It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's Menstrual Man!

A king of Bollywood stars as India’s superhero inventor, saving women one month at a time

- Abigail Jones

AKSHAY KUMAR, THE 10TH highest paid actor in the world—the Tom Cruise of Bollywood and People India’s one-time “Sexiest Man Alive”—can’t remember when he first heard the word menstruation. Sitting in a New York City hotel with his wife, the actress and best-selling author Twinkle Khanna, he considers this, blushing slightly, clearly flummoxed by the question. “I never sat down and thought about when I was introduced to it,” he says.

“With me!” exclaims Khanna, whose whimsical first name is a family thing (her mother is Dimple, her aunt Simple). Before that, she adds, “I don’t think he knew that menstruation existed.”

The question is relevant because Kumar is starring in Padman (opening January 25) about Arunachalam Muruganantham, the man who launched India’s sanitary pad revolution with the creation of a machine that makes inexpensive, sterilized pads. He, too, learned about menstruation only after he got married. “I think that’s the story for most men,” says Khanna, the film’s producer. “I was doing research for a column in The Times of India when I came across Muruganantham’s story.” She laughs. “I call him Muruga because even my tongue twists trying to pronounce his name!”

In 2015, as she began to fictionalize Muruga’s life for her book, The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad, she realized that “unfortunately our world is filled with viewers, not readers. For the story to penetrate every household, to start a conversation, that’s how the idea of making a movie came about.”