Dog’s best friend: Mukherjee with pet Kadambari

The story of Bengali screen and theatre actress, Ishita Mukherjee, and her family — consisting of a bunch of animals — begins on a stormy, summer night in the late Sixties, when she was barely three years old. Her memories before that are blurry, except for a few shadowy black and white images of her parents quarrelling.

“They used to fight all the time,” she reminisces, more than 30 years later, “but I remember that night vividly”. She was sleeping in her room in what was then their one-storey house in Howrah. Suddenly she was awakened by the sound of thunder. The wind was howling outside her window and she remembers being so frightened that she ran to her parents’ room. “But they were in the middle of one of their violent outbursts, and my father screamed at me telling me to go away.” Ishita doesn’t remember how she got through that night, but what she does know is that that incident and many more such rejections from her parents gradually alienated her from them and made her look elsewhere for affection. Slowly, she found herself drawn to the stray animals that wondered around her neighbourhood.

“When I felt sad or scared,” she says, “I used to run out of the house and look for a little puppy or a kitten to hold. They were warm and friendly and never turned me away.”

But Ishita had no idea then that one day these cats and dogs were not only to become her only real family, but that her love for them was also to become the bane of her existence.

“Initially my parents didn’t object to me feeding the neighbourhood animals,” she says. “Part of the reason for that, of course,” she adds, “was that I used to spend my own money”.

From an early age, explains Ishita, she started earning. She could recite poetry and won many competitions at school, subsequently getting offers to lend her voice to radio and television ads. Gradually she started modelling, acting in commercials, which included Vimal showroom and Avon wool, among others. In 1987, when she was in her early 20s, she starred in her first film, Hiren Nag’s Tuni Bou. “I mostly bought food and medicine for street cats and dogs with my money,” she says. “I also used to take sick animals from the streets to the vet.”

Trouble started when she began to bring them home. “If the vet advised that some dog or cat needed to be looked after, I couldn’t just leave it in the streets to die, could I?” she asks, genuinely puzzled.

So an assortment of animals — including rabbits, guinea pigs, mice and even a monkey — started making themselves at home in her house, until, according to her father, Gour Mohan Mukherjee, “the backyard started resembling a zoo”.

However, in spite of their reservations, initially, when Ishita started to gain recognition from various animal rights groups, her parents decided to back her up. Her father even agreed to allocate a portion of the house for an animal care clinic. In 1996, she started the Howrah Animal Welfare Organisation, with financial assistance from the Government of India’s Animal Welfare Board, which also provided her with an ambulance in 2000.

All was well for a couple of years. And Ishita grew more and more attached to the animals — some were victims of road accidents, others suffered from malnutrition or festering wounds.

I didn’t have anyone to call my own, other than these helpless creatures,” says Ishita — who divorced her husband in 1995 after a brief marriage, which she refers to as “a mistake”. She herself doesn’t have any children and calls the animals in her care “my kids”. Ishita weeps openly when she talks about a langur, whose life she couldn’t save. “She had been hit by a taxi, while trying to cross a street near Vidyasagar Setu,” she chokes on her words as she recalls the details. “They brought her in, in an unconscious state. I almost revived her, though one side of her was paralysed. I had numerous x-rays done on her and even a C.T. scan. I sold my jewellery to organise money for it. It was decided that she would have to undergo a brain surgery. But she didn’t make it.” Finally, with permission from West Bengal government’s ministry of environment and forests, she has “adopted” another langur, a three-foot tall, English-speaking (or at least English-comprehending), Pepsi-guzzling giant, who loves to help Ishita comb her hair. But last year, Ishita’s father, at the instigation of neighbours who complained that the sick animals were spreading disease, asked Ishita to close down the animal shelter.

According to Ishita, she refused and things got nasty. In November 2003, her father filed a case against her for using the premises of his house and in February this year, she was roughed up by neighbours. Finally, early this month, says Ishita, her father asked her to leave the house. “But where will I go with all my children?” she sighs.

Right now she is touring the districts of West Bengal with her theatre group. When she comes back to the city next month, she will have to answer that herself.