KOCHI: Kalpana who was tagged as a comedy artist used to say, ‘my first film was an art film and my hero was a great poet,’ said poet Balachandran Chullikkad.
“That was in 1981, when she was just a small girl - must be aged 14 or 15. We did not have much dialogue. She was a beaming character and had a great sense of humour,” said Chulllikkad, who was the hero of ‘Pokkuveyil,’ in which she majored as a heroine. “Incidentally, in the film her parents Chavara V P Nair and Vijayalakshmi played parents to me. It was shot around the serene Sasthamkotta lake” he said.
The film that was directed by legendary filmmaker G Aravindan was noted for its background score by Hariprasad Chaurasia, with flute. Chullikkad played the role of a young artist who lived with his father, a radical friend and a sportsman. Kalpana was a music-loving young woman. The film won the Rajat Kamal award for the second best movie in the country in 1982, when Chullikkad was a campus heartthrob with his poems. “We maintained a warm relation after the film. Though she had many tragedies in her personal life, she never expressed them. She was pleasant always. The last time we met was almost an year ago, when she came to Ernakulam,” he said.
After ‘Pokkuveyil,’ Chullikkad wrote the story for ‘Orukkam,’ a film scripted by John Paul, in which Kalpana played the role of Alice who was married to Anthrappayi. In that film, her character had no comic element and was someone who had made it a habit to accuse the husband. The couple had no children, and later she ended her life, on finding out that her husband had a child from another women.
“The industry did not use her full potential, and in a way sidelined her as a comedy artist. She left us when we wanted her to do roles like the ones Sukumari did,” added Chullikkad.