April 20: Trinamul candidate Abdur Rezzak Mollah, who today questioned on television Roopa Ganguly's smoking habits, her choice of people she lives with and generally her morals, is only a professional hazard. Roopa has several others, but she is happier talking about the good things.

Monday morning. Roopa, actress and BJP candidate from Howrah North, is campaigning in a narrow bylane of Nandibagan in Salkia, Howrah. Hot from the morning sun, she plonks herself down on the doorway of a building she has been invited into, gratefully accepts the lemon tea she is offered and breaks into a story.

She tells of another occasion when she was offered tea. She was campaigning near Hanuman Jute Mill in Liluah, when a tea stall owner, a bright young woman, offered her tea. Since Roopa doesn't drink tea boiled with milk, having given it up since acting in Aparna Sen's Yuganta (1995), for which she had to lose weight, the tea stall owner bought a new steel dekchi (pot) to make the perfect tea for her. It moved her.

Unlike some other star candidates, Roopa does not shrink back from the surging masses. Instead she seeks them out, walking briskly into one-room homes of Nandibagan, where the community is a mix of Bengalis and Hindi-speaking people. Each foray results in a selfie boom.

She also remembers exactly where the tea stall stands in an area that is still not that familiar. Roopa has been campaigning - and living - in Howrah only since Holi. An expert driver who has taken part in car rallies, she says she always remembers locations because of her "road sense".

But politics is a difficult road and so is Howrah North, where the open drains follow one far more faithfully than a mobile network. Roopa knows that. She is not blind to her disadvantages.

Some, like Rezzak, the leader who joined Trinamul after being expelled from the CPM, she cannot help.

Some of Roopa's other problems are self-professed. They would be considered virtues otherwise.

Roopa says she finds it difficult asking anything for herself; she likes to give. But she has to ask people to vote for her. "So I don't say that you must vote for me," she says.

The actress, who has often been cast in films as a woman of intelligence, character and an irresistible sexual attraction, says she is given to outbursts of anger and is "straight-talking". On top of that, says Roopa, she is "systematic" and "meticulous".

Then how does she manage being in politics?

All this is a "huge hindrance", agrees Roopa, smiling. "But at the same time, I don't have to make false promises." Asked if she endorses the BJP's views on religion and ideology, she stops at saying: "I have never used religion for politics though I am deeply religious myself."

Roopa, 50, is still best remembered as Draupadi in B.R. Chopra's serial Mahabharat (1988-1990), a momentous event in the life of the nation.

After Mahabharat, she had been approached by several political parties, including the BJP, which had recruited other actors from the serial and also from Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan as its members. But Roopa stepped in more than two decades later, when she thought the time was right, after 34 years of "misrule" in Bengal and five years of an "unimaginable condition". "The BJP is the only hope."

She halts suddenly where a lane bends and addresses the crowd, first in Bengali, then in Hindi. "Because of politics, Howrah North has been suffering from lack of proper drains, colleges, drinking water. The traffic jams are immense. We can see from the state of the roads how much money has been spent here," she says.

Then she herself makes an implicit reference to what many think is her biggest disadvantage in Howrah: her "outsider" status.

Roopa was given the ticket by her party at the expense of Umesh Rai, a BJP old-timer who had expected the nomination. Rai rebelled after Roopa was chosen, even causing disturbance at a meeting where the nominee was present, and was expelled later.

Roopa makes a great effort to prove that she belongs. "I have a house in Makarda and a factory in Uluberia," she says. Later she says she owns a farmhouse in Makarda and the Uluberia factory belongs to her husband's family.

She ends her speech with " Bharat Mata Ki Jai!" It leads to another selfie boom.

"Umesh Rai's exit will cost the BJP dear," observes a man who says he works in "finance". "He would have won the seat for the BJP," he says. "The outgoing Trinamul MLA, Ashok Ghosh, has been hiding somewhere. Rai has been around," he adds.

Trinamul has fielded cricketer Laxmi Ratan Shukla in Howrah North.

"So it is now a star for a star, but Trinamul has the party machinery working here," says the Nandibagan resident. The Congress has fielded Santosh Pathak.

"But what is the point of anything?" asks the resident. "This place has seen no development for almost 50 years. The drains are just the same." The people take selfies with Roopa but do not talk about their problems so much because they are numb from the realisation that nothing will change.

During monsoon, drain water constantly flows into the houses in Salkia and other parts of Howrah North. The Howrah Municipal Corporation's efforts to raise the height of the roads by 1ft made matters worse. Roopa agrees that the magnitude of Howrah North's problems is immense. "We have a masterplan. We have to begin somewhere."

Howrah is the life of Bengal, she reminds. It is built along the waterline, the Ganga, and is home to industries.

In the afternoon, she visits Hooghly Dock and Port Engineers Ltd, which once built great ships and now is a magnificent ruin. Roopa is meeting the Trinamul union of a few employees, who want the dock to be revived. It is another impossible task.

As Roopa meets the union members in an old colonial boardroom with a formidable stone fireplace that is now crumbling, sitting at a long table with an ancient wooden stand but a shining sunmica top, she promises them help from the Centre in the form of Nitin Gadkari, minister for shipping.

Gadkari was expected at the dock this evening, but could not make it.