Now he was struggling with a rare neurodegenerative disease and was on assisted breathing. He had tested positive for Covid in 2020 and survived. In April 2021, during the peak of the second wave, one of Mumbai’s most popular radio jockeys, Samridhi Saxena, better known as RJ Sam, desperately reached out to me in the hope that I could help her father with an oxygen cylinder. I have lost count of the number of daughters I have met in my travels across India who are similarly haunted. And the truth is, he set me free, entirely so, even when he had to sit on his hands.Įvery day I curse myself for not appreciating him as fully as I should have when he was alive. I remember his protestations and anxieties two decades ago when I was dispatched to report on the Kargil war in 1999 I was dismissive, impatient and stubborn. It took his death for me to understand how traumatized he must have been, especially as a single parent, every time I left for an assignment to a dangerous hotspot. It took losing him to Covid for me to realize how he had been the epicenter of my existence.

It was easy to take the person right in front of us - our dad - for granted. She was a legend, and because she died so young - she was just forty - the memory of her grew larger than life in our heads. We grew up in her shadow, moulded by extraordinary stories of how she once jumped into a hippopotamus enclosure to chase a story, how she petitioned the court and entered the annals of Indian case law by insisting on interviewing child murderers Billa and Ranga before they were executed, and how she exposed corruption and wrongdoing through her writings in the Hindustan Times. Notoriously rebellious, she was India’s first woman war correspondent, reporting from the front line of the India-Pakistan war in 1965 by herself, armed with only a notepad and pen. Among the first generation of women journalists in India, she was the automatic headline story of our family. She was a flamboyant, volatile, tempestuous counterfoil to the gentle, unassuming, kindly and eccentric man her husband was. That is my abiding personal lesson from the pandemic.īefore his death, my sister Bahar and I always valorized our mother, Prabha Dutt, whom we lost when I was just thirteen years old to a brain haemorrhage. I had begun to think of myself as peculiar till I read an account by Michelle Zauner in the New Yorker about how she would collapse in tears every time she went to shop at H-Mart, the Korean supermarket chain the dry food cans triggered an immediate association with her mother. It seems easier to not listen to any music at all. My father, SP Dutt, Speedy Dutt to friends and family alike, used to spend hours at his ramshackle workstation, sitting in a corner of his airless room amid a mountain of books, dusty files and meccano toys that he had designed and built, listening to music on internet radio stations.Ĭhristmas carols, soft rock, Santana -there was a 24/7 loop of music on his ageing Apple desktop.Įvery time I hear the opening chords of a song, a memory draws me back to that image of him and I feel the pain cut me like a knife.

The first thing that has altered in my life is that I cannot listen to music anymore.

Barkha dutt images