“I love pampering myself. I’m a real girl when it comes to that,” says the young girl gearing up to rough it out as a drug addict in her next movie role. Basra may be no place for young girls today – especially ones that like music and candles and oolong tea – but Navdeep Singh’s much-awaited second film of the same name (based in the war-torn Iraqi port city) clears a place for the striking Soniya Mehra. If she has that freshly-minted look about her, it’s because she really is. Not many people caught her debut film, Victoria no. 203, but Soniya isn’t fussed about it. “I was really young then, and so new to Mumbai and the industry. The whole experience made me stronger; I’m glad to have had a two-and-a-half year gap before returning to cinema, I’ve really grown up in that time.” The daughter of the late actor Vinod Mehra, Soniya grew up in the little beach town of Mombasa, Kenya (with family who have roots there) and in London, where she says multiculturalism and a spirit of global modernity co-mingled with her conservative Sikh upbringing. Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that when we see her next, it’ll be in Basra.

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