Nisha Batra

Nisha Batra is a fictional character in the British soap opera Brookside. She was played by Sunetra Sarker.^[1]

Nisha first appeared in 1988, working alongside Sammy Rogers (Rachael Lindsay) at a local supermarket after school - a job she had taken without the knowledge of her strict family, who believed she was using the time to study at the library. Their friendship grew when a strike at the supermarket's wholesalers meant they had no work, and so they both returned to Sammy's house to listen to music.

A significant ongoing storyline for Nisha, Sammy and Owen Daniels (Danny McCall) came in the summer of 1989, when, following a night out with a group of friends, they were involved in a serious car accident which killed the driver of their car (a young man whom one of their friends had just met in a nightclub). At the inquest some months later, it emerged that all the girls except Sammy had been somewhat economical with the truth in order to spare the feelings of the deceased's parents. This, coupled with Nisha's progress in her studies (while Sammy found herself struggling academically) led to the girls drifting apart, and the character was gradually seen less and less in the series.

Nisha re-appeared in the show almost ten years later and began working as a nurse. Her biggest storylines in her final years on the programme involved affairs with Jerome Johnson (Leon Lopez)^[2] much to the annoyance of Nikki Shadwick (Suzanne Collins) in 2002 and Gary Parr (Ben Hull) in 2003.

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