The heroine has to look the same for some years because that is what consumer brands expect when they spend money on promoting their product through a person. When I refused to play the game, they lost interest in me.” In the new world where the heroine is also a marketable commodity, there is yet another rule, one explained by Kalki Koechlin recently. Says Vashisht: “At that point, many magazines tried to sensationalise the scene and wanted me to declare that I had been coerced or tricked into it. Also, Vashisht had done a nude scene in her very first film, Siddheshwari (1989), which gave her a “bold” tag. The Hindi film heroine also had to have a particular kind of ada, an inherent coyness about sexuality, because as Ghai told Vashisht, the heroine has to eventually become the mother of the hero’s child.

Vashisht remembers making a special effort to get a glittering gown made until she was told by Ghai to wear the clothes in which she had come for the film shoot. Vashisht, who has nevertheless had a long and fruitful career across television, cinema, and now web series, recalls a particular incident during the shooting of Taal where Ghai made her change her costume during an awards ceremony in the movie so that she did not outshine the star, Aishwarya Rai. The actress, trained at the National School of Drama, was in his 1999 blockbuster Taal, and he was, in his own way, explaining to her why she could never be cast as the lead in a mainstream Hindi film, despite her brilliant collaborations with directors as varied as Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and Shyam Benegal. The Hindi film heroine cannot look too intelligent or too sexy, said Subhash Ghai to Mita Vashisht once.

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