Kay Kay Menon: The man behind the masks in 'Bahrupiya'

One of the four short films from the newly-released Ray anthology, Bahrupiya tells the story of a middle-aged loner who dabbles in make-up (Indrashish Shah, played by Menon). He considers himself empowered when he comes into a surprise inheritance and starts living life in disguise, going on a vengeful spree which eventually gets out of hand.

Helming a brilliant psychological thriller based on acclaimed auteur Satyajit Ray’s short story Bahuroopi, director Srijit Mukherji (Begum Jaan, Dwitiyo Purush) draws the viewer in slowly with an increasingly dark tale that will leave you lost in contemplation long after you have watched it.

Mukherji as well as original writer Satyajit Ray inspired Menon to take up the intense lead part in Bahrupiya, he reveals in a Zoom interview to City Times, saying that “the makers, the writer and the person who has thought about it was what was more important to him”, and, “of course the screenplay and the way it was panned out in terms of the text, kind of gave me a feeling that this is worth attempting, and (I wanted to) see where it goes.”

A story with myriad meanings

Menon is one of those actors who seems ever-willing to take a risk with his craft, and yet, does not delve too deeply into an “analysis” of his work. Any “interpretations” that could be derived from Bahrupiya, he says, are up to the viewers and critics to thrash out.

When asked if he feels Bahrupiya is in any way a comment on loneliness or a person’s vulnerabilities, he responds, “I don’t know, that’s all post-facto thinking. That’s something that the analysts could do better, more than the participants. Because we were telling just a story, and there can be myriad meanings to it, which can be derived afterwards. So one of them, yes, as you rightly said, could be this, but that was not thought about earlier. It’s just a manifestation - and it kind of gives you the feeling that this could be one of the possibilities.

“For me it was basically a story about a person who has low self-esteem and how he takes refuge in other people’s characters and thereby gets away from his complex. Plus the fact that it involved certain elements of prosthetics made it interesting, even in the mechanical sense.”

Menon dons several disguises in Bahrupiya, with the last and most menacing only adding fuel to the story’s macabre twist. The actor says he was aware that using prosthetics was “physically tough” but only realised it fully when he shot the film. “You can’t wear prosthetics for long because it tends to peel away, and of course because it’s not actual skin, you perspire underneath that mask. But all those things are worth it when you are doing something interesting.”

While Menon is leaving it up to us to decide what Bahrupiya, in the end, is all about, he did share his personal takeaway from the film and how in our public lives, we humans, more often than not, tend to put on masks.

“I guess everybody in life is trying to put their best foot forward - that’s normal social behaviour. When they are alone within four walls they might be slightly different and I also mean here the four walls of the mind. We do put our best foot forward invariably and who says that he or she doesn’t, is lying! We try our best to be as affable and as impressive as possible outside, which is something that is always there within a human being.”

‘Complexities are intriguing’

Satyajit Ray’s works are known for not creating conventional heroes or villains, or portraying the world in black and white; the wide range of human complexities is given prime importance and that, Menon says, is what keeps any form of art from slipping into oblivion.

“Whether we have done justice to Ray’s original story with Bahrupiya, is for the analysts to say. And of course the mandate by Netflix was to push it to the edge, in the darker sense. So Srijit did make a screenplay out of Ray’s short story which is his interpretation of what he thought it was. And yes, complexities are something that are most intriguing in art. If it doesn’t have complexities it becomes mundane and boring. This includes human behaviour and character; the complex stuff that that comprises and makes us human beings, are to be explored in art. That’s what I think is the ‘summum bonum’ of even being in cinema.

“So Satyajit Ray definitely used to explore those (complexities) and explore them beautifully. And we have tried our best to give Bahrupiya a 2.0 kind of treatment. The rest is up to the audience and experts to decide.”

Bahrupiya is just under an hour long and yet it is obvious that Menon invested a lot of time and effort in his character. As an actor, how hard was it to let go of something so absorbing, and move on to the next part?