MUMBAI: Nobody in Bollywood was betting on the outsider Katrina Kaif, but a surging need to forge stability for herself and her siblings has driven her to the top finds Shoma Chaudhry.
The clipped, self-possessed 24-year-old in the untidy hotel room is almost a disconcerting surprise. Curled into the corner of a sofa, hair pulled back in a tight pony tail, Katrina exudes an aloof, slightly irascible air that is difficult to penetrate at first. She has just returned from a set on a windy mountain top — a shot that required her to wear a tiny cotton dress in a chill wind — and is nursing a bad headache.
Katrina came to India at 17 as part of director Kaizad Gustad’s film Boom: he had spotted her as a model in an ad in London. It should have been a grand debut, boasting as it did a cast that included Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Madhu Sapre and Padma Lakshmi. But, for all its apparent star and skin power, the film flopped badly. That could have been the end of Katrina’s Bollywood career — she was young, an outsider, and incapable of a word of Hindi. Instead, in barely six years, she has grown to be a commercial female superstar, moving from the anonymity of bit roles in Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi films to mainstream directors and producers like Vipul Shah, Rajkumar Santoshi and Yash Raj Films. She has learnt Hindi, taken Kathak lessons, and is spoken of in the same breath as Aishwarya Rai and Kareena Kapoor. Far from the minor-league deals of her early years, she now charges between Rs 2 to 3 crores for product campaigns and, at last count, signed a two-film deal with Studio 18 for Rs 6 crore. What explains this singular story? Who is Katrina Kaif off-screen?
One of seven siblings — six sisters, one brother, she exactly in the middle — Katrina was born to a British mother, Suzanne, and a Kashmiri Muslim father, Mohammad Kaif. “My father is not an influence, he was not part of our family; my parents separated when I was very young and I have never met him since.”
Her mother, Suzanne, had deeper impacts. A polyglot lawyer who knew five languages, she gave up a successful legal practice to devote herself full time to international charity work (she now works in Madurai with orphaned children).
She had married again, but that did not last either, and as her work took her to far-flung places, the children followed — homeschooled for the most part by a series of tutors. Hong Kong, Japan, China, Ukraine, Romania, France, Hawaii, America, Poland, Belgium, Austria, South Africa, England: more than 13 countries in almost as many years.
“The biggest thing I learnt from her is to be completely non-judgemental.” There is very little that squares the Katrina off-screen with the one on-screen.
Online, she is unabashed eye-candy, Kiss Me, Kiss Me: a bit role in Sarkar, a pretty prop in Welcome, some cool moves in Race, some razzmatazz in Singh is Kinng, more of the same in Partner and Apne. It’s only in Namastey London, that you get a hint there could be something more to the girl.
A single dynamo then seems to drive Katrina and her choices: the need to make money and forge stability. “She wants to be the man in her family,” Reshma Shetty — owner of Matrix, the agency that has handled her since she first came to India. Katrina is by nature low profile, gentle and intensely private, says Shetty. “She wants to secure things for her siblings.
“I love comedy films. I love playing these light characters. It gives me a chance to be a teenager and have all the fun I missed out on. I feel old because of all I’ve been through, but I am just 24.”
Stardom has brought many panaceas. Three years ago, Katrina bought herself a house in Bandra; a year later, she bought one in London. Most recently, she has bought herself a Porsche. But stardom has also brought fresh set of pressures: the irascible edge, the panic of 360 degree demands, the sense that everything will be sucked out of you. “Everyone reacts differently to this pressure. I don’t react very well, I get frantic, I snap, I feel the stress very easily. People might think, what a difficult woman she is, and I feel like saying, no, no, no, this is not me, I’m just under too much pressure.”
“I believe very strongly in God, I am in a really good place today and I feel he has watched over my journey and given me so much.” Probe her for more essential DNAs and she says, “I have seen so much, I feel old. The other day, a friend was going through a problem and asked me, ‘how long does it take to get over being heartbroken?’ And I really wanted her to understand my words — I wanted the words to have meaning. I said, ‘I have been in a position where I felt I could not live without something, I would not be able to breathe without something — and everything has changed.’ I said, ‘Just understand one thing — you will be surprised how quickly everything can change in this world.’ There’re no laws, no logic. I have seen unbelievable things happen: when I came here, I had nothing. But everything has changed — that is pretty incredulous in itself.”
In all of this, conversation about Salman Khan, Katrina’s tumultuous superstar boyfriend, sits like an unopened box between us. But no embroidered question is going to yank that open. It’s the mix of thaw and reserve that seems quintessentially Katrina. What you are left with then, is stories of her focus.
(Courtesy: Tehelka magazine, India)
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