Sayantani Ghosh opens on Ali Baba co-star Tunisha Sharma’s death: I wish this was a bad dream

Actor Sayantani Ghosh met Tunisha Sharma just a day before the 20-year-old died of suicide on the sets of her TV show Ali Baba: Dastaan-E-Kabul on December 24. Ghosh is still processing the news. “It’s not easy, it still hasn’t sunk in. It’s shaken me and it doesn’t sit well. I still can’t believe it. The heaviness is just pulling me down. I want to cry it out loud, but I’m unable to cry. I wish this was a bad dream and I woke up,” Ghosh laments.

Ghosh is still processing the news, which has shaken her as well. “It raises a lot of questions within. Everything becomes meaningless. We aspire for things and have our dreams but then one moment changes everything. This is beyond acceptance,” she shares.

Both Sharma and Ghosh didn’t have many scenes in the show, however, they bonded well on different things like hand creams. “She was like a butterfly, always chirpy, and had a wide smile on her face. She would come and hug everyone on set. She was very dedicated to her work and that’s what I remember her as. This is beyond acceptance, I see her smiling face. Just talking about her in the past tense gives me knots in my heart,” she elaborates.

While Sharma died of suicide, she in 2021 had spoken about her tryst with depression. The conversation about Sharma’s death has once again diverted from mental health to something else.

“With Tunisha I felt that she was such a happy go lucky girl, why would she go ahead and do something like that, but that’s the point you never understand things from the outside. I believe that we’ve moved away from the basics of life, the core points of life. Most of us struggle with anxiety and stress these days. A lot of people say, ‘Love your own life,’ ‘Don’t give up on your life’, but we would never understand what they are going through, we are not in their shoes. Also, there’s so much stigma around mental health with people saying things like ‘Be strong’. I feel different people react differently, but once we start accepting people, I think the world will be a lot kinder,” she explains.

Ghosh is yet to talk to Sharma’s mother, Vanita. “It was so sad to see her faint. It was heart-wrenching,” Ghosh ends.