Speak like Tarla before you cook like her

Updated On: 09 August, 2022 09:32 AM IST | Mumbai | Mohar Basu

Dialect coach breaks down how she helped Huma perfect Tarla Dalal’s diction, with its Marathi essence, for the chef’s biopic

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Huma Qureshi

Huma Qureshi describes Tarla as a “delicious film.” The actor, who wrapped up the biopic on home-chef and cookbook author Tarla Dalal in June, believes it is an emotional story of a woman who “cooked her way out of the chaar diwari of her kitchen.” Becoming the famed home-chef for Piyush Gupta’s directorial venture, however, wasn’t easy. Delhi-born Qureshi admits it was difficult to adopt the peculiar accent of her subject. “I grew up in a hardcore Punjabi neighbourhood. I can do any accent [prevalent] north of the Aravallis. But on this film, I had to learn from scratch. My diction coach Hetal Varia and I worked for months to make sure we don’t do a caricature. Tarla was a Gujarati woman who married and moved to Napean Sea Road, so her way of talking was unique.”

Hetal Varia, dialect coach
Tarla Dalal