Margarita With A Map

A truly immersive adventure is about chucking away those guidebooks and letting yourself go, says Kalki Koechlin

- Lakshmi Sankaran

There are moments when the therapeutic benefits of travel can hit home harder than any of the dispassionate advice received on a shrink’s couch. Displacement, in a strictly physical sense, clarifies both mind and body. For Kalki Koechlin, that breakthrough came during a trip to Karuna Farm, a nature retreat near Kodaikanal.

Although she can’t quite trace the timeline—it was two three years ago, she says—the circumstances that accelerated her existential crisis are still vivid. “I was in a state of transition with my divorce and a lot of changes in my personal life,” recalls the actor, alluding to her 2015 parting with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap. “Other things were happening at the time too like illnesses in my family and financial pressures.”

Kalki and a girlfriend plotted a quick getaway to the south. “During our time at the farm, we went to the top of a mountain nearby and we did mushrooms. I remember feeling like the universe was breathing with me and that I wasn’t alone. And that everyone was connected.”

By the end of her journey, Koechlin had arrived at “practical solutions” to many of her problems. If this flash of satori, Zen-speak for enlightenment, has a Kerouacian ring to it, that’s because stripped of her glamorous facade, the 33-year-old exudes the air of a happy beatnik.

We meet at her down-to-earth but artsy apartment in Versova, Mumbai. Dressed in a long sleeved striped tee and jeans, shorn of make-up and her hair in a loose post-shower tangle, she answers the door and casually waves me in.