In the last 16 years I have known Leila Kabir Fernandes, wife of the late George Fernandes, the socialist defence minister of India; personally, I could never decipher faith in any religion. She was born to a Muslim father who was the first secretary of the education department under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and then education minister after the demise of Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad. Her mother was Shanti Devi, a Hindu-born lady.

She was married to a Mangaluru-born socialist who escaped the rigours of a Catholic seminary to serve the people as a socialist. Her son, Sean Fernandes, with a Christian name, married a Japanese Buddhist. To such people one never asks their religious affiliation.

But when her dead body was taken out to the crematorium, many asked, "Not burial?”

I heard that she wanted to play two Bengali songs of the Brahmo Samaj before the last rites. As one of her young friends played it from a mobile, her son, who arrived from the USA the previous night, and all of us present at the cremation silently listened.

To my surprise the friend’s mother later informed me, as everything else, she had planned her last rites as a Brahmo Samaj faith person. The old lady went on to say that Leila’s mother was a Brahmo and belonged to the family of veteran Swadeshi movement leader Bipin Chandra Pal of the British era.

A fact Leila never claimed, even with her friends. Though she was a proud daughter of her father, Humayun Kabir, she never observed any routine rituals of a Muslim, nor did she go to church, as her husband went back to church only after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and also invited the Delhi Bishop to do so. She remained a truly secular person, keeping her faith to herself, carrying it to her cremation.

Fiercely independent as a human being and rationalist to the core, Leila was a social activist who claimed to be the “alter ego” of her late husband. When he deserted me, he also left that portion of his personality and got engaged in all kinds of undesirable political affiliations, which got him a bad name, she used to lament.

She hated him for deserting Prime Minister Moraji Desai overnight after a long speech defending him in Parliament.

“I never wanted to recall what went on in my house that night. It will never show George in a good light," she used to say when asked about it.

Leila, while saying bye to George Fernandes, who was disappearing underground to fight the emergency of 1975 from Gopalpur on Sea at Orissa, never thought she would meet him again, as her family friend “Indu” and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had developed a phobia about George after the all-India railway strike of 1974. Many feared that if captured from underground, he would be killed in an encounter.

Back in Delhi she feared her own arrest and going to jail with her one-and-a-half-year-old son. That prompted her to escape from India to Canada with the help of German socialists who arranged an escape through Lufthansa airways.

“I escaped the police guards around my house through the back lanes in the night and with 100 dollars with me landed in Canada with a high fever,” she recalled.

From there she went to her brother in the USA. Americans issued her travel papers, as Ms Gandhi’s government revoked her Indian passport. She became the international face of the struggle against emergency, travelling to Europe to meet socialist veterans seeking intervention to ensure the safety of her husband George by meeting socialist leader François Mitterrand of France, Chancellor of Germany Willy Brand and that of Austria Bruno Kreisky.

She also appeared in a US Senate hearing on human rights violations in India those days. Leila undertook all these against the family friend Indu’s government. According to her, Indu had sent a note warning her against her marriage to George Fernandes. The note from Indu read, ”Hope you know what you are getting into.” She smiled years after narrating the incident, as she knew George and his way with women.

“Ours was not just the unity of a man and woman but minds united in our thought to change India’s destiny,” she said once, narrating the ups and downs of her marriage.

From 1984 to 2009, she was separated from George, and he had refused her divorce. “When I sent him the divorce papers in the 80s, he sent me two bangles of her recently dead mother, asking me to keep them. What can I do with such a person?" she wondered and never insisted on her divorce, freeing him to do what he wanted.

As a medical worker with the Red Cross in the 1970s and also associated with the nursing establishment of All India Medical Sciences (AIMS), she was quick to react to George’s failing health following his second haemorrhage.

With her son, she took charge of him and transferred George from his official bungalow at Krishna Menon Marg to the house she and George built for Rs 1.5 lakhs in the 70s on the land which was donated by her father in the then-new Panchsheel Colony of South Delhi.

The house is now worth over Rs.20 crores, as it has become one of the posh colonies of Delhi. Both George and Leila died there in the same ground-floor room of the house.

Leila Fernandes is someone who was well organised even for her last journey. She has prepared all of her last journey with her friends and even the son, who used to be on a FaceTime call with her on a daily basis from the USA.

After the late discovery of her colon cancer, she prepared for the worst. Called up crematoriums, selected the dress for her son for her funeral and gave a list to her attending family and friends as to whom to be informed of her demise. As she was active in the Panchsheel resident welfare association, the ladies in her neighbourhood remained her only local support system, as her son was away in the USA.

Before her death she ensured all papers and even old photos of George Fernandes were donated to the Teen Murti archives of top leaders of the country. It was ironic that she passed away on the day when the last of George's papers were received by the Teen Murti archives.

She was also called by George’s Mumbai associates to take care of all the papers in the name of George in those institutions established by George as a trade unionist in Mumbai from the 1960s. Leila donated all the books from the huge library of George to the school she was associated with and also a few other libraries for the underprivileged. Some books were already with the St Aloysius College library at Mangaluru, the alma mater of George.

She once wondered why so many of George’s associates were asking her to push her son into politics.

“He is not interested, and so am I, or George will never approve it,” she quipped.

Personally, she remained a left liberal and even wanted to walk with Rahul Gandhi when his padayatra was entering Delhi recently.

A Bengali family stayed with her, looking after personal needs too. But the house, which was visited by prime ministers and a host of political leaders across India when George was alive and also after his death, was a lonely place for her.

“For the first time in my life, I feel lonely, as I have no one around me whom I can call my own,” she told me in one of our last meetings.

She refused all visitors as the cancer aggravated and limited it to occasional calls, as she refused to share her days of misery with even friends.

Leila was worried that his son would have the same issues of her marital discords when Sean Fernandes and his wife were going through some issues. Sean unsuccessfully tried to settle in India with a restaurant chain in Gurgaon in the mid-2010s and to be near his ailing father and old mother before Covid.

Not knowing the business ecosystem of India and not using his rebellious father’s name, it was natural for him to fail, and finally he got back to the USA, where he is a successful investment banker.

His Japanese wife, who got rooted in India, reluctantly followed him six months later. But seeing his son Ken Fernandes now in his teens and wife at the funeral of Leila through FaceTime, one can be assured that the family has overcome their issues.

Leila Fernandes is survived by his son, his Japanese wife and two grandkids, and they stay in New Jersey, in the USA. Her brother drowned sometime back in the sea of Gopal on Sea while on a visit to their ancestral home there.

Her sister-in-law attended the funeral and shared fond memories of Leila as the only one reminding the entire family of the birthdays of all of them every year.

A meaningful life which stayed in the shadows of national politics but never ventured into it but remained as a keen observer who was into social work rather than politics.

I remember her calling up to help her to secure a visa for an Afghan girl who was being treated to regain her face smashed in a bomb blast. I also remember many approaching her to come out against George during the Tehelka controversy days, and she refused.

I also remember how she described Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s shocked face when he came to visit ailing George, who could not recognise anyone by then. She fiercely guarded her personal space not to get carried away by others and remained true to her own ideals of society and humanity.

(V K Cherian is a family friend of Fernandes and has known them closely for the last 3 decades.)