Death and its sister, Illness, were permanent guests at our house. Pained wailings routinely played out like tunes from an ominous soundtrack.
One of his clinics was on the ground floor and a small section of our drawing room doubled up as a makeshift emergency room.
Obscure medical terms were part of our family dinner-table conversations. I didn’t know then that I would turn to Anand again and again: for nostalgia, for succour, and sometimes, even for instruction. As a child, I bandied it about to describe emotionally dense situations like breakups with friends – Lymphosarcoma of the heart. A grand illness, like the name of a viceroy, Rajesh Khanna’s character says in the film, refusing to give in to solemnity. The disease that claimed Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand.
