As told to Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; September 5, 2019)


• DIRECTOR • SRIRAM RAGHAVAN

• FILM • Ek Hasina Thi (2004)

• CAST • Urmila Matondkar, Saif Ali Khan

• LOCATION • Kharghar, Chandivali Studio

Fifteen years since its release, my debut film Ek Hasina Thi is still remembered for its horrific rats. Interestingly, they were not a part of the initial script. In the first act—the initial 45 minutes—Saif’s (Ali Khan) character, Karan Singh Rathod, comes across as a classy guy, a suave, rich businessman, even though one is unsure about what he does.

It was while brainstorming with RGV (producer Ram Gopal Varma) on how to establish that Karan is a gangster with underworld links, that we recalled a scene from The Godfather, Part 3, where Andy Garcia and his girlfriend were in bed when a gangster surprises her in the kitchen. In our film, Urmila’s (Matondkar) character Sarika is surprised not by a man but a mouse in the kitchen. Her scream brings Karan running, but he later scoffs at her for being frightened of a mouse which has since fled.

The scene brought thrills and some laughs and helped establish that Sarika is terrified of rats till she is thrown into prison for a crime she is tricked into confessing to having committed. Behind bars, she encounters not just bullies and weirdoes, but also looks her fear straight in the eye. When she smashes a plate on one of the rats, you know her ordeal has empowered her. And that was the perfect interval point.

The second half was Sarika’s quest for revenge as she entangles Karan in a cat-and-mouse game. In the original script, we had Karan threatening her at gunpoint for the money she has stolen from his boss, making him the patsy. Sarika tells him she’s hidden it in an abandoned mine where her father worked. She takes him below, then, knocks him down and escapes in the shaft which she destroys once she reaches the top, leaving Karan to die underground.

While on a recce to Rajasthan we had found the perfect mine only to realise that it would be impossible to shoot there because how do you take a crew and equipment down there. So, we wondered what to do and someone mentioned that this place must be full of rats. That gave us the idea of using rats.

We toyed with several endings, including the usual one of Sarika pushing Karan off the cliff. Then, we came up with the idea of her trapping him in a cave where the rats come creeping once it gets dark. When I argued that since the story was set in Delhi, where would Sarika find a secluded cave, Ramu emphasised that emotion scored over logic. He told me to shoot it convincingly, confident it would be accepted.

We filmed in a quarry in Kharghar and at Chandivali Studio. It was kind of ironic that having mocked Sarika’s fear earlier, Karan is himself terrorstruck by rats at the end. Chained in the cave, in the fast fading light of the flashlight, he sees rats creep up on him, gnashing their teeth, and knows it is the end. We debated over how much to show, eventually leaving it to the audience to imagine his death as the light goes out and he screams as the rats attack… We had three junglee rats which we kept tied and used for terrifying close-ups. The rest of the rats you see in the frame were actually white mice. We had called for two dozen of them and my assistant Kusum touched them up with black tooth-powder so they appeared a darkish grey on screen. These mice are the friendly sort, and even I have held them without fear of getting bitten. For that shot where a rat runs up Saif’s leg, we used a wound-up mechanical toy.

I must confess that I had a moment of worry when my sister-in-law who was not around when the film released, excitedly called me from a theatre in Delhi a few days later to say that she was watching the film. And, she added, that Maneka Gandhi was sitting one row ahead of her. Fortunately, she didn’t have any problem with the rats in our film.

Ek Hasina Thi was a turnaround film for Saif. His first reaction to my narration was, “I have just started getting a fan following and you want me to play a villain, make them hate me!” Fortunately, both of us like the same kind of films and after I pointed out that Karan is more like a Charles Sobhraj kind of a character, diabolical but charming, he accepted the challenge despite the fact that it went against his image. Urmila too veered away from her glamorous avatar and came up with a gritty performance. After the film’s release, many girls asked my co-writer Pooja (Ladha Surti) for the location of the cave. They wanted to send someone there.

The film wasn’t a huge commercial hit, but it was critically-acclaimed. Interestingly, even though the title was Ramu’s idea, he later wanted to change it because he felt it gave the impression of a romantic film. He suggested Shock! instead. But I stuck to my guns and I am delighted Ek Hasina Thi and its rats still linger in people’s minds.