The obituary I couldn’t write...

“The time is out of joint
Time to pass the joint...”
From Reams of Forgiveness er… I mean Dreams by Bachchoo
I must be excused this week for using this column to mourn a personal irreplaceable loss. The newspapers and TV channels in India have carried obituaries of Mala Sen who died on the night of May 20 in the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai.

They billed her as the author of Bandit Queen, the story of Phoolan Devi, and of Death by Fire.
Writers die, their books live on. That will be true for the readers of Mala’s books. She had said that if she didn’t return from the risky operation she was undergoing for oesophageal cancer, her friends should gather at her flat in South Clapham (a flat we shared when I was married to her and even after), have a drink, smoke some dope if we could find any and take away a book from her shelves in memory.
Such an occasion has been arranged for this evening, some deadline date before this column appears in print, and I have made a pre-emptive raid on the flat so as to be the first to take the “one book memento” she intended. I took several. Her writing, some of mine signed and dedicated to her and two books that we read and marvelled over together.
One of these is a paperback of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Sand. The title story has a narrator who is given a book whose pages, thought finite, miraculously contain all the books ever written. It is one of the narrative avatars of the game of infinities that Borges regularly played in his fiction: the book that contains all other books and therefore must contain itself... which book must then contain... and so on. Like the man on the Quaker Oats packet who holds up a box of Quaker Oats on which there is the picture of the man who holds up a box of... etc.
So, as I look through the pages of Mala’s books I realise that for me the books are not the words on the page, precious though those are. Each sentence is a key to memories of my childhood sweetheart, my first lover, my companion, my wife, my comrade, fellow adventurer, antagonist and in every real, quarrelsome, argumentative, supportive, dedicated, sharing, lending, borrowing, giving, taking, questioning, unquestioning sense of the word, my friend.
I have been asked these last few days to write obituaries, which I have always seen as summing up the significance of each little life rounded with a sleep. I couldn’t. I could only jot down facts: she was the daughter of Lt. Gen. Lionel Proteep Sen and of Kalyani Gupta, that she went to school in Dehradun and college in Pune where we met. I said she ran away with me to England, a complicated but in retrospect amusing elopement. Then the jobs, the political convictions, writings, actions, leadership — facts, facts, facts.
Listing them, I realised I couldn’t write this obituary. Someone so close to you can’t be summed up. I know that somewhere in my works in progress, Mala will emerge as best I can shape her with all the descriptive honesty I can muster as another, albeit main, character in a memoir.
Such a memoir may explain, or not have the acumen to explain, why a 16-year-old girl from the high reaches of Indian professional society turned her mind and later all her efforts to reading Marx and Lenin, leading the actions of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) in Leicester, joining the Black Panther movement and later on the Race Today collective in London, quoting the works of black American radical activists and fantasists from Malcolm X and George Jackson to Eldridge Cleaver, leading a movement of Bangladeshis in the East End etc. etc.
Mala was, by any accounts, an unusual character: amazingly talented, amazingly argumentative and confident if not dogmatic in her view of the world... Stop! There I go. This is becoming the obituary I said I couldn’t and wouldn’t write. Instead a story:
Mala and I lived in Leicester in 1968 when I was writing on Kipling at the university and she was working as a clerk at the Gas Board and supporting us both, paying the rent for the room with a sloping roof we shared under the stairs of a house in the “Asian” district of the city. We saved enough money to drink a half pint of beer at the local pub on Fridays. Late in this payday evening the pub would fill up with mostly Punjabi workers blowing their wages on endless pints of beer.
One Friday a group of them spotted Mala in her salwar kameez and came over to invite us to their table as fellow Indians.
The generous flow of beer became a regular treat on Friday evenings and a few weeks into the ritual the two of us, more proficient at English than the rest of them, were asked to compose a leaflet calling for action on a grievance they had at one of the factories in the city. They said they all belonged to the IWA but that body had so far done very little apart from organising parties at Hindu and Sikh festivals and being the battleground of disputes about Bhangra costumes.
Mala and I composed the leaflet and it was printed off. In the weeks that followed, Mala was regularly asked to negotiate for the IWA and soon she was deemed an honorary secretary of the organisation.
At the time a politician called Enoch Powell made an inflammatory speech demanding the repatriation of immigrants. James Callaghan, then home secretary, introduced a law cancelling the right of Kenyan Asians with British passports from entering the United Kingdom. Powell and Callaghan were not very popular with immigrants and our unofficial pub, Panchayat, decided one Friday that it was time to act.
Mala, by then a marcher on anti-Vietnam war demos, suggested we call a mass demonstration in Birmingham with other IWA branches.
The Narborough Road ghetto became a hive of activity, painting banners and slogans with Mala composing leaflets.
On the day of the demonstration the good burghers of Birmingham watched bewildered as Mala, among others, led 20,000 animated Indians through its streets shouting slogans: Eenukka Pole hai hai! and Challa-ghun ray-sist k***a. No efforts and imprecations on Mala’s part could correct the Punjabi pronunciation, but the fervour if not the message and recognisable names of the villains got through.