‘We Don’t Talk Often Enough About All This’: Kalki Koechlin On Why Her Play, 'Belly Of The Beast'

As an actress, she has never followed a template be it on stage or on screen. As a mother too she has followed her heart, but Kalki admits that she has had to let go of some control so she can continue to work while bringing up her daughter, Sappho.

Excerpts from an interview:

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Your new play has been adapted from the book you published in September 2021. Between The Elephant in the Womb and Belly of the Beast how much has changed?

A lot, the book was only my experience on pregnancy and parenting while the play, Belly of the Beast, weaves together the experiences of five different women. So, there’s more perspectives. Personally too, a lot has changed since I was pregnant and a slave of my own body. From being someone who took every decision without consulting anyone, I’ve come to depend on my husband, mother, nanny, and the community I’ve built around my daughter and me. When you give birth to a child, you are born as a mother too, and the process is at times difficult, painful and life-altering. Our play tackles this idea of transformation.

After a performance, do people from the audience come backstage and want to talk to you about their own experiences?

Oh yes, and it surprised us initially. We had thought we were making a young play for a young audience, but many of the women who wanted to talk, perhaps for the first time, about abortion and miscarriage, were in the fifties and sixties. And the conversations, some almost 15 minutes long, took them back 20-30 years, to when these topics were taboo and so had remained unspoken.

Not just women, we even had a man in his sixties admitting that it was nice to see others talking about such topics on stage because back when his wife had suffered a miscarriage, they had gone through the traumatic experience alone. We don’t talk often enough about all this and so, we wanted to address them through Belly of the Beast.

Scene from the play Belly of the Beast Scene from the play Belly of the Beast

Let’s flashback to your daughter’s birth. What do you remember of Sappho’s entry into this world?

(Laughs) Well, since it was a water birth in a clinic, I couldn’t see her in the moment that she floated out into the water but my husband (Israeli musician Guy Hershberg) described our daughter as a small Sushi wrap opening up slowly like an octopus. They put her on my chest and I was instantly mesmerized by this baby whose lips were already searching for my breast. I was told later that after my placenta broke, I bled almost half a bucket of blood, and they had to stitch me up. But I have no memory of the pain, it was like I was bathed in some kind of a golden light.

You won a Playwright Award for Skeleton Woman, which you co-wrote with Prashant Prakash, also playing the protagonist’s long-suffering wife. If the play was revived today, what changes would you incorporate?

I don’t know how I would portray it today, but the power of the mystic women has always fascinated me which is why I created a play around American psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s 1992 bestselling book, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Skeleton Woman was adapted from an Inuit folktale. I find myths and folktales really help women with getting through these difficult stories. We used to read bits from the book even while rehearsing Belly of the Beast.

Scene from the play Belly of the Beast Scene from the play Belly of the Beast

You are an author, playwright, actor, director, wife, daughter and mother. How difficult is it juggling all these different roles and responsibilities?

It’s tricky, particularly when you are the mother of a young child, and an actress. You don’t go away for the day and return in the evening, you are gone for many days, and that’s hard for a child because the dependability of the routine is what they lean on. They want their bedtime story every night and every morning, their favourite things in the tiffin. But I have a system in place now; a great nanny and a husband who is very hand-on. But I’ve had to learn to let go of some of the control, let others fill in the gap when I’m not around.

(Laughs) I had to be okay with the fact that my husband would send Sappho to school with a funny hairstyle because he doesn’t do her hair as well as I do. And when I’m back home from the shoot, I make up for lost time. I keep my phone in a different room and my daughter and I collaborate, one-on-one, on many different projects, creating things together. The other day, we made a birdhouse by cutting open a milk carton.

Scene from the play Belly of the Beast Scene from the play Belly of the Beast

Any plans of doing a play for children that you can watch with Sappho and her friends?

Maybe one day, but at the moment, I haven’t thought of doing it myself. I do look out for such stuff and promote the work of friends like Ratnabali Bhattacharjee. Her hilarious, interactive play, Hi How Who Why Are You?, explores the dawning of adolescence and what it does to 10 or 11 years old kids when they are visited by hormones like testosterone and estrogen. We also want to tour with our play, as much as we can, over the next few months.

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Has your daughter imbibed the creative genes of her parents?

Well, she has very strict piano classes with my husband who is very keen that she learn the basics of music. I don’t teach her acting myself, but she is curious about it as she spends a lot of time with us at our play rehearsals and is always asking questions. We also do a lot of roleplaying with puppets enacting the characters Sappho likes. Parenting is not easy, but it can be a lot of fun!

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