One day, at artist Sasi Warrier’s studio, I met a group of lively American women travel writers who were on a tour of South India. Shepherding the group was Debika Sen, a California-based tour manager. When I heard the surname, I correctly assumed she was a Bengali. We started chatting.
I am a Malayali who grew up in Kolkata and now am a journalist in Kochi. As for Debika, her father was Bengali and her mother, Bella, was of British-Jewish origin. “They met and fell in love when my father went to study in England,” she said. During our conversation, Debika suddenly said, “You might have heard of my father. His name is Mihir Sen.”
I got a shock when she said that. Sen was one of India’s greatest long-distance swimmers. He was the first Indian to swim across the English Channel in 1958, and also set a world record by swimming in oceans in five continents in 1966. He had famously said, “I wanted to prove to the world that Indians are not afraid.” In 1967, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan. At that time, while working for a national sports magazine, at Kolkata, I had written articles about Sen. One was a seven-page feature called ‘Marathon Man’ in 1988. Then, in 1991, when he suffered from Alzheimer’s, and lost his memory, I wrote another one called ‘Man Without A Past’.
I told Debika about how I had spent time with Sen, at his office and home. Her eyes welled up and she said, “It’s such a small world.” But Debika also told me something that I had long forgotten. Sen had a flourishing garment factory and was wealthy. But one day, in 1977, the politician Jyoti Basu is said to have called him and asked him to campaign on behalf of the Communist party for the Assembly elections. Sen declined saying he was a capitalist.
That did not seem to go down well with Basu. Soon, labour problems began to crop up in his factory. It eventually devastated Sen’s business and he became bankrupt. The stress was too much to bear. Sen developed dementia. And on June 11, 1997, he died at the age of 66. As for Bella, according to Debika, she died of a broken heart five years later.
It was all so sad to hear. What to make of life? So many tragedies take place all the time. And, mostly, all this happens to good people, while the bad go karma-free. Does God exist? Or is He an illusion?
Shevlin Sebastian
Email: shevlins@gmail.com