K K Sharma and M V Kamath, two journalists of whose deaths I learnt on the same day last week, one in the morning, the other in the evening. It was a chunk of the past disappearing, for our history went back more than half a century.
Kamath was the older connection, K K by far the more intimate. I met Kamath in Bonn in 1960, just before returning to India after a squandered adolescence in England. I had asked Willy Brandt, then the heroic mayor of Berlin, an awkward question at a press lunch in London. The German embassy promptly invited me to visit West Germany. Kamath was there. So was Mono Mitra, a freelance Calcutta photographer bound for the Rome Olympics, but that's another story. Later, as editor of the sadly long defunct Illustrated Weekly of India, Kamath plied me with invitations to write that I happily accepted. I can't recall what I wrote but remember his own moving mix of sentiment and nostalgia for his life in New York.
He must have been about 90 when he wrote glowingly about my book Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew's Mission India in the Free Press Journal and Organiser. "I wish we had the funds to invite you to speak to the students," he wrote from Manipal, where he had been director of the Institute of Communication. He was very frail, too frail for a meeting when I did visit Manipal. Now he has faded away.
Kamath wore his heart on his writer's sleeve. There were emotional references to a Caucasian wife. The marriage ended, they went their separate ways, but he never quite recovered from the parting. K K was an extremely private person of whose travails one occasionally heard vague rumours. Working on The Statesman for more than 30 years, we spent many convivial evenings together but he never talked of himself. He didn't gossip either. I once asked him for funny stories or personal anecdotes on some theme connected with the book I was writing. "I must have heard some" he replied, "but can't remember any!" Kamath's writings increasingly revealed his saffron loyalty.
K K was a professional journalist immune to politics. Apart from flirting with a sarcastic style during an early stint as The Statesman's parliamentary correspondent, his writing was austerely businesslike. But his facts were sound as a rock. That's why Time magazine and London's Financial Times rated him so highly.
A full-time Statesman man wasn't really supposed to be working for either. C R Irani, who became the paper's de facto owner, frothed at the mouth as he told me of a senior Financial Times executive waxing eloquent at some formal dinner in Paris of his paper's excellent Indian coverage only because of that fine Indian journalist, K K Sharma. Then, pausing, the FT man added, "I believe he also writes for you?" Irani seethed. "And we give him his bread and butter!" But he couldn't tame K K.
Kamath was Prasar Bharati chairman. His picture appears on Google. K K isn't mentioned there at all. Anonymity amused him. Once Khushwant Singh gushed in a column about K K's wife, Bulbul, enlivening an otherwise dreary train journey. K K wryly told me he was also in the compartment but probably hadn't been noticed. He remained a "special representative", what other papers call a special correspondent, all his life. I fancy the nomenclature was explained by The Statesman seeing itself in its British heyday as an autonomous Calcutta institution whose special representatives parleyed with the viceroy on near-equal terms.
Work didn't enter our long relationship. It was friendship. K K was always there if I (or Deep, my son) needed a bed in Delhi, ran short of money or wanted a contact. He was also my bootlegger. Himself preferring rum, he produced Scotch for me like magic in the parched sixties. Sometimes he smuggled me a bottle in what we called the "flong box" - the parcel containing stereo moulds for relief printing - that travelled between The Statesman's Delhi and Calcutta offices every day. Later, as tastes changed, he delivered cases of French wine. It was cheaper than Indian wine.
The years of his illness were agony. We would sit in utter silence on my increasingly infrequent visits to Delhi. I sometimes wondered if he recognised me. But when his faithful attendant once shouted he had a visitor, K K replied with no trace of the stammer that had always disfigured his speech "Sunanda Datta-Ray" and sank back into the sleep from which he will now never awake.
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