It was in 1981, soon after shifting to Mumbai from Delhi, that Nadira Zaheer Babbar, an alumna of the National School of Drama (NSD), started her theatre company, Ekjute. The idea, she says, was to do theatre just as she was doing in Delhi. “When things worked out well for Raj [Babbar], actors who were working with us back in Delhi too came to Mumbai looking for work. They wanted to work, do theatre… so we created Ekjute. The name symbolises the coming together of everyone,” says Babbar. Her daughter, Juhi Babbar Soni, says Ekjute has always been family. “I was barely five years old when Ekjute was put together. Our house was home to so many theatre actors who had come down from Delhi [NSD], so everybody was either a chacha or didi… If my mother was stuck with something when we needed help with our homework, one of the actors would look into it.”

The initial members of Ekjute included Anupam and Kirron Kher, Satish Kaushik, Kavita Chaudhary, Raja Bundela, and Alok Nath, among many others. “Kirron worked in Chandanpur Ki Champabai, Satish directed Us Paar Ka Nazara,” she shares, adding that they eventually started getting parts in multiple television shows at a time, and couldn’t make time for theatre. When asked whether she was hurt by this, she admits that she was. “It was painful, but I didn’t expect them to continue when they had things working out for them [in television and cinema]. How else would they make a living?”