Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; June 1, 2019)

“One day Priyan (Priyadarshan) called me to say that there was a film he was doing and he wanted me in it. I instantly agreed, no questions asked, and after returning from the shoot of a Telugu film with Nagarjuna in Seychelles, took the first flight out to the location,” reminisces Tabu, sharing that till she reached Pollachi, she had no idea about the film, her role or her co-stars.

Her director greeted her with the news that they’d start shooting the next day, meanwhile he’d organised a show of the original film for her. “That’s when I learnt that we were doing, Virasat, the Hindi remake of Kamal Haasan’s Thevar Magan,” the actress laughs, recalling that while watching the 1992 Tamil drama, she’d wondered which role Priyadarshan had in mind for her, if it was that of Shakti’s girlfriend, Bhanumathi, played by Gautami.

Then, after the interval, Revathy’s character, Panchavarnam, a village girl Shaktivelu is forced to marry after her groom runs away on the wedding day, entered the picture. “And when I saw the scene of her trying to impress and entertain her husband’s girlfriend with a song, I knew this was what Priyan wanted me to play and was thrilled,” she narrates.

The scene of her Gehna singing “Payalay chunmun chunmun” for Pooja Batra’s Anita is memorable even today for its verbal percussion. “I didn’t even know it was called beatboxing then, I just did what Priyan wanted. There were no rehearsals, I was praying we’d get done with it quickly because it was already 2 am and this was the last scene of the day. I was relieved when we canned it in one shot,” Tabu reminisces 22 years later — Virasat opened on May 30, 1997 — with the same charming innocence.

She raves about Kamal Haasan’s writing in the original, Ravi Chandran’s cinematography in Virasat with its canvas of colours still so fresh two decades later, the way Priyadarshan directed the Hindi remake, and Bharathan directed Thevar Magan. “Every character was so well etched and your heart goes out to Pooja’s Anita after she realises she’s lost her love to me by a strange twist of fate,” Tabu points out, raving over Revathy’s potrayal in the original.

Tell her that her innocent Gehna was just as unforgettable and she says she was only following Priyadarshan’s instructions. She adds that even though they had a reference, the setting had changed and the characters adapted to cater to a more pan-India audience. “And Priyan was clear that he didn’t want me to act with an image in my head, actually not even act, but just do what came spontaneously,” she avers.

She adds, “I was very young and if he told me to go stand under a tree, I’d walk towards it obediently, then move left or right, according to his cues. Watching me, a flummoxed Anil commented after a few days that I had a lot of trust and faith in my director,” she laughs.

Virasat was Anil’s first film with Priyadarshan, but Tabu had worked with him earlier in his 1996 Malayalam film Kaalapani . She reveals that she’d been quick to give her nod since Malayalam films were high on content and she believed that since she knew Telugu, Malayalam couldn’t be difficult. “Then, I was given a 12-page dialogue and discovered not a single word was familiar and wailed I couldn’t do it. Priyan compromised and said, we’d start with four pages and he’d give me time to prepare. I imagined I’d get a week at least but he told me to go sit under a tree, I had 30 minutes to get it right,” she recounts. She got it right, going on to do more Malayalam films.

Kaalapani was one of Priyadarshan’s most ambitious films with Tabu as Parvathi whose husband, Govardhan Menon (Mohanlal), a doctor and nationalist, is wrongly accused of bombing a train, and on their wedding day, deported to cellular jail in the Andamans. Parvathi waits for him all her life and Tabu made her presence felt amongst heavyweights like Mohanlal, Prabhu, Vineeth and Amrish Puri, looking ethereal even without makeup. “Priyan upturned a whole bottle of coconut oil on my head the first day and for the rest of the shoot, I happily went around with my hair oiled and in two braids, the large red bindi he’s obessesed with, dotting my forehead,” she giggles, redalling how once the team that included cinematographer Santosh Sivan, goaded her into getting dressed in 20 minutes, telling her that actresses took hours to get ready. “And when I was smiling into the camera encouraged by their 'beautiful' comments, they told me they were referring to the sunset they had wanted to capture when they threw me the dare,” she laughs. Tabu has worked the most with Priyadarshan. “He tells me only he can bear me through five films, and I tell him it’s because he loves me so much.”