Funnily enough, it’s an actual phone call in the film that will resonate
with many. Chopra Jonas’ character is calling her school-age son, Ishan,
from a pay phone. The two are oceans apart, and Aditi is living in poverty in
London, where her daughter is receiving treatment for SCID (severe combined
immunodeficiency). Ishan, who is still in India, is crying because he was teased
at school for drawing a picture with a pink sky. The conversation about an
inane slight is one any parent can relate to, and Aditi is furious as she tells her
son, “Never change the colour of your sky for someone else” before adding,
“I coloured mine the way I wanted.”
The scene is powerful not just because Chopra Jonas nails it but because,
as the world’s first Indian superstar, she, too, is doing things the way she wants
to. She already has dozens of acting credits to her name (in India and in the
West), been named a UN Goodwill Ambassador and married a man 10 years
her junior. She has been a vocal advocate for women’s rights around the world
yet created a Twitterstorm over her position on Indian politics. She isn’t easily
defined, and now, with The Sky Is Pink, she stars in—and produced—her first
English-Hindi film because, well, borders aren’t her thing. “I don’t think that
my careers in India and America are mutually exclusive—the world is a very
small place, and entertainment is global,” she explains. “Hindi movies are
very close to my heart, so as long as people want to watch me, I’m going to
continue doing them.”
If a star of Chopra Jonas’ calibre had to push boundaries or be more
Western to cross over into the American market, her profile now allows her
to retreat a little and embrace the #AlwaysADesiGirl hashtag you’ll find on
her Instagram feed. She recently appeared on a U.S. magazine cover in a
traditional Indian sari, a look she loves dearly and considers super-flattering
for any woman’s body. “When I was growing up, there was no world in
which that would have happened,” says Chopra Jonas with pride. “I carry
my culture everywhere I go. India can be mainstream instead of being a
flavour, you know?”
Director Shonali Bose’s sensitive script for The Sky Is Pink is another reason
Chopra Jonas knew she could bring an English-Hindi film across the sea. “Love
and grief are things I dealt with very closely after the death of my father,” she
says. Her dad succumbed to cancer in 2013. “Grief is eventually a companion
and not really something that goes away. It’s so much better to celebrate how
someone lived rather than the sadness of their death.”
A well-respected Indian-born director known for festival hits like Margarita
with a Straw, Bose also brings an intimate awareness of mourning to this fi lm,
having lost her teenage son, Ishan, in a freak accident six years ago. Years of
“grief work,” as she calls it, meant focusing all her attention on her younger
child so that he would not feel like he’d lost his mother too and confronting
every painful feeling as opposed to denying it. When the real Aditi Chaudhary
approached Bose with her family’s story last year, Bose felt ready to write
about the loss of a child.
“From the moment I started writing this script, I only wanted Priyanka as
Aditi,” says Bose. She hadn’t worked with Chopra Jonas before but was certain
the actor’s full potential had yet to be explored in either India or America.
On the morning of Bose’s late son’s birthday, she received a text saying h