The Many Layers Of Aditi Rao Hydari

Aditi Rao Hydari is an enigma, a delightful cocktail of fierce and fiercely feminine, vulnerable, and self-assured. Cosmo EdNandini Bhalla gets to know her...

- Nandini Bhalla

I am scheduled to interview Aditi Rao Hydari at 4pm, at a cosy restaurant in Mumbai. She will be travelling to Hyderabad later that day, and her manager has squeezed me in between an afternoon shoot and evening flight.

My own Delhi-Mumbai flight lands over two hours late, amidst heavy rains. The roads are water-clogged, and traffic is at a standstill, lined with blinking cars and despondent drivers. I have chewed my nails down to stubs, anxiety rising with every missed traffic light. By the time I reach Aditi, she has been waiting for an hour. The interview must take place in the car now, her manager informs me, on her way to the airport. I yank open the door of her SUV, apologies at the ready. But Aditi doesn’t let me finish. “You must be starving,” she says, then searches her car for something to eat. A jar of granola emerges from the in-car storage unit. “Eat this,” she urges. And so we have a few moments of silence, sharing a jar of chocolate-flavoured granola.

One of the first things that strikes you about Aditi is how tiny she is. A Google search reveals she is 5’5”, but in this moment, curled up on the car seat with a blanket, in a pair of trackpants and a T-shirt, she looks even tinier, almost child-like, with a delicateness to her. When she speaks, she waves her pint-sized hands about, and when she is passionate about a subject, she discusses it with a wide-eyed gaze. I ask whether this impression, this ‘fragile quality’ affects the kind of roles she gets offered. After all, in Mani Ratnam’s Kaatru Veliyidai, she plays the sweet, devoted Leela. In Padmaavat, she is the meek, mistreated wife of Khilji. In Bhoomi, she is the vulnerable rape victim who then fights for justice (a memorable performance that won her the Dadasaheb Phalke Award); and in