Everybody who knew her, has a funny story about Zohra Sehgal. Even as they participated in her last rites on Friday morning, family, friends and fans inevitably began to swap those stories?about Short Circuit, her dog, about her remarkable wit, about how she would tease co-actors who did not turn up on time at shoots?so that there were as many smiles going around as misty eyes. Sehgal, the feisty actor of more than eight decades on stage or screen, so full of zest, died of cardiac failure on Thursday evening. She was 102.
Sehgal regularly played the old lady with a twinkle in her eyes in films such as Cheeni Kum, Dil Se, Veer Zaara, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Bend It Like Beckham among others. She received many honours, such as the Padma Vibhushan. But perhaps the most evocative of the silvern haired Sehgal was the moniker ?Grand Old Lady of Bollywood?. It is lesser known that Sehgal started out as a dancer in 1935, joining Uday Shankar?s troupe, and later choreographed for theatre and films and performed across Japan, Egypt, Europe and the US. In the 1970s, she had served as the Director of the National Folk Dance Ensemble, an initiative to preserve the dances of India that despite all her hard work did not take off. Sehgal was not only an intrepid dancer at a time women dancing professionally was considered unacceptable but she also married a man who was a dancer and younger to her by eight years, Kamleshwar Sehgal.
The feet that could once pirouette, however, had begun to weaken with age and she had written to the Union Ministry of Culture in 2011 for allotment of a ground-floor government accommodation anywhere in Central Delhi. That request was never met and the second floor apartment in Mandakini Enclave is where Sehgal continued to live until taken ill a few days ago.