BOMBAY BURST MY BUBBLE “THE FACT THAT I WAS SMART POSED MORE OF A PROBLEM. I STILL HAD TO GO AROUND WITH A BEGGING BOWL.”
Born in Cambridge, raised in Delhi, New York and Florence, Pia Sukanya is not exactly what you’d call a Mumbai girl. And yet, it’s this city she chose to pay tribute to with her directorial debut Bombairiya. The film is a dry comedy about a Public Relations manager (Radhika Apte) who is having a terrible day because she loses her cell phone. The young girl finds herself negotiating with the thief (Siddhant Kapoor) and seeking help from a complete stranger (Akshay Oberoi); their varied worlds colliding to create comical situations. “The crazy things that happen in this film would have been absolutely unbelievable if the story had been set elsewhere,” believes the singer-songwriter turned director.
UU TOO SMART FOR TINSEL TOWN Despite never having lived in India, Sukanya gave up her green card to move to Mumbai 11 years ago, armed with a Cambridge degree in Social Anthropology, over-qualified to pursue her dreams of being an actor and a singer. “Bombay burst my bubble. I was depressed for about three months,” she recalls. Her degree didn’t matter, neither did the fact that she had played Maria to Eddie Redmayne’s Tony in Cambridge’s theatrical production of The Westside Story. “The fact that I was smart posed more of a problem, because I still had to go around with a begging bowl asking for work,” she adds.
UU TRUE STORY It was only when she met Michael Ward, an independent producer who would become her husband, that she began her journey as a writer and really learnt the craft of storytelling. “One day, writer-director Aarti Bagdi, a friend of ours came to visit us. She began telling us about how her phone got flicked and how she got it back. It was the most fantastic little incident,” exclaims Sukanya. That was the beginning of Bombairiya. Knowing little to nothing about filmmaking, encouraged by her producer husband, Sukanya found herself in the director’s chair.
UU REALITY MEETS MAGIC “Every day on set was like being in film school,” says the director. It was the naiveté of a debutante that allowed her to shoot on location across the city of Mumbai, notorious for the red tape against filmmakers. “You’d only do it if you didn’t know any better. But that’s when reality meets the magic of making a film. You come out with something quite different from what you’d initially thought of, because you’re unable to control every situation,” she explains. Bombairiya is a play on Bombay and the word bairiya (lover). “Dealing with the city and its ways is a constant challenge. But I still love this city and I chose to be here because of how bizarre and wonderful it is,” says Sukanya. Through the film, she warmly pokes fun at Mumbaiites, not as an outsider but an insider who has spent 11 years chasing her dreams here.
DEBUTANTE DIRECTOR PIA SUKANYA TALKS ABOUT HER BOMBAY STINT WHICH LED HER TO MAKE BOMBAIRIYA, HER COMIC TRIBUTE TO THIS CHAOTIC CITY