Madhuri Vijay on Cross-Generational Dynamics

In “Hidden Life,” you tell the story of Nidhi, a fourteen-year-old girl from Bangalore who is sent to stay with a great-aunt in Madras while her mother recovers from a miscarriage. At Jaya Aunty’s house, she also encounters Jaya’s daughter-in-law, Padmini, who is cognitively disabled, and a middle-aged male visitor, Sudhir, who is a Theosophist. How did you assemble this cast of characters, and did you know from the start where their interactions would lead?“Assemble” is just the word. I began writing this story with different characters, namely, an aspiring young writer and his new bride, who pay a visit to an elderly relative resembling Jaya. For whatever reason, that combination of characters didn’t work. I replaced the young writer and his bride with a teen-age girl, but that didn’t wo