She is the nine year old giving Amitabh Bachchan acting lessons!

Playing a deaf and mute psychologically traumatised girl, Ayesha Kapoor has given a stunning performance, prompting the big man himself to say that one of the highlights of working in Black for him was the chance to work with Ayesha.: "That a girl that small can give such a huge performance is incredible. Ayesha is extremely confident, intelligent and focussed. And very committed...

She'd get upset if she didn't deliver the correct shots. When she decides to take up the profession full time she'll have my full support and recommendation," gushes Amitabh Bachchan.

What he won't talk about is how the Pondicherry-based Ayesha who plays the young Rani Mukherjee in Black, would often get into a huddle with him over a shot and tell him: ‘Amitabh, don't you think we should be standing in this way, with the light in our face?'

"Imagine a nine-year old explaining to Amitabh Bachchan how a scene should be done," laughs director Sanjay Leela Bhansali. "We'd watch her and go, ‘hmmmmm...' But Amitji would listen to her very patiently."

"I like acting.... In fact it was quite easy," says Ayesha, just back from her riding class.

"I just had to practice a lot with my eyes. I had to look blind and that was very hard but Sanjay made shooting very easy. So even if I got tired he'd patiently wait for me. There was this one time when I had to do a really hard scene with my screen-dad (Dhritiman Chatterjee), so Sanjay would just tell me to stop after a while. Then again we'd start. He'd call me Honey The Bunny The Funny...."

She, of course, called everyone by his or her first name on the sets. It was Amitabh and Sanjay always. Even during the interview she is confidence personified. "Next I would like to do a film revolving around horses. Something like International Velvet or Seabiscuit."

The daughter of a German mother and an Indian father, who also owns Hidesign in Pondicherry, Ayesha says she has never seen any of Amitabh Bachchan's movies. "I didn't know who he was. But the first time when he came on the sets, I was really scared, actually."

But while Bachchan and Bhansali gush about the nine year old — "When she left to go back home to Pondicherry I felt a piece of me had gone, says Bhansali — Ayesha says the biggest plus of doing Black has ben the chance to learn the sign language.

"My friends and I use it now. We communicate in the secret language that only we understand.''