Calcutta, May 2: Her painted lips parted in a flashing smile, then contorted in sudden fury.

Balika bodhu was in towering rage.

“Tora ki bhebhechhish ta ki, aami ki andho hoye gechhi? Bangal ke high court dekhachhish? (Do you think I am blind? Stop taking me for a ride),” she yelled at the party workers around her.

“How come these are here when I am passing through?”

The offending objects that had made Moushumi Chatterjee — the Congress candidate from Calcutta Northeast — explode in anger were two rectangular cloth-over-wooden-frame hoardings of Ajit Panja of the Trinamul Congress and the CPM’s Mohammad Salim in a corner of Narendra Sen Square.

It was 6.30 pm. Moushumi, known in Bengal as balika bodhu (or the young bride) for her first celluloid role in the eponymous film of the seventies, had just arrived in an open Mahindra jeep, hands folded in a namaskar.

But the hoardings had spoilt her mood.

For the average party worker, Moushumi has come as a surprise in more than one way. Having walked the narrow streets of north Calcutta with her for nearly a month, they have learnt that the woman who can turn on a 1,000-watt smile can in the next moment sting with venom.

One worker recalled how he was at the receiving end one day. “We shall drive close to the left,” he had said while escorting her in an open jeep. “You have to charm the big crowd over there.”

“You are trying to fix my route! You ********,” Moushumi had screamed. “Let me be through with this, then I will show you who fixes which route. Now ask the driver to move right, I want those people to have a better view of us.”

Numb with shock, the escort did as he was told.

Another time, she had lost her cool at a party worker who was holding aloft a flag behind her to create a backdrop. “What do you think you are doing standing there? Get off my car, now,” she said.

When the man said he had been “assigned the job”, Moushumi turned on him. “I don’t want arguments from jokers like you. If you don’t get off the car this moment, I will make mincemeat of you…. Your own folks will not be able to recognise you.”

Then she turned to the swelling crowd, her smile back in place, as if nothing had happened — the mark of a seasoned actor. In the years she spent in front of the lens, Moushumi — who formalised her screen name from Indira Chatterjee through an affidavit — has worked with larger-than-life heroes like Uttam Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan.

But many in the Congress feel a seasoned politician, not a seasoned actor, should have been fielded from the constituency. “Here we are dealing with stalwarts like Ajit Panja, who is an MP for 20 years, and Mohammad Salim, who is a state minister. I don’t understand why our leadership has fielded Moushumi who has no experience in politics,” said a senior leader.

If some of her partymen think she is inexperienced, Moushumi thinks they are inefficient. “No candidate in Bengal is suffering as much as I am. Because of the inefficiency of you guys, I am forced to eat all kinds of inedible stuff, like machher jhol with tejpata (bay leaf) in it,” she said once. “Can you beat it, tejpata, t-e-j-p-a-t-a in machher jhol. I want to meet this gem who cooks my stuff.”

As cooking non-veg stuff cannot be managed in the kitchen of the Alipore guest house that has been turned into her temporary residence, Moushumi’s campaign managers have organised a steady stream of supplies from outside.

But there was no trace of the “suffering” as Moushumi walked down the narrow Sitaram Ghosh Street, Narsingh Lane and Raja Lane, in a lavender sari, feet ensconced in designer chappals. ’Oreal lipstick completed the picture.

Hours of campaigning under the scorching April sun had tanned her face, but the Elisa Dolittle of Calcutta (in Ogo Bodhu Sundari) seemed not to notice. Maitreyee Saha, her campaign manager, has been telling her to use sunscreen lotions, but she would not listen. “Erokom kaalo hoyechhi, ekta tribal meyer charitrey bhalo manabey (I’ll fit perfectly in the role of a tribal girl),” she told her campaign manager.

As she went asking for votes, walking the narrow bylanes off Amherst Street with a profusely sweating Somen Mitra, the former state Congress chief, in tow, she talked to hundreds of local residents, mostly women. “Where does the eight lakh votes go every time?” she told them. “This time you must vote for me.”

Barely seconds after Moushumi had walked past a row of tiled-roof houses towards Amherst Street, 7 0-year-old Karunamoyee Dutta rushed out weeping. “Moushumi ke dekha holona baba,” she cried, clutching Mitra’s hand. By the time Mitra could free himself, Moushumi had boarded her vehicle and sped towards Keshab Sen Street.