My Favourite Girl

Didima’s no more. Today morning at around 7:30 am while the world was wondering what to have for breakfast or where to find their next sanitizers, Didima said her au revoir and off she went. And it’s an au revoir and never a goodbye.


vasamsi jirnani yatha vihaya
navani grhnati naro 'parani
tatha sarirani vihaya jirnany
anyani samyati navani dehi

Almost every child growing up in an Indian household would have heard these lines somewhere irrespective of his or her religious affiliations. It’s a verse from the Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2 Verse 22 and one of the most famous.


It says as a person puts on new clothes, discarding the old, the soul too gives up the old and useless body and accepts a new.


The soul in Hindu scripture is indestructible and I would want to believe that the purest soul that I have ever met would come back to this world. For suddenly today the world seems a little more barren and a little more colourless. Little Girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice, so goes the nursery rhyme. Didima was made of Pure Love. I have never found anyone so full of love for everyone. I have never found anyone so forgiving, so selfless and so full of life. I have never seen anyone with such curiosity about everything in life with a true desire to learn. I have never seen anyone so diplomatic and yet stern and I know it was because her love was unconditional. Everyone she met, she made them feel special. She made them feel that they were the most important person in the room and they loved her back. My friends from childhood remember her, my mom’s friends came down to meet her for one last time. The world stopped for her.


Didima was my most favourite person in the whole world and I probably was her fifth (after the 3 children she brought into this world and her amazing husband). And as my Filipino friends had taught me, being in the Top 5 is always a great thing.


She gave me some of my earliest books. She gave me some of my most treasured gifts. But most important of all, she gave me the gift of writing. Anything I have ever written is because of her. My parents believe that I got my writing genes from her. People called her up asking her to write something for their children’s birthdays, weddings and sometimes even funerals and she could break into verse anytime.


During my teenage rebellious years, I had said I perhaps put Sukanta Bhattacharya as a poet higher than Tagore because of his realism. And I, a veteran of many school debates had been brought to my knees, my arguments demolished, without making me feel bad about it.


So here’s Tagore for you – “ami Mrityu cheye boro, ei kotha bole jabo ami chole.”

 “I am larger than death, saying this I will leave”. (From Mrityunjoy – The conqueror of death) 

There are few people in this world who find God. I think she did it. She had such faith in Jesus that she believed in earnest that all that she would ask for will be given. And in her I found the true embodiment of secularism in India – a practising Hindu finding her personal God in Christ. Since childhood I have seen her straddle the boats of Krishna and Christ. My grandfather’s family came from Navadweep, the heart of the Vaishnavite movement in Bengal and her own family Deity as a child was Raghunath – an incarnation of Vishnu while her children went to Catholic Missionary Schools.


Often I have been asked at work why do I rarely say a no to a challenge? I think the answer lies with Didima. I have never seen her say a no to anything that life threw at her. She faced it, found a way to solve it and moved on. With a smile.


Exactly a year back, dadu had passed away. And I always knew that this day would come and she chose a Sunday. The entire world she had touched landed at her house. She caused no disturbance to anybody and off she went on the ides of March. Julius Caesar was her and my Dadu’s favourite Shakespeare.



Can an exit be more poetic?



And can memories be more beautiful?