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Anupama Parameswaran knows the cost of being seen, of being a young woman in a world that's always watching. Beyond the beauty, the glamour and her young 28 years, she speaks five languages more than enough words to tell her story. The actor opens up to AKSHAYA PILLAI on the quiet details of a loud life.

- AKSHAYA PILLAI

It could be because the cold, claggy December morning has only just begun to shake off the night that our conversation starts with dreams. The kind that return us to ourselves unguarded, vulnerable, true. Anupama Parameswaran tells me about a recurring one from her childhood: a German shepherd, its silhouette dark against a streak of white light in the doorway. Her small body curled between her parents. The dream arrived in loops, night after night. "I don't know why it scared me so much, but I'd wake up crying," she says. "Wetting the bed," she adds, her voice low.

Parameswaran says this with an openness that is unexpected but welcome. "It's strange, but I dreamt of a dog again last night. This time, it was chasing me. I grabbed a sword" she pauses here, as if deciding whether or not to say the next part," and beheaded it. Only to realise it was my own dog." The weight of her dream settles between us. "Sorry, I have vivid dreams. They are heavy on emotions and always weird."

The morning light sifts through Parameswaran's Hyderabad apartment window, the wooden beams of her fourposter bed framing her like she's in an oil painting. Her eyes are half-drawn and her seraphic face is creased with sleep. "I don't mind mugging ten pages of dialogue but photoshoots and interviews stress me out," the actor confesses. It certainly doesn't seem that way. Still dressed in her loose white nightsuit, the 28-year-old talks to me like we've been catching up this way every Saturday for years. Every now and then, she says something and flips her hair, sending it cascading dramatically to one side. Her curls are brushed out into a kind of goddess volume. She calls it her 'Vogue hair', left untouched from the cover shoot which took place three days earlier, where she was reimagined as Padmini, the lotus nymph immortalised on Raja Ravi Varma's canvasses.