Meeting the daughter of a legend

By Shevlin Sebastian 

Photos: Debika Sen (extreme left); Mihir Sen 

One day, at artist Sasi Warrier’s studio, I met a group of lively American women travel writers who were on a tour of South India. Shepherding the group was Debika Sen, a California-based tour manager. When I heard the surname, I correctly assumed Debika of being a Bengali. We started chatting in Bengali. I am a Malayali who grew up in Kolkata and now lives in Kochi as a journalist. 

As for Debika, she is of mixed parentage. While her father was Bengali her mother, Bella, was of British-Jewish origin. “They met and fell in love when my father went to study in England,” she said. 

During our conversation, Debika suddenly said, “You might have heard of my father.” 

Then she paused and said, “His name is Mihir Sen.” 

I got a shock when she said that. Sen was one of India’s greatest long-distance swimmers. He was the first Indian to swim across the English Channel in 1958, and also set a world record by swimming in oceans in five continents during a calendar year (1966). These included the Palk Straits, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bosporus, the Dardanelles and the length of the Panama Canal. He had famously said, “I wanted to prove to the world that Indians are not afraid.” In 1967, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan. 

At that time, while working for a national sports magazine, at Kolkata, I had written articles about Sen. One was a seven-page feature called ‘Marathon Man’ in 1988. Then, in 1991, when he suffered from Alzheimer's Disease, and lost his memory, I had written another one called ‘Man Without A Past’. 

I told Debika about how I had spent time with Sen, at his office, home and during a photo shoot at the National Library. Her eyes filled up and she said, “It’s such a small world.”

But Debika also told me something that I had long forgotten. Sen had a flourishing garment factory and was wealthy. However, one day, in 1977, politician Jyoti Basu called him and asked him to campaign on behalf of the Communist party for the Assembly elections. Sen declined by saying he was a capitalist. That did not go down well with Basu. 

Soon, labour problems began to crop up in his factory. It eventually devastated Sen’s business. He became bankrupt. The stress became too much to bear. Sen developed dementia. And on June 11, 1997, he died at the age of 66. As for Bella, according to Debika, she died of a ‘broken heart’ five years later.

It was all so sad to hear. What to make of life? So many tragedies take place all the time. And, mostly, all this happens to good people, while the bad go karma-free. Does God exist? Or is He maya (an illusion)?

(Published as a middle in The New Indian Express, South Indian editions and The Morning Standard, New Delhi)