTNetflix allows for this to happenmdashwith a part DCP Vartika Chaturvedi that gave her enough stress to bawl inside the loo of her vanity van during shoot onceShe played the lead in Human 2022 on Hotstar to crack a ldquotough partrdquomdashimagining a calm queenpin of an illegal drug testing cartel as a ldquocross between Princess Diana demeanour and the Joker mental staterdquoItrsquos an acting process she has begun to only lately earnestly develop Although instinctively you can sense the same expressive eyes from MWmdashthat explained so much in 15 minutesrsquo flatmdashin Darlings 2022 on Netflix as well while she effortlessly oscillates between characters from such disparate socioeconomic classes As with Jalsa 2022 on AmazonI guess if you stick around long enough no one remains underrated forever Neither do audiences nor technology stay the same The downtime teaches better lessons though donrsquot they What was it for herNothing really she says besides that you really wait for what you wanna do Shersquos done about 40 filmsseriesmdasha relatively limited filmography by Indian standards Itrsquos not a privilege that all actors enjoyof courseIn that interim since I did wonder Shefali actively paints cooks she started a restaurant in Ahmedabad and has directed two short filmsAnd oh she also stepped back to raise two children One of whom it turns out was equally blessed with their grandfatherrsquos football genes having stepped out to play soccer in Spain Seems like decently multiple life goals to meMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper