I, The Salt Doll

Sushila Lotlikar was barely in her teens when tragedy forced her to give up her education and join Parshwanath Altekar’s Little Theatre in Mumbai in 1940. But the young Konkani girl soon became a hit on the Gujarati stage and went on to storm the Marwadi stage. And then, at the age of twenty-one, she retired. Taking her mother’s advice—‘The world of cinema and theatre is like a coal shop, your hands are going to get black’—she married actor-writer Pandit Jaydeo Mishra and ‘moulted’ into Vandana