We had stumbled upon this extraordinary slice of story during our expedition to Russia a few years back. A thread on how does Hema Malini connect to the Siamese twins from a remote village in Kyrgyzstan (1/12) 
We were partly familiar with how Bollywood classics like Awaara, Bobby and Disco Dancer had made their place in Russian pop culture, but we hardly could imagine, how big ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’ was (2/12)
The phenomenon began with the dubbing of K. A. Abbas’s ‘Dharti Ke Lal’ based on the Great Bengal Famine when Josef Stalin was still around. From then to the late 70s, 200+ Hindi films were dubbed in Russian and thoroughly entertained Soviet cine-lovers (3/12)
Seeta Aur Geeta is a 1972 comedy-drama by Ramesh Sippy, about identical twins, played by Hema Malini, who were separated at birth and grew up with contrasting personalities. The film was dubbed in Russian and released as Зита и Гита (Zita i Sita) (4/12)
The film struck the right emotional chord with the Russians and became a classic hit nationwide. 55.2M tickets were sold. More than anything, Hema Malini became a household name across the undivided Soviet Union (5/12)
Little girls in Moscow started imitating her dialogues, tried to master her circus rope tricks, pets were named Zita and Gita. Even a modern-day restaurant in the Butylka building, St. Petersburg is called ‘Zita & Gita (6/12)
Far away from Moscow, in a village in Kyrgyzstan, two girls were born to a poor Muslim family in 1991. They were Siamese twins - a rare disorder where newborns are physically conjoined having an unlikely chance of survival (7/12)
The Kyrgyz sisters were even a rarer species of Siamese twins known as ishiopagami, having three legs for two and one common pelvis. However, their mother - Zumriyat - did not abandon her daughters (8/12)
A remarkable story of survival, struggle and willpower began. Eventually, the help came from Russia. In 2003, they were put in a Moscow hospital where doctors performed the most complicated operation to separate the sisters (9/12)
It was a miracle and the first of its kind in Russia. During their birth, Zumriyat named her daughters after the characters played by Hema Malini from her most favorite Bollywood movie (10/12)
The story of Zita and Gita Rezakhanova was nothing short of a fairytale. However, after the operation, Zita’s health began to deteriorate and after 12 long years of battle, Zita finally breathed her last in 2015 (11/12)
Gita still lives on, alone, surviving on Zita’s memories that help her stay strong (12/12)
Source and photo credits: ria.ru, Rotten Tomatoes and agromassidayu.com.
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