Asha Bhosle sang for decades and acted exactly once. That film was Mai, and the actor playing her daughter on screen happened to be her real niece, Padmini Kolhapure. Today marks what would have been Bhosle's 93rd birthday, and Kolhapure's recollections of that one shoot, first shared with Bollywood Hungama back in May, are getting a fresh airing.

Bhosle died on April 12 this year at 92. The anniversary lands a little differently now, and Kolhapure doesn't pretend otherwise.

"Thanks to Asha aatya that I got my first film Ishq Ishq Ishq as a kid," Kolhapure said. Decades later, Mai closed a loop she hadn't expected. Bhosle, as it turns out, made her involvement conditional. "She said that she will only work in that film if Padmini is a part of it," Kolhapure recalled. "We worked together. We interacted so much. She was very close to my father. So she would tell me all those wonderful stories of their young and masti days."

On the work itself, Kolhapure keeps it simple. "It was great working with her. If you see the film, she has done such a brilliant job."

A perfectionist who wouldn't take praise

Mai's director, Mahesh Kodiyal, gave Bollywood Hungama his own account shortly after Bhosle's death, and it lines up with what Kolhapure describes. Bhosle, by his telling, second-guessed herself constantly on set. "At times, Asha tai used to feel how she would enact such an emotional scene," Kodiyal said. "At that time, I used to ask Padmini to make her comfortable. She used to give a fantastic take. But still she didn't used to be happy with it. She used to say, 'Nahin re, maine barabar nahin kiya.' I used to say just that she did is a big thing."

A singer who'd recorded thousands of songs across languages, unsure of one scene. Make of that what you will.

Living legends, still on rotation

Kolhapure doesn't separate Bhosle from Lata Mangeshkar when she talks about what the two of them left behind. "When we say she is not with us, it just doesn't seem real," she said. "For me, they are like living legends only because we still hear their songs every single day."

She brings up a recent run-in with Ashutosh Gowariker to make the point. "My mornings begin with Asha ji's and night ends with Lata ji's songs," Gowariker apparently told her. "That is there and that's never going to change."

Mai remains the only feature Bhosle acted in, a curiosity in a career built almost entirely around the recording booth. Kolhapure's account, offered months before Bhosle's death and recirculated now on her birth anniversary, is likely to stay one of the few first-hand descriptions of what she was like in front of a camera rather than behind a microphone.