A WRITER OF THE UNUSUAL

KONKONA SEN SHARMA’S FATHER, ON THE TALE BEHIND HER DIRECTORIAL DEBUT

“Don’t come to our house at night,” warns science writer and journalist Mukul Sharma. “I still do planchette all the time.”

Sitting in the sun-washed living room of the Gurgaon house where he lives with his wife and their adopted daughter, it is difficult to take Sharma’s warning seriously. The location looks as non-threatening, as the smiling, bespectacled, balding man delivering the warning.

Which is why you need a setting like McCluskieganj to create the right mood, he says. “You do it in the middle of a forest and you can actually scare somebody.”

As he had once done, way back in 1979. His little prank forms the core of daughter Konkona Sen Sharma’s directorial debut, A Death In The Gunj.

“My ex-wife, Rina [actor and director Aparna Sen], and I had been going to McCluskieganj since 1976. We had also bought a house there,” says Sharma. “We would do planchette all the time and I would always be the one to move it. That day we were asking who would die first. And when we came to our friend Chris Tripthorpe, I just didn’t say anything. He got scared and ran away. And he died after that – got run over by a train. Many believed it was suicide,” recalls Sharma.

It was the guilt of a prank gone wrong that made Sharma write the short story on which A Death... is based. “My story was speculative fiction about why Chris committed suicide,” says Sharma. “My story was about whether, after dying, Chris would have wanted me to have died first.”

The plot of A Death... is very different, which is why the credits state that it is only based on the short story.

“Konkona was only about a-year-and-ahalf old when this happened. But she heard the story many times from me and Rina.”

Bits and pieces of the family stories have found their way into the film – like the blue Ambassador that one of the lead characters drives. And the song ‘Toont gachhe,

bhooth nache’, a tribal riff that the family’s help in the Ganj used to sing.

This is, however, not the first time that one of Sharma’s stories have been made into a Konkona film. The Kannan Iyer-directed Ek Thi Dayan, produced by Vishal Bhardwaj and starring Konkona, was also based on a short story by Sharma, and he co-wrote the script with Bhardwaj.

The writer has recently finished turning two of his other stories into film scripts, one for Bhardwaj and the other for Abhishek Choubey. “The first is called Dream Sequence. It’s about a person who dreams that he has woken up. The other is called Ghost.”

Though Sharma and Sen separated when Konkona was about eight, he remained close to his daughter. “I married Binita soon after and Konkona would come and spend time with us. Actually, so would Rina. We couldn’t make it as a couple, but there was no acrimony,” he says.

The good will is reflected in the fondness with which he talks of Aparna’s most recent film, Sonata. “I think she has been a better director than an actor... she didn’t get as much opportunity as an actor. It’s different with Konkona, she didn’t do many commercial films. I don’t watch Hindi films, so I haven’t seen hers either, but my wife has seen Wake Up Sid and she said Konkona was very good. I have seen 15 Park Avenue and Mr and Mrs Iyer [both directed by Aparna Sen]. She got a national award for Mr and Mrs Iyer.”

The writer also remains in close contact with Dona, Sen’s daughter from her first husband. “She was two when I married Aparna and I adopted her. How can you not remain close to someone you have know from the time she was two,” he says.

But what did Konkona, his only biological child, inherit from him? “My nose. And weirdness,” says Sharma immediately.

On a shelf in his study is a small blackand-white photograph of a very young Konkona, that Sharma says was taken by the mathematician and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose.

“She likes the bizarre and I am Mr Bizarre. But she is also very focused, very down-to-earth. She gets that from her mother, not from me,” he says.