Like everything else in her unplanned life, the return of Moushumi Chatterjee (in Yash Daasguptaa’s Aarii) just happens to coincide with her birthday. The initial plans were to release Aarii on Poila Boisakh but getting the right chain of theatres pushed it by a few days to April 25. It will be Moushumi’s birthday the next day, the producers keen to turn her presence in Calcutta into a double celebration.
It is a celebration, for Aarii marks the coming out of Moushumi Chatterjee who went into a shell (of depression and diabetes) after the untimely passing of her older daughter Payal in 2019. “To me, it’s like it happened yesterday and that’s how it’s always going to be,” she disclosed.
Last seen in a substantial role in Aparna Sen’s Goynar Baksho (2013) and in a fleeting but spirited role in Piku (2015), it has taken Moushumi a decade to return to the screen. She is, in any case, a difficult customer to get on board. She turned down even family friend Deb Mukerji’s son Ayan’s film Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani because, “I need something substantial, I can’t just play a mother who calls out to her kids that khaana is ready.” But, as the producers of Aarii will probably endorse, once she puts her signature to an assignment, the commitment-bound professional in her takes over.
Like it did when the final schedule of Aarii was shot in mid-Jan in a remote place near Digha where everything and everybody smelt of fish, there were negligible comforts and the production team was not equipped for half the crew, cameraman included, to start throwing up and falling ill. One day, Moushumi was so ill that she was up all night visiting the washroom, unable to even get up and report for shooting. But once she felt better, she shot till 11pm. It was the last schedule, the film had to be wrapped up.
Never mind that she, a Bengali, didn’t order fish for weeks after her return to Mumbai. And that returning to Calcutta after the shoot was like “coming back to life”.
Back to her chatty self, she recalled the government doctor who was called in to take a look at her. “Hilariously, he was keener on taking a selfie with me to show that he was treating Moushumi Chatterjee,” she laughed. “I was thinking, here’s an exhausted senior citizen who’s been visiting the washroom all night and you want to click pictures? But,” she added, “He was a good doctor who set me right with two doses of medicine.”
Her level of commitment is best gauged by the fact that depression and diabetes were topped by a stroke and an episode that required a pacemaker in her heart in 2024. The doctors would have liked her to rest for at least three months but she’d said “yes” to Yash and Nusrat Jahan, and their film Aarii couldn’t be put on hold. She began shooting for it within two months of her surgery.
“But the producers were caring and looked after me well,” she remarked, cheerful after pulling off an assignment that she felt fortunate to have gotten at this stage of her life. “It’s such a lovely role. Of a woman like me, crazy. And she makes her son’s life also crazy. With a touch of dementia setting in, it’s a mother-son story, poignant, emotional, comic. I immensely enjoyed working in it.”
Accompanying her on this visit to Calcutta for the release of Aarii will be her younger daughter but on the 26th, Moushumi aims to be back in Mumbai to spend the evening with her “old man”. It’s fitting that Megha is her companion on this trip; for left to herself, Moushumi would’ve done no interviews, no commercials, no reality shows. It was Megha who stepped in to pull mom out of depression and back into the world.
In 2025, Moushumi did an ad for a kitchen product with Sonakshi Sinha. Now she’s done a film. Later in the year, she has another surprise up her sleeve. But we’ll wait for her to make that announcement.