in a mini romper, high ponytail and beige wedges, is relaxing a five-star Mumbai
hotel café.
A week earlier, out at an event, she was rocking a buttercup yellow peplum tube top with cobalt blue pants. Just days before, she was a ravishing desi girl in a Laila Motwane lehenga. But it’s unlikely you’ll catch her in such diva-esque avatars when she’s dropping off her son to a birthday party like she was today. Mommy duty done, Malaika gets down to ordering a sandwich: smoked chicken with multigrain bread. After it arrives, there is a brief examination of the bread, which is eventually dumped. Peeling open the sandwich – “Sorry, I’m using my hands” – she picks out the chicken and occasionally dips a chip into coleslaw. “I’ve this slight OCD thing about food. You’re not sure where things are coming from.” Malaika herself comes from a solid background in dance. She’s been “dancing since the age of four”, learning ballet from Mumbai’s legendary Firoza Lali, and later Bharatnatyam. Her mother, she says, would have loved her to continue with a career in ballet, which would have involved going to Russia and working with a company. But by the 1990s, MTV landed in India and signed her on, modelling assignments with photographers like Farrokh Chothia and the late Prabuddha Dasgupta came her way as did her first music video (for Bally Sagoo’s Gur Naal Ishq Mitha). None of this was part of the dream. Of the Arora siblings, younger sister Amrita was always the one who was interested in films and “cut out for it”, Malaika says.
Train to fame Malaika’s career as a VJ and model was cruising smoothly when it got an unexpected jolt – a jig with Shah Rukh Khan on top of a (moving!) train in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se, when she was only 22. Chaiyya Chaiyya was a luminous precursor to what would become de rigueur a decade later – the item song that threatened to eclipse the entire movie. “Malaika was my discovery,” says Farah Khan, who choreographed the song. “Mickey Contractor recommended her. We were petrified that she couldn’t pull it off. But her body language blew me away. She has always had the ability to look sexy without being vulgar.” Today, 14 years later, Malaika recalls the six-day shoot.
“It was draining and tiring. We had to go back and forth on the same stretch of track. Our ankles were strapped for safety; I was shackled and bruised! After a point, I told them to take it off; I’d rather fall than dance hanging upside down from the train!” Chaiyya Chaiyya got her instant nationwide acceptance and gave Bollywood an unusual gift: someone who looked like a million bucks, danced like a dream and astonishingly, had no interest in an acting career. “Acting has never excited me,” Malaika admits.
The ‘item girl’ career, on the other hand, suited her perfectly. She wasn’t required to be on set for four months at a stretch. And she didn’t need an entourage. “Even when I was modelling, I never had a mom sitting on my head and a bunch of people waiting on me. I’ve always been independent. I’ll do my thing and go.” Designer and friend Wendell Rodricks, whose biography Green Room features a smouldering Malaika on the cover, recalls the impact of Chaiyya Chaiyya. “It pulled the rug from under our feet,” he says. “Here she was, almost unknown, on a train gyrating like she was on terra firma. Through tunnels and hillsides, climbs and descents, she held up fabulously, against Shah Rukh.” Not that he expected otherwise. “Malaika is a natural flirt. She works a camera like no one else I know. As a model on ramp, she can reduce a seven-foot-tall diva to a pygmy. It is in her DNA. I jive with her and the room stops to look. She knows poise, rhythm and movement better than anyone I know.”
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