Aadmi Aur Aurat

It was an end similar in all but one thing to the tear-jerkers in which she had acted - its illogicality. Mahua Roychowdhury, 32, the reigning queen of the Bengali screen, who died last fortnight in a Calcutta hospital after battling for 10 days against third-degree burns, created an even bigger splash in her death than at any time in her successful career. Police doubt if she could have suffered burns due to the bursting of an oil-stove, as testified to by her husband and later on by herself. And the suicide theory - however tempting - falls flat on its face due to lack of tangible information regarding the possible motive for such an action.By far the busiest actress in the Bengali film industry, Mahua had 15, or nearly a third of the total number of Bengali films, riding on her shoulders at the time of her death. She had almost all by herself put the Bengali cinema on a come-back trail with Lal Golap in 1983 and Shatru, last year's runaway success which grossed a whopping Rs 90 lakh on a modest investment of Rs 6 lakh. Her performance in respected movie director Tapan Sinha's television film, Aadmi Aur Aurat, telecast in June, won her critical acclaim - again that corrected her reputation of merely filling the box-offices coffers. Suicide would have been too unthinkable a turn of event in the middle of such a steep and dramatic ascent. According to the statement of her husband Tilak Chakravarty, Mahua had returned with him from a party at the next-door flat of film director Anjan Chowdhury (the maker of Shatru) around July 12-13 midnight when the accident happened. Mahua, said Chakravarty, had lighted the stove when it, suddenly burst, engulfing her in fire.However, the version did not square with the fact that the stove had been found intact by the police later on. There wasn't a drop of kerosene oil in it whereas doctors at the emergency ward of Calcutta Medical Research Institute, a private hospital near Mahua's home at Behala in the outskirts of Calcutta, said that she stank of kerosene when she was brought there. However, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the West Bengal Police closed the case on July 18 after Mahua had herself given a statement that the fire had been accidentally caused. Significantly, she did not mention any explosion. But, goaded by the noise made in the local media and persistent doubts expressed by some members of the film industry who knew the actress closely, the state police reopened the case shortly after her death.One of the first things they did was to interrogate afresh Chakravarty, 38, and Mahua's ex-dancer father, Nilanjan Roychowdhury, who lived with his married daughter and, with his son-in-law, managed her finances. A cm official told India Today that one of Mahua's several joint accounts kept in banks with her husband and father was closed at her bidding only four days before the incident. But police claim they have cracked some witnesses who have admitted that Mahua and Tilak had drunk a lot that evening, and that the fire incident was in fact preceded by a bout of drunken brawling in the presence of the father, the child and their two domestic helpers. One investigator hinted that heavy kitchen utensils were used by the couple against each other.This claim was prima facie supported by two pieces of evidence: the post mortem revealed marks of haematoma under Mahua's eye and on her back, suggesting that she had been badly bruised ; and Tilak had a badly sprained ankle which he said he had got while trying to rescue his wife. Police say they have also dug up evidence of a chronic cycle of depression and alcoholism in Mahua's personal life, caused reportedly, by her fling with a producer in Bangladesh and resentment at being kept on a short leash by her husband and father, the manager-duo.Nilanjan, for that matter, was totally dependent on his daughter and lived with her, leaving his wife in a cheap and shabby home in the less affluent suburb of Dum Dum. Tilak, who gravitated to films as a child artiste in the 50's, was a subsequent failure in show business and settled for a small job in a bank. "There is no doubt that Mahua was their bread ticket," said a fellow actress who would not go on record but emphatically claimed that it could not have been an accident.CID officials have also discovered that Mahua had once earlier tried to kill herself. "If we accept it was a case of suicide then everything else falls in place, including her statement which could have been an attempt to cover up the embarrassment," the officials say. Their reasoning is that Mahua was drunk, and overcome by depression after the fight, set herself on fire. As the Special Inspector General of Police (Crime), Rathin Bhattacharjee, explained; "Now it is entirely up to the forensic department to determine whether accidental death can be totally ruled out."Specialising in plain-as-Jane girl-next-door roles, Mahua neither had the glamour of a Suchitra Sen, Bengal's screen legend, nor the talent of a Madhabi Mukherjee, the most famous of the Satyajit Ray heroines. But she was luckier than perhaps all of them as she could create an empathy with the audience for her sheer ordinariness and got her slot ready made in the most popular of Bengali pot-boilers, the domestic drama. Ironically it was through Suchitra Sen's personal make-up man that Mahua's father, who had been long planning a career in films for his daughter, got her the first screen role - that of a zestful teenager in the famour 1971 chart-buster called Shriman Prithwiraj. But her career nosedived shortly afterwards and even getting paired with the famed Uttam Kumar could not save her career. She was married to Tilak in 1976 and was cast with him in yet another unsung bomb.