Aditi Rao Hydari Makes Her Move

Author and cinephile Raja Sen on why Aditi Rao Hydari continues to inspire legendary filmmaker Mani Ratnam

- Raja Sen

The first time we meet the heroine in a Mani Ratnam romance, she doesn’t appear on the screen as much as she flashes suddenly and all-conqueringly across it, all eyes and energy and unlikely grace, a lyrical bolt of lightning. She is often surrounded by a dour world, one markedly duller than she is, though in time it is evident that most worlds will pale in contrast with the incandescence of this modern fairy tale heroine. And I mean modern. She has verve and spirit and agency, and a Ratnam fairy tale is almost always the fairy’s tale, with doomed men helplessly at sea, often led there by that first glance.

I first met Aditi Rao Hydari at a Bombay dive bar. It is the kind of place where rum is served in efficiently large doses—in small Dettol-shaped bottles—and where chicken lollipops gleam in a radioactive shade of orange. A place where the jaded and the broke can find cut-rate comfort for a while. The year was 2009, and, sadly, this delightfully debilitated drinkery was trying to clean itself up. Tables had been depressingly cloaked in sunmica, and tubelights cruelly cut through our familiar smoky gloom, when I looked up and saw a girl at our table, and for a second I thought I had made her up in my head.