“There is no Vasantha without Sai,” says Vasantha, her voice steady through the grief, hours after the death of her husband G N Saibaba, a former Assistant Professor at Delhi University and a human rights advocate. Saibaba, 57, died late October 12 following post-operative complications from a gallbladder surgery at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad. The family said Saibaba’s body would be donated to Gandhi Medical College in Telangana on Monday. A former professor of English at Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College, Saibaba spent a decade in jail over alleged Maoist links before he was acquitted by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court and released from Nagpur Central Jail on March 7. The years in jail, many of those in the infamous Anda Cell, took away 10 years of his life as the wheelchair-bound activist endured physical hardships and legal setbacks. This was also the time Saibaba wrote “hundreds of letters” — many of these to his wife Vasantha, his childhood sweetheart who he met at a coaching centre in Amalapuram in Andhra Pradesh. “We went to the same centre. One day, Sai was late and the teacher asked me to help him with the lessons. That was the start,” Vasantha had said in an earlier interview to The Indian Express, when Saibaba was admitted to AIIMS for a series of tests for complications sustained during his jail stint. As she now struggles to deal with the loss, Vasantha, speaking on the phone from Hyderabad, says: “Sai and I have been together since we were children. We fell in love, shared ideas, shared our life, and we became one. He may not be physically present for me, but he is still alive, and will always be, in my heart.” As love stories go, Vasantha and Saibaba’s journey together would be put through severe stress tests after his arrest in 2014. With DU suspending Saibaba three days after the arrest, Vasantha was left to figure it out all by herself. Without a home and with her teenage daughter by her side, Vasantha, with help from well-wishers and students of Saibaba, fought a long and difficult legal battle. In the earlier interview to The Indian Express in April, Saibaba had broken down as he said: “When Vasantha’s mother was alive, she would borrow from her but she passed away during Covid. and life got very difficult.” The long, difficult years, however, didn’t chip away at their relationship. “Until my arrest, Vasantha and I had never been separated for a single day. Ours isn’t just a romantic relationship… It’s more than that. We are in love even now,” he had said. While Vasantha juggled home, the visits to jail and the legal battle, it didn’t help that Manjeera, who was barely 15 when her father was taken away, was struggling to deal with the sudden vacuum in her life. Like her father, she would study English literature and even did her undergraduation from the same college where he once taught. “Manjeera would have been my student if I hadn’t been arrested,” Saibaba had said. So while Manjeera was doing her Master’s course from St Stephen’s College in Delhi, he would encourage her to send him copies of the novels she was reading — from Shakespeare to Indian writing in English and one of their “multiple common favourites”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “He would write notes for me on these novels, and I would share these notes with my entire class… Literature was how we bonded,” Manjeera tells The Indian Express from Hyderabad. With Saibaba’s acquittal in March, the void Manjeera felt through much of her teenage years seemed to fill in again. Manjeera says: “I spent the most formative years of my life without him. Even though we wrote letters, I always missed having him around when he was in jail. So when he got back seven months ago, just hugging him, just to be able to fiddle with his hands, him patting my head made me so relaxed. I didn’t know I would lose that warmth so soon.” Manjeera recently enrolled for a PhD from the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. “He was so invested in my PhD topic,” she says. “He would encourage me to write and get published and said he would do the same. He told me, ‘Since we are both procrastinators, I will egg you on and you do that to me.’ But now he is gone. We had made so many plans. Now that he was back from jail, I thought my father would be with me for a lifetime. And he just goes away in seven months! Though I still don’t feel like he has gone away for good. I keep thinking if I dial his number, he might just answer and tell me what to do.” Vasantha, too, has been struggling. “I keep thinking that I did not have enough of him… Didn’t see him enough, didn’t talk enough,” she says quietly. How would Manjeera want her father to be remembered? “You know, as a child, I once asked him why he was doing all this. Why are you trying to be so selfless and all? He told me, ‘You grew up in the city and are much more individuated… with a sense of self. But I grew up in the village, in a community. My ideas and sense of beliefs stem from that sense of community. I view myself as someone who is part of the whole community. So I don’t look at it as any individual loss or gain that I am facing.’ That’s how he would like to be remembered — as one of the people.”
