A star isn’t always someone who stares down at you from gigantic billboards. Someone who appears on a screen looks like your neighbour or relative, and quietly makes a place in your heart and hippocampus, is also a star. Sr Journalist SP Singh pays a very personal tribute to one such star – Surekha Sikri.

I always saw her as a very political person in her choices. She featured in a movie that was perhaps the most discussed in politics at the time – Kissa Kursi Ka (1978). My generation read a lot about Kissa Kursi Ka but we could only watch it some 45 years after first hearing about it. Someone had put it up on YouTube about three years back – and it was a treat to watch her introducing a chief engineer as someone who has gulped a thousand miles of road, several power projects and bridges: a grievance redressing officer who listens to complaints all day but is completely deaf; and a cultural tzar who lords over artists and teaches modern art painting to monkeys. “Inn ke liye kala ka ek hee lakshaya hai: Hakumat ki khidmat!”

I was a sophomore when I encountered her in a TV serial that changed something deep inside many of my age kids. I came from a ‘refugee’ family, and in my world that had a single TV channel, no internet, no phone and a second-hand Vespa scooter as a dream, watching Tamas (1986) was a university-level liberal arts education with subcontinental history as a major.

We questioned everything after that – including our parents, grandparents, relatives. “Did you do this kind of stuff?” we’d ask them. They, in return, told us how they were themselves the victims. But Tamas was very powerful. “So, do you know people who did this kind of stuff?” I didn’t much follow Hindi cinema or TV soaps but kept encountering her.

I would think of the real-life people she was portraying. It was as if she would embody people I knew so well. Always real. Never an actor.

As Ameena of Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro, Fayyazi of Mammo, then in Sardari Begum, even in Cotton Mary and that Muslim woman in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer in early aughts. Some of you might recall her in a Munshi Prem Chand story brought to screen by Gulzar where Hamid brings her that ‘chimtta’ because she keeps burning her hands while flipping rotis. It is embarrassing to say this at my age but I remember sobbing, and then, noticing that I am all alone at home, crying bitterly and then wailing loudly.

I am sure she must have done many other far more wonderful things, but I will forever remain grateful to her Rajo in Tamas! And to her role in Mammo! Farida Jalal was in front and at the centre of that story and, of course, won awards for her performance, but please watch Surekha Sikri’s Fayyazi – Mammo Jalal’s Indian sister. Hers is the performance that lingers in your mind.

I have never watched Balika Vadhu, and might not at all, but we will always have a bit of her in our lives, each from a character we were mesmerised by. Every time I watched her in a movie or a television serial, I would think of the real-life people she was portraying. It was as if she would embody people I knew so well. Always real. Never an actor.

Surekha Sikri will always be around, as long as we have access to screens! For those of my generation, we don’t even need that! I will never forget her face when Hamid brings the chimtta!