Even as she was speaking to us, Swara Bhasker was patiently trying to give instructions to someone to drop a parcel at her gate. “My stylist is sitting in Goa and I need clothes for these promotions and she’s been sending me courier packets. I live on campus in Delhi and they don’t allow anybody in. So the whole day I end up answering calls from people and saying, ‘Guard bhaiya, rakhwaalo packet, please!” laughs Swara.

The firebrand actor, known as much for putting her weight behind issues that plague the social and political fabric of the country, as she is for essaying strong women on screen, plays a cop putting her life on the line to bust a human trafficking racket in the interestingly titled series Flesh, that drops on Eros Now on August 21. The Telegraph chatted with Swara on the show, social media and beyond.

What can you tell us about Flesh and what made you sign on?

The subject is not just dramatic but also disturbing. It shows the bad and sad reality of human trafficking in our country and around the world. It’s really very sinister. It’s exciting for me because before this, I had never played a cop before, I had never done action before. I had never handled a gun in my life... never want to, by the way (laughs). I think using a gun on this show has made a great case for ahimsa in my mind.

You’ve perhaps delved into a similar emotional space before, but physically, as you said,

Flesh was a whole new ground for you. What went into prepping for this character?
There were two things. One was that I really wanted to get into the skin of a cop. As someone who is an activist and constantly engages with young people and students, the side of cops that we see, especially these days, is sadly antagonistic to our various causes. But when I spoke to a range of cops for this show, both men and women, what I found was a very palpable sense of frustration at the way in which the system gets manipulated by criminals in tandem with the powers that be, to be able to get off the hook. They feel that even when they do their job, the fact is that it’s just so easy to undo everything.

So thy being trigger-happy, I feel, is far more complicated than just a simple abuse of power. This realisation was interesting for me because I had never really looked at it like that. I had never thought of the frustration of an honest cop working in a system like this. So emotionally, I decided that was the thing I would hold on to... for every character, you need an emotion as the framework around which you build the rest. For me and for my character Radha, it became that frustration. Throughout the show, you will keep seeing that she’s so frustrated by the fact that she can’t do more, better and faster to bring these criminals to book or to some kind of accountability.

The other thing was the physical aspect, which was quite challenging. I had never done so much action, or so much running on screen! Physically, a lot of my prep was just running! (Laughs) And running in a way that looked nice. My running bits in the initial portions that we shot has me going, ‘What am I doing?!’ and then my running suddenly improves later (laughs). I actually took classes for running. I got a trainer, who is an athlete and boxer called Abhishek Sharma, and I only worked on form. One of the comments I got when we had just started shooting was, ‘You run like a girl’. And I was like, ‘Hell, I run like a girl... I am a girl!’ (Laughs) But then I was told that I am a cop first, and that my running had to be like that of a cop. And so I focused on that and it became a big part of my prep.

And then, of course, I had to handle a gun... I think I am still not comfortable with handling a gun. I’ve resigned to the fact that there will be no peace between me and
the gun.

You mentioned the word ‘frustration’ a couple of times and you play a cop who’s very unconventional and doesn’t like doing things by the book. For someone like you who has always been branded unconventional, is there a point where Swara and Radha meet?

I don’t identify with her being trigger-happy, not at all (laughs). But I think behind her frustration is an anger at lack of justice, which is something that I identify very strongly with. She’s actually a very complicated character, and so a lot of her responses come from a space far deeper than what we initially understand. I didn’t necessarily identify with someone who would bend the rules or call for immediate justice... on the show Radha says that she wants to line up all the traffickers and shoot them one by one with a machine gun... but that’s not a position I would espouse publicly.

But if you dig deeper, I think it’s a common frustration we share at how easy it is for criminals to get away with something as evil as human trafficking, which is actually modern-day slavery. More than one cop I spoke to used the word, ‘rakshas’ to describe these traffickers.
So yes, there is a shared sense of frustration, especially when you see how deep-rooted this nexus is and how it even has its roots in civil society. A lot of these traffickers are regular people within local communities. One cop told me about a housewife in Bombay who was running this racket from home while her husband would go to work! This is such a huge racket in our country and the perpetrators are just allowed to go. It’s something we even saw in the Muzaffarpur shelter home case. The female minister who was purportedly involved, nothing happened to her. And it was one of the most gruesome cases... (pauses).

Moving on, what’s the mindset been like over the last few months as we all adjust to a new way of life?

I was in Bombay for the first two months. But my mother had a fall and I was thankfully able to get permissions in the middle of the lockdown and fly to Delhi, where I have been since. Being at home with my parents has taken away a lot of the stress and anxiety that came on in the initial stages of the pandemic. But yes, it’s hard, it’s surreal, it feels like we are in a different world! It seems like we stepped over some threshold and came into another world. There is a lot of unexplained anxiety that we all are feeling, but I am trying to deal with it in as mature and wise a manner as I can. Also, the fact that I’ve had so many releases in the last few months has helped... I’m really glad that Flesh gives me something to engage with and get my mind off.

Why do you engage with social media trolls on a daily basis when it would just be easier to slide them by?

I feel that the virtual world is as much a public space like a road, restaurant or bus stop is and if we saw someone misbehaving in a physical public place, we call them out, even if we see them harassing someone else, right? So why should it be different in a virtual public space? We should try and make even that civil, decent and free of abuse. It’s just that for me... standing up for myself and others and trying to keep public discourse civil and clean.

A lot of your fellow actors, especially in the last few weeks, have quit social media citing abuse. For someone who’s been handling it for years, haven’t you ever been tempted to quit or at least take a break?

If I did that, I would feel that I would be abandoning a cause or a side. And I really don’t want to do that (smiles).