Rolling in the deep

Shreya Dhanwanthary has played real-life heroines and make-believe molls. But at heart, she's just a geek, hoping to inherit the Earth

-  Arshia Dhar

Good things happen when Shreya Dhanwanthary gazes into the distance. In Scam 1992 (2020), her breakout role, in which she plays reallife business journalist Sucheta Dalal, that gaze means she's uncovering Harshad Mehta's epic stock-market fraud. In her latest Netflix series, Guns & Gulaabs, in which she plays the enigmatic femme fatale Yamini, her gaze harks back to a mysterious past shared between her and the not-quitegood cop Arjun.

Scam 1992 is set in Bombay's Dalal street. Guns & Gulaabs plays out in Gulaabgunj, a fictional small town in the hinterland. Dhanwanthary, 35, is clearly enjoying living in several different worlds at the same time. She's played the cool cop Zoya in Raj and DK's thriller series Family Man (2019-) and has been popping up on the streaming and big screen ever since her debut, in the Telugu coming-of-age drama, Josh (2009), in which she played a college student.

"You know how they say that when the one who is meant for you will arrive, you'll know? That there will be violins playing in the background? Yeah, all of that happened when I was on a film set for the first time," Dhanwanthary says.

Stars in her eyes

Dhanwanthary grew up in Bahrain and moved with her family to Gurugram in the mid-2000s. She was in her third year of studying engineering, in 2008, when she participated in the Miss India South pageant. She was first runner up, and ended up as a finalist at Miss India in the same year.