On a summer afternoon in 2013, I was busy at work in my terrace room in Kolkata when my mother called out urgently from the floor below. “Come down fast, they are showing your Baba,” she urged. Screening on one of the popular satellite movie channels, there indeed was my father, a loose half pants clad nine-year-old, mouthing dialogues in the 1949-released, Agradoot-directed hit Bengali film, Sankalpa. On screen, seated next to Baba, Pradip Bag, who passed away in 1988, was the six-year-old child actress, Baby Shikha, father’s real-life younger sibling, Shikha Rani Bag. My elder aunt, Boro Pishi.

It wasn’t just the novelty of seeing the siblings on screen that struck me. As family, we had known of the existence of the film where both had acted together and the only one featuring Baba.

That Baby Shikha, who subsequently achieved wider fame as a child actress in her maiden name Shikha Rani Bag, had acted in around 40 films alongside such doyens of Bengali cinema like Chhabi Biswas, Pahari Sanyal, Bhanu Bandhyopadhyay, Kanan Devi, Molina Devi, Komol Mitra, Tulsi Chakraborty, Johor Gangopadhyay, Suprabha Sarkar, Asit Baran, Anup Kumar, Biswajit Chatterjee, Suchitra Sen and Uttam Kumar, was often part of our family’s dinnertime chatter. Had the 20-year-old aspiring actor not been rejected at the screen test of the 1957-released film Neelachaley Mahaprabhu, then even Soumitra Chatterjee, I remember Boro Pishi cheerfully rue once.

Decades later in 2016, as a professional journalist and there for an interview, I would blatantly drop Boro Pishi’s name to break the ice with the then 81-year old, Soumitra Chatterjee. At the ground floor library-study of his Golf Green home, Chatterjee had initially appeared grumpy and monosyllabic. The ploy worked. He sat up. “Accha? You are Shikha Rani Bag’s nephew? How is she doing? Isn’t she Bose now?” Chatterjee exclaimed, even remembering his visit to the convocation of Shikha Rani’s dance school. All set, I sent a silent thank you to Boro Pishi and dived into an acutely intimate interview that on publication in Mint Lounge magazine became virally controversial for Chatterjee’s narration of his relationship with filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and an incident of physical assault.   

Meanwhile, at our local chicken shop, I have enjoyed the undeserved privilege of getting priority delivery for being “Shikha Bag’s nephew.”

For audiences of the post Independence Nehruvian era, the films she acted in were as stellar as the roster of her co-stars– Mejdidi, Banaprastha, Niyoti,  Agnipariksha, Subhada, Baloygras, Rani Rashmoni, Shilpi, Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Neelachaley Mahaprabhu, Sonar Kathi, Sadhok Ramprasad, Adrishya Manush, Mathur and Arghya, among others. In those days of stand-alone, single screen cinema halls and before the public launch of television in India, many of these films gained widespread popularity and some were adjudged superhits.

One such was 1954’s Agnipariksha. The film became the first blockbuster from Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen’s assembly line of hits and flagged off the duo’s journey to becoming one of Indian cinema’s iconic romantic pairings. Shikha Rani went to act with the Uttam-Suchitra duo in Shilpi (1956), again as the young Suchitra Sen, riding on the unprecedented success of Agnipariksha. 

Years later, a married Shikha Rani, having by then opted out of professional acting for a career in classical dance, happened to visit the Indrapuri Studio in Tollygunje. Sitting on a charpoy outside with other technicians was Uttam Kumar, who recognised her immediately. “Eijee,” he greeted Boro Pishi, with characteristic cheerfulness. “Why did you run away from the field? I had wished to act with you in other films too,” Kumar would tell her.  In life, we never found Boro Pishi regretting any of her decisions and wearing a constant chirpy facade like an armour. But did I sense a tinge of remorse when she recounted the Uttam Kumar anecdote?   

Meanwhile, even though she played the role of Suchitra Sen’s daughter in 1954’s Baloygras, it was her stellar act as the young Suchitra in Agnipariksha and Shilpi that gave Shikha Rani an unshakeable title as ‘Chhoto Suchitra’ — a title that continued to be used by the media even till her recent interviews more than six decades later.

It was the 1953-released Sohrab Modi-directed big banner Hindi film, Jhansi ki Rani, that took Baby Shikha’s talents beyond Bengal’s borders. The film broke barriers for being the era’s most expensive production and becoming the first Indian Technicolor film, which was shot by the Oscar-winning cinematographer of Gone with the Wind, Ernest Haller. 

Decades later, at home we, as children, would be enthralled by the stories from the shoot, where Baby Shikha powerfully enacted the role of the young Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi. But in flesh-and-blood it was our Boro Pishi, then merely a nine-year-old girl learning to ride a horse, an elephant, and injuring herself after mistakenly trying to climb the elephant by its well-oiled tusk instead of its trunk. At her home, among dozens of framed photographs of our aunt with stars of Bengali cinema and even non-cinema luminaries like the writer Ashapurna Devi or dancer Uday Shankar, the one with Baby Shikha flanking the then Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, during a screening and reception for Jhansi ki Rani in a Delhi hotel, stood out. That the 1942-born Boro Pishi shared the same birthday as Pandit Nehru, November 14, gave Children’s Day an added allure for us, the kids in the family.

Post-liberalisation of the early 1990s and the opening up of the television market in India, Boro Pishi’s  films would often be aired on satellite television channels, though not as often as they used to be showcased on the single-channel state-owned Doordarshan–in that gap, I would sense a passage of time from not just television’s transition from mellow B/W to the razzmatazz of colour but of society’s taste, lifestyle and sensibility. 

While often we would hear from others about the screening of those films featuring the child artist on any of the bouquet of satellite movie channels, neighbours and relatives would gather around our old black-and-white EC TV when the pre-announced “Boro Pishi-r cinema” would air on Doordarshan. Whenever the popular Mejdidi song, Pronam tomay ghonoshyam, would inevitably repeat on Chitramala, Thursday evening's programme of Bengali film songs on Doordarshan, the children of the house would go all nasal trying to imitate actor-singer Kanan Devi’s old-school singing as a chubby, sari-clad little Boro Pishi nodded along in the film. In the same room, she would laugh at our shrilly, silly antics. In the constant churn of change, the innocent joy of her films were a given, a clock stuck in time.

An interesting trivia we also knew was the 1962 film, Mayar Sansar, where Shikha Rani shared screen time with her younger sister, our Choto Pishi, Mala Bag (later Maitra). That was the only time Chhoto Pishi graced the big screen; Mayar Sansar also happened to be Shikha Rani’s last — she chose a life of matrimony over matinee stardom. Her legendary co-star in the film, Chhabi Biswas, is known to have egged on the 19-year-old during the shooting to consider starting her own family life, sansar.  Twice widowed, Boro Pishi's attempt at starting a sansar of her own remained short-lived and ill-fated. 

Personally, the screening of Sankalpa on television that summer afternoon spooked me more than it surprised me. Twenty five years after Baba passed away on Bijoya Dashami day, when my elder sister and I were still in middle school, and in an era that was innocent to the mobile phone camera and easily shot and easier forgotten videography; an age that sought and found comfort and colour in the sepia of carefully preserved family photo albums, here was Baba back again, bound within the four corners of the television screen, speaking, moving, emoting. “Tezu (my nickname), that is the merit of cinema. It preserves for posterity. Now don’t get so shocked if you see me on screen one day after I’m gone,” Boro Pishi told me on the sidelines of a bhai phonta function in the family after I had shared my goosebump moment on seeing our long-gone father come alive on TV. The tone of her voice had the same blend of jollity and concern–traits that characterized Boro Pishi for us.

In the morning of May 22 this year, Boro Pishi was gone too. Her 82-year-old body finally succumbed to the villainous cancer that had been gnawing inside her the past many months. Like the way she lived, she left without a fuss. 

She chose unavoidable death over requests and pleading of family and friends to undergo painful chemotherapy and radiation interventions, which she felt will only defer the inevitable. 

As the helpers of the government hospital brought down her body from the upper floor and laid it out on the backyard of the hospital before the journey to the Nimtolla crematorium, her ashen and bloated face seemed to carry traces of the ageless grace and poise with which she lived her life. 

Her 14-year stint from 1948 to 1962 as a reigning child actress in an era that heralded the Swarno Jug, the golden age of Bengali cinema, was defined by realism, Boro Pishi had mentioned in an earlier interview. 

To illustrate, she remembered the occasion when she had requested “Suchitra (Sen) mashi” during a shoot to guide her with a dialogue. 

"Why do you want me to say your dialogue?" Sen had countered. "You must not be influenced by me and find your own delivery style", Boro Pishi recounted what the leading lady of Bengali cinema had advised.

On another occasion, her senior co-actor in Niyoti, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, was playing the role of a burn victim, his face so disfigured that little Shikha Rani would scream and forget her lines. This led to Bhattacharya making the child actress sit on his lap at the makeup room while his hero’s face got transformed to the macabre by the makeup artist. In those 90 minutes, the actor carefully explained to Boro Pishi the minutiae of makeup. "See this is blood, see this flesh" - he showed her. What Boro Pishi saw and understood was the realism that underpinned cinema of her time.  

When she quit filmdom for conjugal life, never to return to tinsel town, Boro Pishi was aware of the reality of erstwhile Bengali middle class society that frowned upon women acting on screen or on stage. Instead, a trained classical dancer, she started her school of Indian dance and music, Nrityalok, which she ran till her last days and for over half a century. 

She never let go of her free spiritedness–Boro Pishi in short cropped hair when middle-aged ladies in braided and combed hair was the norm; Boro Pishi in salwar kameez when middle-aged women in saris was the convention; uncharacteristically for a woman, Boro Pishi playing the tabla, which she learnt from our father, in those countless memorable evenings of music, drama and poetry at our home; Boro Pishi leading a water ballet recital when audiences had little exposure to such forms of art and performance. All the members in the family were mandatorily her students, be it of dance, drama, recitation or music. 

Encouraged by their sister, All India Radio would frequently find Boropisi, our father and their middle brother, our Boro Kaka Chandan, recite poetry till a listener wrote in mentioning that ‘Akashvani te aajkal Bagh er utpat khub bereche (Radio has recently witnessed a spurt in tiger intrusions).’ Though not short of wit, the listener obviously took liberties with spelling or pronunciation.

As a child, I was a student of Boro Pishi’s drama department. Having uneventfully seen through Boro Pishi-directed plays at the prestigious Rabindra Sadan stage and another at the Raj Bhavan in the presence of the then state Governor, i created a flutter, for the wrong reasons, playing the role of the protagonist Amal in Rabindranath Tagore’s play Dak Ghar (The Post Office) during a performance for neighbours, family and friends at our home. Unable to any longer tolerate my sister’s overzealousness as a prompter from the wings, buzzing like a mosquito ahead of my dialogue delivery, my six-year-old rebelled on stage. “Can you then keep quiet, didibhai?” I raged loudly in between a dialogue. The audience broke out in spontaneous laughter. Boro Pishi didn’t but did not rebuke us either — we were after all children and students at the doors of acting, like she was four decades ago. 

Many of my childhood evenings were spent at the terrace room of Boro Pishi’s dance school in Deshbandhu Park in north Kolkata, where dozens of girl students practiced under her guidance. Among the girls, including my sisters, was Dilip, a young mustachioed man and an ardent student of Bharat Natyam. As much as the mudras, movements and mellifluous Bharat Natyam melodies like Krishna ni begana baro left a permanent imprint on my impressionable mind, the male dancer Dilip could well have been my earliest experience of a shattering of gender stereotypes. In  a musty society hijacked unquestioningly by moral mores, Boro Pishi always stood as a catalyst of change and progression.

Boro Pishi had expressed to her closest students to sing and dance on her death. As her body lay at the backyard of the hospital, her oldest students attempted to sing but voices soon choked up. While family members maintained a stoic silence, a mobile phone played singer Debabrata Biswas’s evocative rendition of Tagore’s Bhora thak smriti sudhay to which both old and young students of Boro Pishi gently danced around the lifeless form of their teacher. Some of the older ladies among Boro Pishi’s students have started their own dance schools. Encouraged and mentored by her, almost all the new school names are prefixed with Nritya, as a tribute to Shikha Rani Bag’s 56- year-old dance school, Nrityalok.    

When Baby Shikha was introduced to Jawaharlal Nehru during the screening of Jhansi ki Rani in Delhi, India’s first Prime Minister greeted the nine-year-old actor saying, ‘May many more shikhas like you light up in India.’ Boro Pishi didn’t understand the significance of Pandit Nehru’s words then. Surely over the years she did.