Onir came to cast Prosenjit, took away his wife instead

Arpita, Prosenjit Chatterjee's wife, hailed as a Bong beauty, seems to have transformed completely to play a south Delhi girl in Onir's Shab.
The actress has already begun shooting in the Capital. Here, she sizzles in a romantic scene with newcomer Ashish Bisht. Onir has begun shooting the first schedule of Shab in Delhi, with areas like south, north and central Delhi as shoot locations.On Friday, the director turned a lounge bar in Delhi into the set for his film's promotional song, with lead actors Arpita Chatterjee and Ashish Bisht enacting a roman tic number. ���We'll have four schedules here based on four seasons. Now we are shooting the summer part and hope to come back in August for the rains. Delhi has seasons, unlike Mumbai. I love the way it gives people here the opportunity to dress up fashionably, and my film is about glamour, fashion and relationships," said the director. This is Arpita's Bollywood debut, and she is playing a Bengali girl from Lucknow who lives in south Delhi.
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Talking about how he found his Delhi girl in Arpita, Onir said, ���When I met Arpita for the first time, she had long hair. She was wearing a white shirt and jeans, I saw her and thought, 'Wow, she is my Raina.' The only thing I told her was that I had imagined her character with short hair." And chopping off her hair was the first step towards Arpita's transformation into a south Delhi girl.

"Only because it was Onir, I didn't even take two seconds to say yes to chopping off my hair. Had it been some other director, I would probably have taken time to think. That's how much I trust him. He'd told me that he wanted my character to have really short hair, and that he didn't want to use a wig," said Arpita. And her new haircut attracted a peculiar reaction from her son, nine-year-old Trishanjit. ���My son is extremely possessive about me. After I got my haircut, I went to pick him up from his boarding school before the sum mer vacations, and all his friends and their parents loved my look. My son didn't like the fact that they were praising me. So, he said, 'What have you done to your hair? It's not looking good, you are looking like a boy!'"
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Arpita also took Urdu diction classes in Kolkata to improve her Hindi dialogue delivery, as instructed by Onir. Though Arpita has spent a lot of time in the NCR ever since she started her own media company in Noida last year, she is not yet familiar with Delhi. ���I have been staying in Noida on and off since last December. So, I am familiar with that part of the NCR. But I had never been to the parts of Delhi where we are shooting for this film. Honestly speaking, I don't like Delhi too much. After Kolkata, if you ask me which city is my favourite, I would say Mumbai. I don't connect with Delhi. But the other day we were shooting in Hauz Khas Village, and I absolutely fell in love with the place! It is one of the main locations for the film; we shot in a cafeteria there. It is so vibrant and colourful, there is so much positivity there," she said.
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The actress also told us that Onir was initially looking to cast her husband, Prosenjit Chatterjee, in a film. ���He had come to our house to meet him, and ended up offering me role. My husband keeps teasing me, saying, 'Onir had come to cast me in a film and took you away instead!' The two of them keep joking that if Onir casts me in yet another film, my husband will kill him," Arpita said, adding that pursuing a film career and running her own company wouldn't have been possible without her husband's support. ���This is India, after all, not America. I wouldn't have been able to do so much without his support," she added.