The first SHOT.........by Brian Brake

Aparna Sen was born in (then Calcutta) to a Bengali family, originally from East Bengal. Her father is the veteran critic and film-maker Chidananda Dasgupta. Her mother Supriya Dasgupta is the cousin of renowned Bengali poet Jibanananda Das. She spent her childhood in Hazaribagh and Kolkata and had her schooling in Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata. She studied her BA, English honors in Presidency College, Calcutta but did not complete the degree. She met the Magnum photographer, Brian Brake, in Kolkata in 1961 when he was visiting India to photograph his Monsoon series. Brake used Sen as the model for what was to become one of his most well known photographs - a shot of a girl holding her face to the first drops of monsoon rain. The photo shoot was set up on a Kolkata rooftop with a ladder and a watering can. Sen describes the shoot He took me up to the terrace, had me wear a red sari in the way a village girl does, and asked me to wear a green stud in my nose. To be helpful, I said let me wear a red one to match, and he said no - he was so decisive, rather brusque - I think a green one. It was stuck to my nose with glue, because my nose wasn't pierced. Someone had a large watering can, and they poured water over me. It was really a very simple affair. It took maybe half an hour.

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Her face is one of the best known images in New Zealand photography, and as Michael Field reports, she is even bigger in India.

Monsoon Girl - a young Bengali actor who became a New Zealand photo icon - is attracting headlines in India for her latest movie, The Japanese Wife.

Late New Zealand photographer Brian Brake gave Aparna Sen early stardom when, in 1961, he photographed the Indian monsoon for major publications.

The single best known picture was something of a fake; a 14-year-old Bengali girl holding her face to the first drops of monsoon rain.

But Aparna Sen was no simple Bengali and the photo was staged on a Kolkata rooftop with a ladder and a watering can.

Now a major player in the serious side of Indian film-making - as distinct from Bollywood - her now 63-year-old image is again featuring across Asia.

She has filmed Bengali writer Kunal Basu’s book about an improbable love story about an Indian maths teacher who marries a Japanese girl through an odd sequence of events.

Sen told the Indian press that the plot was unbelievable.

"It is but that’s what drove me to the story. The trigger for me was the point where everyone dismissed the idea as absurd."

Sen is no lightweight. Her father was filmmaker Chidananda Dasgupta, a founder member of the Calcutta Film Society along with legendary director Satyajit Ray.

In 1961 she debuted as an actress in Ray's Two Daughters. It was then that Brake used her.

Her directorial debut came in 1981 with the award winning 36 Chowringhee Lane.

In 2002 she made an English language film, Mr and Mrs Iyer, with her daughter Konkona Sen Sharma playing lead with Rahul Bose - who plays the teacher in The Japanese Wife.

It caused a nationwide sensation with its depiction of a subtle love affair between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.

Sen’s own biographies no longer mention the Brake picture. She told Wellington photographer Bruce Connew how she was photographed.

“He took me up to the terrace, had me wear a red sari in the way a village girl does, and asked me to wear a green stud in my nose,” she told Connew a decade ago.

“To be helpful, I said let me wear a red one to match, and he said no - he was so decisive, rather brusque - I think a green one. It was stuck to my nose with glue, because my nose wasn't pierced.

"Someone had a large watering can, and they poured water over me. It was really a very simple affair. It took maybe half an hour."
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She plainly has no great feeling for the photo and she said she had no idea Brake was an important photographer.

“I felt I was just a model, a prop. I did what I was asked to do. Nothing more, or less. This photograph, it's amazing the way it conveys a great deal more than went into it. In a way, it's so like Ray; Ray is the master of the close-up. In one close shot, there would be so much information, emotional and physical.”

But she did not like the photo: “I looked more 28, than 14, and I was all teeth. I didn't like myself at all.”