She’s All That

The clincher is: this tenth standard student from Hyderabad (she plays the hero’s sister) isn’t deaf-mute in the film. And for a debut film, she delivers dialogues like a pro, in perfect sync with the uttered word (which is dubbed). Nadodigal (Nomads) is a typical romance about a group of friends who leave home to help out a friend who’s romancing a powerful politician’s daughter. Naturally, he’s not in favour of the match. The critics have given the film a thumbs-up and it’s done fairly well at the box office. In fact, there’s a Kannada remake on the cards and also talk of a Hindi production, with Slumdog’s Dev Patel in the lead.

Abhinaya, meanwhile, is a director’s delight. And not just because unlike most other actors, she isn’t fixated on her mobile phone. And she can hear a bit thanks to a cochlear implant, an electronic device that provides a sense of sound. For the rest of it, she relies on sheer talent. Director Samuthirakkani says “her acting is effortless. She nails the lip movements every time. I usually act out scenes and she imbibes nuances easily. She’s very focused, more perhaps because she’s lost two key faculties.” She’s also now the lead in his next film.

Abhinaya’s coming to her debut film itself was sheer luck. She was a substitute for a leading actress who dropped out at the last moment. What impressed Samuthirakkani was that she had an “eloquent” screen presence, and the fact that she didn’t betray any sign of having a handicap. Mother Hemalatha says “she has an internal clock. That’s how she coordinates the action and lip movement”.

Abhinaya herself likes to think that she got the acting gene from her father, Anand, an ex-iaf man who’s done minor roles in about 50 Telugu and Tamil films now after retirement. She was like any other infant till her mother noticed that the child wasn’t responding to sounds. “Her body language wasn’t good,” recalls Hemalatha. She was diagnosed deaf but an abnormality in her inner ear left many surgeons confused on the line of treatment. But she caught a break when she was 12 (and still in the fourth standard). An ENT surgeon, Dr Mohan Kameswaran, agreed to do a cochlear implant surgery. “We get the best results if it’s done at a relatively young age. As one grows older, the residual auditory capacity is undermined. In Abhinaya’s case, the surgery was risky because of an abnormality in the inner year. She is still being reviewed periodically. But I tell you, she’ll go places because she’s a brilliant child,” says Dr Kameswaran.

Abhinaya, who routinely scores 100 per cent in math nowadays, now wants to take up acting seriously. Her personal profile says she’s a “big fan of Sudoku puzzles and is at home with her laptop”. “She’s also fully conscious of her figure and does yoga regularly,” laughs mother Hemalatha.“She’s always been confident of her abilities. This is in part because we have never let her feel that she’s in any way inferior. In fact, her body language is very evolved, which explains why she takes to the screen so easily,” she adds.

So will Abhinaya be India’s Marlee Matlin, the hearing-impaired actress who at 21 became the youngest woman to win an Oscar for best actress for Children of a Lesser God. Well, it’s early days yet but she’s made a start.