On the way to school, Amitabh Bachchan often looked into his father's room where he would find Harivansh Rai Bachchan busy working on a new poem or a literary work, having often toiled for over 16 hours at a stretch.
But one morning, Amitabh was surprised to see his father sitting upright on his chair, with his right hand in a utensil. He went close to his father and found that the hand was soaked in warm water.
As the actor recalled the incident on Saturday in New York at a function, Bachchan Sandhya to mark the birth centenary of his legendary father, you could feel he was reliving the experience intimately.
His father was working on translating a biography that had been published on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, free India's first Prime Minister. The translation was being done at Nehru's request.
The senior Bachchan, a close friend of the Nehru family, had just about four months to complete the translation from English into Hindi. "It was a very thick book and my complained that he had too little time to translate it," Amitabh said.
Text: Arthur J Pais
Photographs: Paresh Gandhi
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