It was Mrs Gandhi’s State of Emergency that first brought me into contact with Leena and Komi. Leena came to Lisburne Road with WoWo in the seventies when I was living there with my then partner, the late Abhimanyu Manchanda, and our daughter, Claudia (ChuChu). We kept in touch intermittently through the political campaigns that we were all involved in. Our two daughters were similar ages. Manu would go to Pilgrims Lane to see Komi and treat her with homeopathic remedies when she had a nasty wound on her leg.
I didn’t get to know Komi properly until ten years later when ChuChu and I moved to Hampstead and discovered that Leena was living in the next street with her mother.
Komi was lovely and welcoming. ‘I’m so pleased Leena will have a friend nearby,’ she said.
Over time I realised Komi was an extraordinary character. She was a well-spring of amazing stories about her long life. To me, back then, she was already an older woman, though only a few years older than I am now. When I looked out my kitchen window I often saw Komi going by on her morning walk, even in freezing weather, dressed in a sari and shawl and wearing chappels.
The house reflected the richness of Komi’s existence, full of treasures of India and Komi frequently visited Christies and Sothebys to add to her amazing collection of shawls. To my mind, she was buying back some of the misappropriated possessions she had lost through Partition. She was reconstituting her cultural heritage through these purchases that she appeared compelled to make.
Her story of buying the house in Hampstead was one of the most often told, and one that I would retell to my own friends who could scarcely believe it. Over time, Komi’s stories would be told and retold until even people who had never met her, knew of Komi through her stories.
My favourite such story was of Komi being approached by a woman at one of the mainline London railway stations and asked for a small sum of money for a bed for the night. Komi didn’t hesitate to offer hospitality and took the woman back to Pilgrims Lane. Let us call her Mrs Colley.
Mrs Colley had been ‘in service’ as one half of a couple. When her husband suddenly died, she was out of a job with nothing to sustain her. She made herself a small cot in the Komi’s kitchen and proceeded to act out her duties as if she was back in service, answering the door, announcing visitors and making tea.
Leena has written a wonderful story based on this incident.
I also remember Komi telling me that she had met Mussolini and walked off with his pen after borrowing it for some reason.
She loved life and treated every day as a blessing. As she grew very old, she became more and more serene and beneficent, smiling all the while and performing simple acts of discipline that gave shape to her life, especially after becoming less mobile. She loved to read and write, composing stories based on her childhood that were both beautiful and disturbing.
I remember the pleasure she got from eating ice cream, going for jaunts on Hampstead Heath, greeting visitors, and telling her stories. She had a way of making you feel loved and special. Always, always, she repeated, ‘I’m so lucky. I’m so lucky. I’ve got two beautiful daughters.’
She died as we would all want to go, gently fading away, loved ones nearby, still radiating her extraordinary aura of spirituality and peace.
Diane 20th August, 2009
