Life, loss, and longing

By Amit Roy

IT IS now four years since Lord Gulam Noon passed away. He was a close friend whose number I have still not deleted from my phone, nor that of Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, chairman of the Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Those gone include friends, colleagues and others I got to know well through work. At the Indian Journalists’ Association, we lost Manab Majumdar, Daljit Sehbai and Batuk Gathani. The in memoriam column is a long one – in no particular order, they include Mala Sen (who wrote Bandit Queen); Dev Anand; Jagmohan Mundhra; the Nawab of Pataudi; Manubhai Madhvani; Paul Bhattacharjee; Lord Richard Attenborough; BKS Iyengar; Dicky Rutnagur; Khushwant Singh; Suchitra Sen; Richie Benaud (admired only from afar); MF Husain; Saeed Jaffrey; Alyque Padamasee; VS Naipaul; and Mahendra Kaul. And, in many cases, the elderly parents back in India and Pakistan (and in this country, too) of friends who are UK residents.

What was especially life-affirming was a question-and-answer session with Bollywood actress Manisha Koirala, who spoke in moving terms about her battle with cancer at the JLF session in the British Library. I bought a copy of her book, Healed: How Cancer gave me a new life. I loved her in the film, Bombay.