Surekha Sikri: ‘Dadi’ whose grand smile never failed to connect

Nonika Singh

Veteran actress Surekha Sikri won hearts and a National Award with her feisty performance of a quirky robust ‘dadi’ (grandmother) in successful and critically acclaimed ‘Badhaai Ho’.

Three-time National Award winner, she had a winning smile that never failed to connect. It’s hard to imagine we have seen the last of sprightly acts of the actor, who was last seen as a bedridden patient in director Zoya Akhtar’s short film in the Netflix anthology ‘Ghost Stories’.

An NSD alumna who made her film debut with ‘Kissa Kursi Ka’ (1978), her filmography with films like ‘Sardari Begum’, ‘Zubeidaa’, ‘Hari Bhari’, ‘Sarfarosh’ and Rituparna Ghosh’s ‘Raincoat’ runs long. So does her innings on television, which includes Govind Nihalini’s critical success ‘Tamas’.

If ‘Tamas’ fetched her first National Award, Shyam Benegal’s ‘Mammo’ (1994) led her to the same illustrious honour. Yet she was always self-depreciating. While critics gushed over her performances, she was rather circumspect about her talent and assessed herself critically.

A brain stroke in 2018 and another in 2020 led to a prolonged illness and she had to drop out of films like ‘Sheer Qorma’, a fact she truly regretted. As she passed away into eternity, it’s not just her family, including her son Rahul Sikri, who mourned her demise. Her reel family of films and television serials paid rich tributes to this much-loved ‘dadi sa’ of ‘Balika Vadhu’.

Gajraj Rao, who played her son in ‘Badhaai Ho’, remembers her as “youngest at heart on the sets”. Ailing for some time, her last wish, “I want to walk again” may not have been granted but in the annals of acting, she would always stand tall.