Tabu is Mother (Superior)

Aura is one of those words that’s tossed around freely in a time when words have come to mean very little or nothing at all. But true aura is being enveloped in a cloud of personality that goes far beyond the person themselves, holds you prisoner in the beam of their eye, catches you in a web of smiles and scents that sticks to your hair and skin.

Tabu opens the door of her home office to greet me in a billowing black kurta, jewellery dancing around her face, hair loosely tied, and I can’t stop grinning at her like some kind of goddamn moron. She insists I try the walnuts she’s got from Kashmir, we chat about growing up in Hyderabad and what the city used to be, she tells me her closest friends are Malayali or Tamilian, and about their day trips to Pondicherry together. I realise that I’m trying to inch closer and closer to her on her massive couch as we speak, and at some point, I’m hanging half off the thing, leaning into her, unable to look away from her. 

It is no hyperbole to say that at 53, she is one of our greatest actors, as enigmatic as she is charming, as becoming as she is unafraid. A woman of the kind we see rarely these days—and she’s on top of her game, doing some of the most interesting work of her career. Her newest role is her next international production, after The Namesake (2006), Life of Pi (2012) and most recently, A Suitable Boy (2020). In Dune: Prophecy, a prequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation which releases on Jio Cinema today, she plays Sister Francesca. The series is set 10,000 years before the films, and is based on the 2012 novel, Sisterhood of Dune, which tells the origins of the Bene Gesserit, a shadowy order of magical women who secretly pull the strings of the universe. Can you imagine a better role for her? “Oh it’s a beautiful character,” she says. “So many layers, so many stories to her. It was fantastic, I worked with a bunch of amazing people and there were so many women involved in key positions there. And I will always love the time I spent with Mark [Strong] and Emily [Watson]—they are like treasures, treasures.”

It is a role that fits easily into Tabu’s oeuvre, which includes all manner of mainstream, commercial films and a smorgasbord of some her most beloved ones featuring flawed, complicated women, sometimes even convincing feminine wrecks. Women who operate in the greys, or what her Wikipedia means when it states her penchant: “often known to play troubled women”. She laughs, “It was very radical at that time, when I started doing these roles. I was called brave and courageous. But picking these roles came very easily to me. Why would we leave this space unexplored? I was doing Vijaypath (1994) and Jeet (1996) and Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999) and Saajan Chale Sasural (1996), so when I did Chandni Bar (2001), people were like, ‘This is blasphemy.’ But I think my success in commercial films brought an audience to these other films. And I had great fun. Somebody once said to me, ‘You’re not ahead of your time, you are against it.’ I just wanted to do things my way. I wanted to do what I wanted to do.”

Tabu also brought a different kind of woman to our screens, one we weren’t used to seeing and one that we were scared of. That we are still scared of. “Female sexuality had a very different portrayal then,” she says, “and I think films like Astitva (2000), Chandni Bar, Maqbool (2004), even Cheeni Kum (2007) gave us a new kind of female sexuality. That was the most interesting part for me.” Are things different now, are they better? “I wouldn’t say better,” she says carefully. “Sometimes what happens is that you want to pronounce sexuality so loudly that it feels unnatural. In these films, the sexuality was underlying, without being underlined. It’s like seeing a woman as a whole being. A complete being.”

And these complicated, troubled roles only add to Tabu’s universal appeal. She seems like a nice person. She doesn’t scream superficial movie star. She is different with every role. And nobody knows much about her, even beyond her mononym. And that’s perhaps what makes Tabu so irresistible—that we simply don’t know that much about her life in an age where we know far too much about everyone. “But you know only what they want you to know,” she reminds me. “You can really engineer that. Of course, the other side of it is that nothing can be hidden any more. I can’t do any secret things.” What secret things does she want to do? “I can’t do anything!” she complains, “Before my mother, you will know. It will be all over Instagram.” Ah, yes. The bane of our lives. “I try not to be on social media at all, but you know, producer bol raha hai, post karna hai, toh karna padega.”

She doesn’t watch a lot of films (“I know it’s contrarian because I’m an actor, but my sister was the movie buff, not me)” and finds inspiration in many things—art, music, nature. “It’s so difficult to encapsulate how you’ve become who you’ve become, what has shaped you. There are so many experiences that you’ve absorbed, that have become part of your internal fabric, you know.”

Her real introduction to art came from MF Husain, when she was doing Meenaxi (2004). “That’s when I sort of understood—not understood, you never understand—but I got a sense of what art is. I was able to observe one of the greats at such close quarters and for that, I consider myself so lucky. Just watching him come into my room in Jaisalmer with a butter paper and sitting on the floor and making a sketch in half an hour. And he’d roll it up and give it to me. He used to make these wooden things for me too, like, he would carve a camel out of wood while sitting on set.” You can see how moved she is by the very thought of him—her whole face lights up.

She also loves music, and wants to learn to play the guitar. “I’m going to start classes in November, inshallah. I play the harmonium (though I find it very difficult) because I’ve learnt Hindustani classical singing, which I still practise. But I just love the guitar. I don’t know if I’ll be able to learn, but I’ll try. In my head, I’ll become an expert in a month and give rock concerts, people will go mad, there will be a stampede to watch my shows. But actually, I think I’ll just learn to play ‘Happy Birthday’. It’s the one thing everybody learns.”

What no one tells you about Tabu is that she’s also very, very silly. She is, as expected, intelligent and insightful, thoughtfully considering every question she’s asked, and anyone in the industry will tell you she can be a diva who gets what she wants—but she also giggles constantly, her hands flying up to cover her face while laughing, like a little girl. On most days, she lapses into Hindi or Urdu frequently, but she also acts the clown: she mimics people, she gurgles about her chihuahua, Chinnu—she is basically an all-round delight. “I am very happy with my life. I mean, I’m not 20, and my definition of happy is not the same at 50. Happiness is overrated, everyone is trying to be happy. I think contentment is more important. Acceptance, too. I have always accepted myself as I am.”

People sense that, I think. There is something very alluring (and formidable) about a person who has accepted themselves, as if they are creating a space for you to accept yourself as well. And people adore Tabu. How does she stay so sorted when fame can be so corrosive? “I never set out to become famous. It was never important for me, it was not the final objective. Having said that, fame definitely has a very, very weird way of affecting your life, much more than money and success. Because it’s bizarre, right? And now it’s so easy to be famous, you don’t even have to do much. There is no way it will not alter your personality. When you have people’s eyes on you, it will affect the way you live your life.”

Work is very important to Tabu, and she doesn’t really understand the concept of a work-life balance. “What if somebody’s life is only work? What if you don’t want to have a life apart from work? What is work to you? Work and life are not separate things. But I do understand now that everything, every issue, every fight, every battle, everything comes down to your individual needs and priorities.” For her, being unattached just seems to be a seamless part of it. “I don’t know any other life,” she says. “I don’t have anything to compare it to. I don’t know if being single is defining how my life is right now, if that is why I am who I am. I don’t know how it would have been if I’d had somebody in my life. Maybe it would be better, maybe it would be worse. I don’t know, I will never know.”

Having said that, she really cherishes people and relationships, and believes that’s all life is really about. “And flowers!” she exclaims. “I want to have flowers all around me. Champa is my top. Lotus, I love. Mogra. But also Krishna kamal. Big white sontakka. Lilium. I love them all, especially the fragrant ones. I’m a sucker for fragrance because I have a very sensitive sense of smell.” And does she have a signature scent? “I love rose. My family always wore ittars, which we used to get from Lucknow and of course in Hyderabad’s Old City. So I’ve grown up with all these things in my nose. Gulab. Khus. Mitti. Oudh. Shamama tul amber.”

“In fact, I wrote something about it in my journal. I titled it ‘The Changing Nose of the World’. It’s about how our sense of smell and our appreciation of fragrances have changed over the past two decades. I think as a population, we are on a journey in our sense of smell and what appeals to us. It’s really, really interesting.” Did she say JOURNAL? My eyes sweep the room knowing they will find nothing, but I don’t know if I’d be able to snoop in her journals even if I could.

Tabu has been journalling almost all her life, and still has all her old journals even if she can barely read her own handwriting anymore. “I love writing. I think it helps me make sense of my life. You know how restless you feel when you haven’t written in a while? I felt that for a bit. And then I had to consciously go back to it, make a habit of writing again. It’s hard to get started, but once you start, the words come.” So naturally, there will be a book to explain the enigma of Tabu one day? “I’ve been getting offers for a book for the past 20 years, but no.” She does, however, want to be part of the writing process of a film. “More than directing, I think this will be far more interesting for me. I may want to write something with Vishal [Bhardwaj]. Because I understand him so well, I know that I can take it somewhere and he will respond to it.” Hell yeah, we are so ready.

As you’d expect, Tabu is the kind of star who comes to the door to see me off, and here, I tell her I’ve fallen for her badly. Hook, line, et cetera. I’m in love with her. “I’ll send you a flower from my balcony,” she says indulgently, as if this is something she hears all the time. Because of course it is.

Later that day, I meet a friend for coffee and when I hug her, she asks what perfume I’m wearing, it’s so lovely and unusual. Tabu, I tell her. I’m wearing Tabu.

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. Visual and Creative Director: Jay Modi. Photographer: Bikramjit Bose. Style: Naheed Driver. Hairstylist: Rohit Bhatkar. Make-Up Artist: Mehak Oberoi. Set Design: Purnima Nath. Production: Imran Khatri Productions. Styling Assistant: Bidipto Das, Junni Khyriem