Kamal Ghorui
Actor Raju Shrestha, is remembered as Master Raju and every cinema lover remembers his face as a child actor. He’s been one of the most popular child actors and worked wit most big names in the industry – right from Dharmendra, Hema Malini, Jeetendra and Amitabh Bachchan. However, Raju only had a bad experience working with one actor and that was Moushumi Chatterjee. In a recent interview, he described some instances with the veteran actress which left a deep mark on him. Revisiting his first collaboration with Chatterjee in 1975, he said in an interview with Siddharth Kannan, ““If someone asks me who was the toughest to work with, I will say Moushumi Chatterjee. I never understood her as an actress in the first place. She never worked on her diction and delivered her lines with a Bengali accent. I never liked her.”
He went on to describe an incident from the sets of ‘Do Jhooth’, also starring Vinod Mehra and said, “We were making a film called Do Jhooth. It starred Vinod Mehra and Moushumi Chatterjee. I was quite active in films then. It was my first time working with her. There was a scene where she was dropping me off at boarding school and I was supposed to cry in protest.”Raju who was 9 years old that time, further said, “She assumed I wouldn’t cry and started pinching me. I was very young. She had long nails, and it hurt badly. I was ready with glycerine, but when she pinched me, I began crying for real. I was professional enough not to miss my dialogues, but once the scene was cut, I cried even more. I showed my mother that she had scratched me with her nails. My mother complained to the director, who confronted her. She said, ‘I thought he wouldn’t cry. To avoid a retake, I pinched him.’”Raju revealed that history repeated itself in 1978 during the making of ‘Tumhari Kasam’, which featured Jeetendra and Moushumi in lead roles. “There was a scene where she had to drag me home while beating me and then throw me onto a bed without a mattress. I requested her to push me gently and said I would manage the fall myself. She agreed, but then she hit me for real and threw me hard. I was badly hurt. My bones ached, and I cried a lot. I even asked her, ‘Aunty, what’s wrong with you?’ She just smiled and walked away,” he recalled.The repeated experiences left a deep scar on the young actor. “I was traumatised. Every time I was told we had a film with Moushumi, I would feel scared. I had my worst experiences with her,” he admitted.
