Tillotama Shome: Playing Tough

“HE IS SIX years old,” she says to the man seated in front of her, referring to the son she is a single mother to. Something terrible may well happen to her, but she is unafraid, just a slight tremor of her lips betrays her emotion. In Paatal Lok’s Season Two, a series stud­ded with startlingly good performances, her Meghna Barua, Superintendent of Police, Kohima, Nagaland, is a class act. Whether she is mourning a colleague’s death or presenting the facts with weary cynicism, Tillotama Shome’s Barua is a woman of integrity, of purpose, and of substance, an Assamese in Nagaland who is both an insider and outsider.

Almost like Shome herself, who at 45, has really come into her own in an unfamiliar industry, shedding the ste­reotype of playing the house help, a role she so memorably essayed in her debut, Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001). Alice, the servant of a well-meaning if slightly loopy household in South Delhi, was a blessing and a curse, typecasting her for several years, until it was another role, ironically once again, of a domestic help, in Rohena Gera’s Sir (2018), that brought her to the attention of audiences and casting directors.

And so began a striking resurgence, unusual in the Mumbai film industry, where second acts are rare. In the last few years, coinciding with the stream­ing boom, Shome has played a range of women, a venal but criminally deprived hairdresser in Delhi Crime Season Two (2022); a pregnant RAW operative in The Night Manager (2023); a time travel­ling courtesan in the vampire drama Tooth Pari: When Love Bites (2023); a love starved imaginative mobster’s wife in Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper (2024); and most recently, the uniformed Barua with a side hustle as an hobby embroiderer in Paatal Lok.

To think that it almost might not have been. After three years of consis­tently being rejected for roles, other than that of secondary characters, she left to study educational theatre at New York University, after which she worked with students—she doesn’t call them inmates—at the high-security Rikers Island. She saw the worst face of the American social system that stigmatised people based on race. A chance encounter with Irrfan Khan, who was in New York for the premiere of Nair’s The Namesake brought her latent dissatisfaction to the fore. She returned to India in 2008 to try her luck again.

It was at the margins that she got work, op­portunities to shine, and she took them gratefully. Qissa (2013) with Anup Singh was like film school for her, she says. “Anup gave me such a peti-full of tools [toolbox] to work with that I will always be grateful.” As the girl who so desperate­ly wants to be the boy her father (played by Irrfan Khan) had always wanted, she was heartbreaking.

In A Death in the Gunj (2016), she was stellar as Bonnie, the hysterical mum, in a stalwart cast. Later, in Sir, which came to streaming two years after it wowed the world at film festivals, she was the personification of dignity as the maid with whom the master fell in love.

The last few years have been kind to her, giving her more work than she ever had. Some of it is because of the change in the industry which needed actors of her calibre to play complex roles in long-form narratives. Some of it is also due to the change in her own approach. “I was so caught up in my self-doubt and my self-questioning that I forgot to build a safety net for myself. I had forgotten that you cannot be an artist without failure. But when one is younger, one doesn’t realise it. My friends, family, my Buddhist practice, my sense of community now gives me tremendous power to enrich my life,” she says.

And indeed, she continues to attract great work, preparing for every character with diligence and empathy. For Barua’s character, she says, the script had some Nagamese lines and she had a fantastic dialect coach, Anungla. She says, “As I began preparing those lines, I felt like creat­ing a consistency in her tonality irrespective of the language she was speaking. The facts were; her name is Meghna Barua, she is Assamese, posted in Nagaland, married to a Naga man and has learnt some Nagamese to get around at work. I then started work on how she would speak English and Hindi. I shared my thoughts with Sudip [Sharma, the creator of Paatal Lok] and told him I would like to take on this delicate challenge and if he could keep his ears trained for any word that sounds off. He gave me the thumbs up for it and I am so grateful. Thankfully, for me, I had started learning Assamese for a film by Rima Das that got pushed.

Anungla helped me lean into what I already knew, and built the Nagamese in. This was critical for me. It is very important for me to sound right.” Indeed, the politics of representation matters to her and the makers equally, so it was a happy situation.

It is interesting that she plays a migrant often. Perhaps it is because growing up, as an Air Force officer’s daughter, the family moved every four years. “I identify with the life of a gypsy and my identity is fluid,” she says. There have been ups and downs to it. She explains, “When you are in it, it just feels like you have to learn new ways of camouflaging, starting from ground zero, again. Some kids thrive in that change because they are friendly and charismatic, my brother did, I did not. Maybe, acting has something to do with not just what we are revealing but also what we are hiding. But in my personal life, the forties have totally been about oversharing, hugging people more, a passionate need to know the people behind the work, their families.”

SHE IMBUES HER powerful characters with delicate traits, whether it is Ratna’s stitching in Sir or Barua’s embroidery. “On the day of the big table read of Paatal Lok, I was very intimidated by so many new people who knew each other very well. I began to embroider while reading my lines, to relax into the room. Jaideep [Ahlawat] bhai saw it and suggested to Avinash [Arun, the director] and Sudip to include it somewhere. They agreed, but we were not sure where. And one day I just woke up and knew that instead of looking into a file when Ansari calls, this could be the Christ­mas gift this busy mother makes for her son, who thinks she has forgotten. My tiny tribute to some incredibly gangster mothers I have the privilege of knowing, who do forget, but what they remember is already so gigantic. And Sudip and Avinash were very gracious to allow this into the world. And they humoured me to find the right embroi­dery that I was a bit obsessive about. It was very quick. Jaideep bhai is the one who suggested it, after all he has em­broidered in Three of Us (2022), so I sup­pose the threads were all tied up on this project. I was very happy to be on that set every day. Felt incredibly supported, a constant bouncing off a certain kind of joy at being able to be a part of this story, despite the many challenges. That’s a thing! That is invaluable.”

So, is she happy she didn’t stay in New York? What would that life have been? “Yes, I am happy,” she says, “not be­cause I left Rikers, but because I left to be closer to my parents. It was not part of the plan. I would have quit Rikers anyways, to do a PhD. They are a very positive influ­ence on my life barring my relationship with money. And I wanted an adult life, intentional adventures with them. My mother has a huge appetite for life and it’s amazing to latch on to it. I just did not feel like flying 18 hours one way to see them. Mumbai was a good distance away. The work at Rikers though was foundational for me to re-enter the audition room with a certain openness to the character, which my body did not earlier have.”

The life of an actor is so complicated. There is so much waiting and then sud­denly a rush of work can fol­low. How does she deal with the highs, the slows and the lows? “I have improved a lot from where I started. I don’t often fall into the depths of darkness as I used to. I have developed many other interests, I am very involved in my local community. So, the long wait is filled up with people and interests that resuscitate my lust for life. And then one day I have a total meltdown. But it’s just a thing, you know, part of the design.’’

As for her friends, such as Konkona Sen Sharma, who directed her in A Death in the Gunj and in Lust Stories 2, and Kalki Koechlin, she says. “Those rascals are all right. They are all pretty strong personalities, we know how to reign each other in when we get intolerable, celebrate each other, some expert level scrabble players, and a few good-looking babies in the mix. They are a huge part of my everything in the everyday.’’

And her ability to draw out the extraordinary from it, to make characters like Lipika Saikia Rao in The Night Manager, who refuses to give up, or Bindi Jain in Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper who refuses to settle for less, or Paatal Lok’s Barua who, like Ahlawat’s Hathi Ram Chaudhary, is honest to the core, simply because she knows no other way of being. She feels deeply, works diligently at her craft, and lives empathetically.

cinemaDelhi CrimeMonsoon WeddingPaatal LokThe Night ManagerTillotama ShomeTooth Pari: When Love BitesTribhuvan Mishra CA Topper