Sure, let’s not judge a woman by her clothes. But tattoos are another matter. Director-producer Pooja Bhatt has tats everywhere — she has them on her fingers, her hands and her neck. And they tell a story.

She points to her left hand, where the Latin phrase Amor Fati (love of fate), said to have been Friedrich Nietzsche’s guiding philosophy, is inked. “My friends from Calcutta have been calling me Aamaar Fatty after this,” she laughs, pushing away her hair — with streaks of green in it — from her face. 

Bhatt, at 44, is certainly not a fatty. Her smile reminds you of the teenager who breezed into Bollywood with the 1991 hit Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin. But her tats and her green streaks make her stand out. Her conversation, too — sometimes formless, but always frank — sets her apart.

“You know, my maternal granny has a Calcutta connection,” she says, setting the conversation rolling. “But soon after she was married, they shifted to Maharashtra. She so loved India that she refused to migrate to England with my grandfather, and single-handedly brought up her five kids here. That’s how strong she was.” 

Bhatt visited Calcutta for her film Cabaret, directed by her long-time friend, adman Kaustav Niyogi, who is going to debut as a director at the age of 50. “Everybody thought Kaustav was an alcoholic and he was finished. But he proved the world wrong. He has told us this incredible story.” There was speculation that the film was based on the dancer-actor, Helen, but Bhatt sets the record straight. “No, it’s not based on Helenji’s life,” she says.

Cabaret, to be released shortly, traces the life of a woman from Jharkhand, played by Richa Chadha, whose Maoist boyfriend is gunned down in front of her. It captures how her life changes as she moves to Mumbai and then to Dubai.

She believes in portraying women with strong characters. She points out that she has done so in films such as Cabaret, Jism-2 and Dushman. “I love to tell stories of strong women from a woman’s perspective. And I also want to make movies where women can whistle and drool over sexy men and get turned on watching bare male bodies. In fact, my movies have more bare men and covered women than vice versa,” she laughs. 

Bhatt is known as a hands-on producer who works in tandem with the crew and looks into every aspect of production. She has picked up the art of making successful films on small budgets from her father, director-producer Mahesh Bhatt, and uncle, Mukesh Bhatt. 

On the anvil for Bhatt, who runs her own production house called Fisheye Network, is Oh!, a Web series on female orgasms. She said she was inspired to do this film after reading Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories. “We still don’t consider female pleasure a priority. When I say female orgasm, I am talking about female liberation, too. Whether she wants to be a celibate or a harlot, it’s her choice, isn’t it? The series will cover stories of women from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.” One of the episodes will be directed by her stepmother, Soni Razdan, “who has written a brilliant script”. She wants to shoot the first four episodes, each 45 minutes long, by August, and then approach the Web channels.

One of the stories is about a 50-year-old widow who experiences an orgasm for the first time after she has sex with a young lover. Another story might explore how a Bhojpuri item girl feels when she returns home after acting in films. An episode deals with an old prostitute who teaches a younger woman how to pleasure herself to escape the everyday brutality that sex workers face. Yet another story deals with circumcised Bohri women.

Bhatt is active on Twitter, and that’s where her fans learnt that she had divorced her husband Manish Makhija, who made a name as the rustic Udham Singh on television several years ago.  “I wanted to put to rest all the speculations around it. It’s so strange, isn’t it, that no one asked me why I fell in love and why I got married, but they were so bloody interested in why I divorced. Two very good friends and partners can grow in different directions over time, what’s wrong in acknowledging that and moving on,” she says. 

When there’s a collision between the heart and the head, Bhatt points out that she always listens to the heart. She left acting, when she was one of the top actors, to take up direction. “When I produced Tamanna in 1997, I was younger than Alia,” she says, referring to her half-sister. “The film was shot with only Rs 80 lakh and got a National Award. I tasted blood and that set the ball rolling,” she reminisces.

There’s a photograph of Bhatt with Alia as a baby on a table. How does she feel about her sister’s success? Does it evoke a sense of déjà vu in her, since she has been there, done that?

“There’s a joke in the family that we put a Bhatt out there every 20 years,” she laughs. “But, on a serious note, we don’t give each other tips, we are intelligent enough to make our own decisions and we don’t intrude into each other’s space. I feel she is growing with each movie and Udta Punjab has been her best so far,” she says. 

We are meeting in her office — the presidential suite at a five-star hotel in Mumbai. The interiors are vibrant, a disco ball hangs from the ceiling, a wooden parrot sits on a wooden perch and there are beautiful paintings — including portraits of her father, and one of Aung San Suu Kyi — adorning the walls. A bust of Lenin sits on a side table. There is even a black-and-white picture of Mahesh Bhatt as a toddler trying to play with a tiger that his film producer father had brought for a shoot.

“I love this idea of setting up an office in a hotel room. If I am bored I can pack my things and move to another space in another hotel. Nothing is permanent and there is no end to possessing things. After a point, money does nothing,” she says. “Economics never drove my decisions. But, of course, you should have that ‘F*#k you’ money in your bank so that you can live on your own terms. Slavery comes in attractive packages. I can’t be a slave to a Birkin bag or a rock on my ring,” she asserts.

Bhatt is now also thinking of facing the camera — after 15 years. Her father is writing a story with her in mind. “It’s again a strong story of an alcoholic woman who gave up her daughter to pursue her career. The plot is so powerful that I couldn’t say no to it.”

She looks like she has lost weight, which may work well for her if and when she returns to acting. “I’m an extremist,” she says, about her health regimens. “Either I am on a health spree or bingeing, either running or lazing around, either sleeping the whole day or staying awake the whole night, finishing an entire pot of mishti doi or not touching sugar at all. And this plays havoc with my weight. So I have two sets of clothes ready,” she says.

She has a lot on her platter now. The script for Jism 3 is being worked on. “The cast is yet to be decided but my friend Jackie Shroff is going to be there. I want to shoot it in tea gardens and maybe I will settle for Sri Lanka.” She is also working on a film called Love Affair, the story of a lonely foreigner who has an affair with a man, whom her husband subsequently kills. Razdan has written the script and Kalki Koechlin plays the protagonist.  

She also has a long-term plan to shoot a document on her father’s life. “People think Mahesh Bhatt is a serious chap. But he is fun-loving, easy-going and childlike. He is fascinating.” 

But all work and no play will make Bhatt a dull girl. Isn’t she thinking of love again? “I am always open to love. If I am not, then I am dead. I am a hopeless romantic, but I am not going to be defined by that love. It doesn’t define my existence. You can’t plan life and love,” she says.

I notice the tattoo on the right hand — “Everything is a fairy tale”, it says. On the wrist is her birth date — 24 — written in Roman numerals. February-born, her birth sign, Pisces, is marked in symbols. The nape of her neck sports a dolphin in a Maori form of art. 

There are letters inked on the fingers of her two hands. C, says the little finger of the right hand, A, says the ring finger, R, says the middle finger and so on. Together, the nine letters spell the phrase Carpe Diem. Bhatt, clearly, has seized the day.