On Independence Day, Ms D Bhattacharya remembers a relative who was part of India’s struggle for freedom and pays homage to those who made sacrifices for the nation.

My great-uncle on my mother’s side, Ashutosh Kahali, never got married and was a close friend and aide of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. During the freedom struggle, he carried out much of his work from behind the scenes and was known to shun the limelight.
𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊, as I called him, was one of the founding members of the Anushilan Samiti and used to stay in a mess in Kudghat with his comrades. We lived in Tatanagar and would pester him to visit us, but he would always say that he was busy with work. Back then we did not know what that work was. 𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊’𝓈 meetings and assignments required him to travel around the country. My mother says that to enter these meetings, he would have to send his headquarters a code number for which he would receive another in return. Nobody apart from he and Netaji knew these numbers.
Once, when 𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊 was due to return from a meeting from somewhere, the people in his mess received word from an anonymous individual who told them to pick him up from the train at Howrah. When the train pulled up at the station, my maternal uncles, who were also involved in the freedom struggle, found 𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊 unconscious in his seat. Nothing was stolen from him. He had all his belongings and his money–only his diary was missing. He was brought back safely to the mess. A few days later, as he was washing his face, he fell down the stairs from the second floor. He had an internal haemorrhage and was admitted in the hospital. People by his side said that he would stare into the void and sometimes it would seem as though he was searching for someone.
𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊 loved my mother very much, and here comes the astonishing bit of the story. Early one morning after his hospitalisation, my mother was feeling low-spirited. A pigeon came and sat outside her window and in her dazed state she heard a voice call her by her name and say, ‘Niru, you have arrived!’ The pigeon flew away, and my mother decided she would go to meet her uncle the next day. As she was packing her bags that evening, my father came up to her with the evening papers and informed her that her uncle had passed away that very morning at 4 am.
Even today I wonder who informed my uncles to collect 𝒟𝒶𝒹𝓊 from the station and what was in the diary that was stolen from him. Because of the sacrifices of people like my great-uncle we won our independence. I hope that in our celebrations we remember the freedom struggle and uphold the ideals on which our nation was built.