Anupam Kher, Rajat Kapoor, Irrfan and Shobana in Apna Asmaan

When Kaushik Roy showed his first film Apna Asmaan to his younger son, he was very apprehensive. The character of the differently abled Buddhi in his film is based on the real-life 17-year-old. “He didn’t say much but he seemed to like the film,” says Kaushik, who after three decades of advertising and marketing turned director with the film starring Irrfan, Shobana and Rajat Kapoor.

“Apna Asmaan (which releases this Friday), is mostly autobiographical,” says Kaushik. “My younger son being mildly autistic, my wife and I have been through a very tough time. We were always assured that everything would be fine. We would wait for the miracle that one day he would become like the others, like my elder son. But it would obviously never happen.”

And then Kaushik had a dream where his younger son was an accomplished adult but not a pleasant man to deal with. “In the dream, my wife and I were trying very hard to get him to acknowledge us as his parents. Then as I narrated my dream to my wife, I realised that I was extrapolating it as a story. From there I decided to flesh it out into a full-length feature, something I had always wanted to do.”

After burning the midnight oil over Syd Field’s screenwriting books, Kaushik was ready to translate his dream into a script. “I kept writing but I wasn’t sure at any stage whether I was going anywhere,” he says. “But finally when Ashutosh Gowariker said that I should go ahead and make it into a film, I was assured and decided to take it to the next step.”

Like most first-timers, Kaushik couldn’t get a producer. “They wouldn’t touch films like mine,” he explains. “It either had to be a romance or a comedy or an action film and my film had none of that. So after a lot of attempts I decided to produce it myself. I felt if I was confident about my script I should be able to risk my own money.”

The actors were comparatively easier to get. “Irrfan read the script and agreed to do it instantly. For the mother, I was looking at a couple of other faces but they wanted the kid to be a five-year-old so that their screen age did not touch the 40s. I couldn’t agree because Buddhi had to be a 15-year-old boy. Before I narrated my idea to Shobana, she had announced that she was not interested in movies but after reading the script, she agreed.”

Getting Dhruv, the boy who plays Buddhi in the film, was the toughest. “I had met him but then he didn’t seem to take the whole thing seriously,” recalls Kaushik. “We zeroed in to two other kids, with whom frankly I wasn’t satisfied. Then just before we were ready to shoot, Dhruv wanted me to take another audition. When I played the tape later at night, I knew he was the one.”

Kaushik Roy with Dhruv at the Nandan screening of Apna Asmaan. Picture by Aranya Sen

On the sets, however, there were no first-timer’s nerves. “They were all accomplished actors and all I had to do was explain to them what scene was coming before this and what came next,” Kaushik says. “They would constantly challenge me and even suggest different dialogues. It made me really happy that they were actually thinking for my project.”

Having won the German Star of India at the Stuttgart Festival and been selected for Argentina’s San Luis Cine Festival, Apna Asmaan is now days from release. “It’s a personal release for me as I wanted to share my pain with the world,” says Kaushik. “My son has a lonely life to lead and that’s something he has to fight himself.”