Minister Pratim Chatterjee retouches his make-up at the shoot of Amader MLA. Picture by Sudeshna Banerjee

Pratim Chatterjee the fire minister may not be having the best of times but Pratim Chatterjee the actor was all fired up at a film studio this Tuesday.

Three weeks after the Stephen Court disaster that claimed 43 lives and left Chatterjee’s reputation gutted, the country’s only fire minister walked into Bharatlaxmi Studio on Prince Anwar Shah Road for a guest appearance on a TV show.

Chatterjee has acted in many Bengali films since making his acting debut in 1982, but Tuesday’s shoot was a “one-off” small-screen appearance on request.

“I do not do TV. They cannot afford me,” boasted the actor-minister, who claims to be the highest taxpayer among Bengal politicians.

His earnings as an actor apparently go to a library he has set up in his constituency, Tarakeshwar.

In the studio antechamber, Chatterjee was greeted by a colleague. Anisur Rahman, the panchayat and rural development minister, had just finished his turn before the camera and was clearly relieved to be let off.

“Arey Pratimda, ki shob camera, action, cut…apni toh obhyosto eshob kortey. Ami toh phese gechhi (You are used to all this but I was ill-at-ease),” admitted the minister.

The chat show called Amader MLA features not only Chatterjee and Rahman but also aims to bring to the sets each of Bengal’s 294 legislators. Most of them may be jittery under the arclights but not Chatterjee, who claims Shah Rukh Khan wants to do a Bengali film with him.

As he walked into the set, anchor Rana Mitra greeted Chatterjee as a “colleague from the industry”.

Acting runs in Chatterjee’s family — actor Sabyasachi Chakraborty is the son of his brother-in-law, theatre personality Chhanda Dastidar is his sister-in-law and her husband Jochhon, by extension, another brother-in-law.

“I started late. Tokhon ar hero-r role korar boyesh nei (The age to play the hero was gone),” he recalled. “Ekhon shudhu baba-i kori (Now I play only the father).”

Chatterjee’s next outing on the big screen will be as an industrialist. “That means wearing suits,” he said, mopping his brow in the studio’s only set with an air-conditioner.

Acting is of course not the only thing that Chatterjee does apart from dousing quit calls after yet another fire.

Unknown to most, the minister, a mechanical engineer from the erstwhile Bengal Engineering College in Shibpur, is also a gemologist, a skill of little use in his day’s work.

“I had worked for De Beers in Holland. Jyotibabu (Jyoti Basu) had even asked me to do research on diamonds. But it is difficult to bring raw materials from there.”

His association with gems is reflected on his fingers. “These are two-carat rings. The original stone was six carats,” Chatterjee pointed out.

Whether Shah Rukh Khan offers screen space to Chatterjee and hails him as a gem of an actor, however, remains to be seen.

“Never in my life have I called a producer to ask for a role. Let him (Shah Rukh) make a Bengali film, then we will see,” said the fire minister.