Ritwik Ghatak's daughter dies in sleep

KOLKATA: The diamond nosepin glitters as usual. A few magazines lie strewn over the bed. A nightwear that she had asked to be bought on Sunday lies near her feet. The packet is waiting to be opened. Everything in the room seems as normal as it was on Sunday morning. Except for the fact that the person lying on the bed will never wake up. On Monday morning (March 20, 2017), Ritwik Ghatak’s daughter Samhita had breathed her last. She was 60.
Her grieving well-wishers have said she suffered a silent heart attack in sleep. The death certificate reads that the likely cause of death was acute myocardial infarction in a case of diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism, atrial fibrillation and hypertension.
She lay on her bed as if in deep slumber. In the drawing room, a photograph of her daughter Aditi who had died in an accident in 2012 hangs on the wall. The signs of grief of having lost a daughter and her father at a young age had disappeared from her face. She seemed to be finally at peace with the demons of being at the receiving end of a tragic life. From a distance, large black and white portraits of her father seemed to keep guard of her body as her close relatives sat down to discuss how their beloved ‘Tuntuni’ had silently bade adieu.
Last year on Ghatak’s death anniversary (February 6), Samhita had recounted the pain of dealing with the memories of her father’s death. She was only 19 then. On a rainy day in February, Ghatak’s condition had deteriorated and Samhita had literally bundled him up in a taxi while taking him to the SSKM Hospital. If prodded, Samhita would talk about how she had helplessly watched her father’s condition deteriorate. “What a traumatic sight it was to see stains of his blood all over the wall! His hands were tied up and he was so restless. Before slipping into coma, Baba’s last words were ‘maa maa’. I don’t know, if he was referring to me or my grandmother,” she would say in her recollections.
Samhita’s death was peaceful. “Phaki diye chole gelo (she cheated me with death),” said her husband Subrata Sarkar. Film scholar Sanjay Mukhopadhyay, who had gone for the cremation of both Samhita and her director-father, is taking time to come to terms with the loss. “When Ghatak had died, we had all gone to the SSKM hospital. Bijan Bhattacharya was there. I remember seeing Satyajit Ray standing under a tree, Mrinal Sen, Anup Kumar, Utpal Dutt… they had all come. It was overcast even on the day Ghatak was cremated. So was it today when we took Samhita to the Keoratala crematorium,” Mukhopadhyay said. It was difficult for Mukhopadhyay to see 90-year-old Surama Ghatak come down from her house to bid her final adieu to daughter Samhita. “Twice, the hearse wanted to move away. But she didn’t want to let go,” Mukhopadhyay said.
With Samhita’s death, the work of research, archiving and preservation of her father’s works might receive a big jolt. In recent years, Samhita had given a lot of effort to host on an official website on Ghatak. She was constantly coordinating with National Film Archives of India (NFAI) to ensure the preservation of Ghatak’s feature films and documentaries. NFAI director Prakash Magdum was shocked with the news. “She was very helpful in preserving Ghatak’s work and always cooperated with NFAI’s effort. Her aim was to bring Ghatak’s works to public domain. Even recently, she gave permission to host a retrospective of Ghatak’s films in Scotland. I am shocked with the news,” Magdum said.
Samhita’s niece Ina Puri recollected how she had met her “Tuntuni” at their grandparent’s home in Baharampur during summer holidays. “I can still visualise the two sisters, aged 10/12, slightly awkward as adolescents tend to be but fiercely independent. The afternoons were long and scorching hot. To keep ourselves entertained, we rigged up makeshift stages to enact plays and skits. Looking back it seems strange that we had no games or television sets. Under the Bakul trees sprawling branches, we had been the actors and the audience too,” Puri said.
Later, when Puri met Samhita as adults, she was still as imaginative. “She was still a dreamer as she told me her plans of the new film she was going to direct. Though devastated by the deaths of her father, her younger sister and her daughter (most recently), Tuntuni’s spirit remained fierce and unbroken throughout her life. She fought to keep her father’s legacy alive and create her own niche. Sadly, the dreams remained unfulfilled.”
Said Samhita’s cousin, Srutakriti De, “She was truly trying to do all that it took to preserve my uncle’s works. She even went to Bangladesh to hold a retrospective of his works. This is a big loss for all of us.” Mukhopadhyay added, “Samhita’s death is a huge setback for archival work on Ghatak. In her humble way, she was trying to do her level best to contact everybody connected with Ghatak’s creative efforts.” Consolation, if any, lies in the hope that she will finally meet all her loved ones who had once left her bereaved.