Nimisha Sajayan bought a cake on Friday, wrote ‘Pothettan Brilliance’ and cut it all by herself. She would have liked everyone else from Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum to be there with her. The movie which had, from the time it released, been loved a lot by laymen and critics both, has received quite a few honours at the National Awards. Pothettan, as Nimisha and quite a lot of his friends and followers calls director Dileesh Pothan, was away at the time, so were the others including Fahadh Faasil. So Nimisha had to cut it alone to celebrate, but she sounds happy.
There is going to be another occasion to celebrate on Sunday — Vishu — and Nimisha, an ardent Krishna devotee, can’t wait.
“We would celebrate it every year when I grew up in Mumbai. The first many years I woke up to see the kani set up by my parents. When I was in Class X or XI, I began preparing the kani and then waking up to see it,” Nimisha says, overjoyed. She may play all the mature roles on the big screen but in life, she speaks like the young girl she is — easily thrilled, holding onto a little girl’s innocence at 21 and 22. She talks of the Vishu days her non-Malayali friends would come home and ‘Amma would give them all sadya’. “I love eating sadya on a vaazha ila (banana leaf),” she laughs. Food is a big love for her, Nimisha says, doesn’t matter what it is, she’d have it happily.
That’s what she is planning to do today too, eat her sadya. “Vishu means Sadya to me,” she says. She also plans to make her favourite ada pradhaman payasam on the occasion. But then last Vishu, she couldn’t be home. She was on the sets of Eeda. And Nimisha, who had a small idol of Krishna with her, made a Vishu kani with it. “I called cameraman Pappu chettan and director Ajith ettan to see the kani in my room,” she says.
She moved to Kochi with films coming in one after the other, undoubtedly for the talent she has shown in the very first film, Thondimuthalum... The third one now is Madhupal’s Oru Kuprasidha Payyan. “No, it is not that I work only for serious art house kind of movies, everyone is asking me that now,” she says. But they come to her, and this time it is as Hanna Elizabeth, the-girl-next-door kind of character. The shooting’s done and she is expected to dub too for the first time, but there are many kadinamulla vaakukal (tough words), she says. But then her next director — Sowmya Sadanandan — has taught her all the pronunciations. “I will be acting with Chackochan (Kunchacko Boban) in that one,” she says.
