BEFORE & AFTER: A poster of Smile Pinki; Pinki in Oscar glow

Pinki Sonkar is not the only one wearing that winning smile.

Away from the Oscar spotlight, scores of underprivileged children in and around Calcutta have found a reason to smile after free surgery to repair their cleft lips and palates.

Like the Uttar Pradesh-based protagonist of Megan Mylan’s Academy award-winning documentary Smile Pinki, 15-year-old Shahfaiz Ali from Keshabpur village, in Hooghly, had dropped out of school two years ago because he couldn’t take the taunts anymore.

“Classmates would call him thontkata, making fun of his cleft lip. It was so humiliating that he stopped going to school in Class VII,” recalled the teenager’s father Shah Islam, a daily-wage worker. Shah knew surgery would rectify the defect but the family’s monthly income of Rs 700 wasn’t enough to feed everyone, leave alone pay for Shahfaiz’s treatment.

The Smile Train, the NGO that had sponsored Pinki’s surgery, stepped in to change Shahfaiz’s life. He underwent cleft lip surgery at the Institute of Child Health (ICH) in Park Circus last February and a smile was born.

Six-year-old Isha Chowdhury, a resident of Jagaddal in North 24-Parganas, was also on the verge of quitting school when The Smile Train chugged into her life. She underwent corrective surgery at the ICH on February 16. “We thought it was a curse. Thank god, it’s over,” said grandmother Madhabi Sarkar.

Surgeon Parthapratim Gupta, the director of the Smile Train project at the ICH, said: “There are thousands of children with such congenital deformities, mostly from families that cannot afford corrective surgery. It costs Rs 40,000 in a private hospital.”