The Midukki girl

Her feet are dipped in the pool, just about. Summer days, it’s nice to be here, right outside her apartment block in Thiruvananthapuram. Abhija puts aside the black stole she had wound around her neck, ‘it’s just too hot’. She asks to look at her — a sleeveless white T-shirt, a multicolour palazzo, bangles on both hands, her curls tied into a knot. She is in life, the exact opposite of how you have seen her on the big screen.

It’s been only a few movies, but there’s mostly that typecast character — a woman of limited means, clad in cotton Saris and carrying an impassive face. The only difference has been Love 24x7, a movie made by a woman. Even the two critically acclaimed movies where she’s played the only female character — Ozhivu Divasathe Kali and Mundrothuruthu — have Abhija playing the woman on the street. Her last released film Action Hero Biju, too saw her in a similar role.
 

She says, as she swings her legs over the pool, that’s a choice she makes to suit the life of an independent woman that she’s been living ever since she was a girl.

That story begins in Idukki, where she grew up with her little sister Aami, her dad teaching them ways to do all on their own, her mom, a mind full of anxieties. “But that’s how mothers are. I feel that way towards my plants, towards my little sister, but she says we are friends first and sisters next.” Aami is an artist.

Abhija too grew up loving arts. When it was time for college, she came to Fine Arts in Thiruvananthapuram and chose a design degree. She liked to sculpt too. “But back then all I had in mind was getting a job as soon as my degree was over.” And she got one, in a corporate firm in Bengaluru. Abhi spent eight years there, working as a designer and animator. It was not the typical corporate job, not for the creative team. She enjoyed it, a lot. But in those years, the pull towards classical dance had been just too much.

“At first it was Kathak. I would go on weekends and my sir was so good to me that when I told him I wanted to switch to Odissi, he was all for it. He even got me to teach his daughter Odissi,” she laughs. Abhija laughs easily. Not for the crude jokes, she says. But she can’t help when the spontaneous ones come as a play of words, like the ones Indrans would crack in the sets of Mundrothuruthu. “He would say it and then move on easily to his lines, while the rest of us would still be in splits.” That film was shot in a hundred-year-old house. “Manu (the director) would tell us the dialogues so beautifully that I wonder if I’d ever get there.” Abhija hadn’t known any of them before.

It was the same for Ozhivu Divasathe Kali. She knew there was a director called Sanal Kumar who took a movie called Oraalppokkam. But she was meeting them all the first time. “There was no script and my character — Geetha — developed into someone who spoke only a few lines.” But then she became thick friends with everyone pretty soon. And that’s not easy for her. She takes time to connect. Theatre is however an exception, it just clicked.

It was the last years of her corporate life when she got a call from Parvathy, of Abhinaya Theatre Group. Abhija went through a déjà vu as she heard Parvathy’s invitation to act as ‘Kamala’ in the play Siddhartha. She had watched that play once, and wished she could play Kamala too. “What surprised me was how this call from Parvathy chechi had come like a quick flash once before, but something I never thought of again.”

The decision was hard to make, plucking her life from the comfortable ways in Bengaluru to Kerala. Her sister Aami said, don’t think, just go ahead. She did. Abhija climbed stage after stage, as Lady Macbeth first and then many many characters later. Now she’s come to a stage where she wants to write a play, and has shut herself off into doing that — limited phone calls, limited social networking. However, she doesn’t wish to remain silent about the current political scene circling the JNU and the Hyderabad University. “As an artist and an individual I can’t ignore these situations, one must strongly protest,” Abhi says. “The silence should stop.”