Multifaceted Koel Purie Rinchet, who recently turned author with her debut book Clearly Invisible in Paris, never wanted to be an author but ‘always wanted to tell stories through acting, writing, and producing’. Her book is about the story of four friends, Neera, Rosel, Violet, and Dasha, who live in the same apartment block in Paris and find themselves intertwined in an uncanny manner.
Having four characters in the book, all of them her creation, Purie Rinchet was extremely careful about keeping them different from her personality. “Each character is an amalgamation of people I know, people I have read about, and people I have hated. It is fiction at the end of the day, but it’s based on real life,” says Purie Rinchet while chatting about her book.
Although the story was conceptualised before the world went into lockdown, it has the pandemic as the backdrop of the story. “Every good book I have read has been placed against the backdrop of world events. It’s a horrible thing to say...sometimes I wish I had lived through the 2015 terrorist attack in France, then I could have set it there because I needed something tense happening for my storyline. In March, we went into lockdown. I can’t be agnostic and think that I wished for the pandemic. But it gave me the tool that I was looking for,” recalls Purie Rinchet in her typical exuberant style.
Although the pandemic feeds into the story, Purie Rinchet says the core essence would still be ‘friendship’, even if the pandemic had not happened. “If the pandemic had not happened, I would have created a situation like it. It could have been a war or a terrorist attack.
The story is not about that. It is about the connection that these women in the book have,” says Purie Rinchet, adding that the course of the story was not affected since she didn’t write anything during the lockdown. “I didn’t write anything during the lockdown. I was in Paris when the first lockdown happened in Europe, which was very scary. We were not allowed out.
There was policing all around. Sometime in October, when it cleared out and we had some curfews, I finished the book from start to finish in six months,” says the 44-year-old, who didn’t face writer’s block and hopes she isn’t jinxing it.
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Out of the book
Koel Purie Rinchet will soon be seen on the big screen with The Archies, directed by Zoya Akhtar. She plays the role of Alice Cooper, mother of Betty Cooper, played by Khushi Kapoor. It is set in an Anglo-Indian hill station called Riverdale. Because it’s the ’60s, it has a hangover from the British Raj. “I play Alice Cooper, a baker who is super sophisticated, someone who smokes and bakes at the same time. The styling is interesting. My character is in love with young Queen Elizabeth II. Parents are the ones who are delinquents, and kids are the good ones who are activists. But it stays true to the comic and true to Zoya. Imagine both worlds coming together,” says Purie Rinchet about the movie that also stars Agastya Nanda and Suhana Khan.