On November 30, I was working on Departures, the final chapter of my new book. The light in Delhi’s evening sky was growing weak. I wondered if it was stitching a dark fog coat to settle on tree-tops in Lodhi gardens. It looked like the winter routine of gloom. As things were not exactly falling into place on the page, I decided to take a break from writing. I lay down on the bed and picked up my phone to check messages that had dropped in while I was away.

I saw Derek’s message and opened it instantly. It felt like a telegram, which in the pre-internet age, at least in India, was most often deployed to swiftly transport dark messages about dear ones. Derek’s message was telegraphic but did not have the staccato template of a telegram. It was somewhat a compression of pain with a consolatory acknowledgement of life: “Sad news here. Jerry passed away a short while ago. It was peaceful and he was asleep when he left us. A very special and lovely man.”

Jeremy Seabrook, my teacher, loving mentor, towering intellectual and British author, born in distant 1939, had moved on, but his physical form was to stay with us in a freezing chamber for three more weeks, until he was finally received by a warmer chamber at St. Marylebone Cemetery in London’s East Finchley on December 20.

Of course, his enormous production of a lifetime of words put between the covers in nearly 50 books, in thousands of newspaper columns and articles, scripts for stage, radio and television, letters to friends, the unpublished notes and drafts in the forgotten folders of his notebooks and his computer have permanently ensured he lives on. That is whatever permanence means in library corners, undusted newspaper morgues, digital facilities that demand a password and rows of archive cartons, which could easily be mistaken for rows of uninterred ash of the dead.

Derek’s message was not unexpected. We knew it would come anytime soon. We all knew Jeremy was suffering. We knew his cancer had advanced and was quite aggressive. We had been informed a couple of months ago by Derek Hooper, his loving partner of 50 years, that he was “not so good really”, he was very weak, and the prognosis was not optimistic. The doctors had spoken in terms of months and not years.

This had prepared us in a way for the final announcement. It had created a strange play and countdown in the mind, which the heart tried to suppress with guilt. How could we possibly think of the death of a person who is so dear to us? How could the mind throw up images of his final resting posture inside a coffin when he is still catching his breath, however slowly and sufferingly? How could one possibly imagine the verbal ornamentations of an obituary? That was the algorithm of the mind, its organically embedded artificial intelligence.

The confirmation that Jeremy would depart soon had become starker and more real after I had spoken to him on his birthday – November 14. It was not that breathless voice making sense of the world with a gentle rush of words. It was not that voice that instantly created not just sentences but empathetic paragraphs. It was feeble but still clear. It was being pulled without self-pity from somewhere deep in his throat.

In normal times, when Jeremy spoke on phone, one would hear at the end of his long sentences a certain characteristic hiss and heave. It was a hiss and heave of exasperation that came at the end of his swift assessment about all things going on in the world. That was missing on November 14. Although he had said often that he was open to video calls, I had always preferred to only listen to him on the phone. The video, I had imagined, would create needless distraction from his intense thoughts and words. It is good I did it that way. Jeremy is now a voice not a frail physical self in my mind. I am surrounded by the echoes of his words in generous rooms of memories he made possible.

Even on November 14, when it became apparent that he was sinking, I felt the effort of his voice. To speak was a commitment to him. It was like in a folk story I had read many years ago. When Jeremy spoke, the metaphorical walls collapsed from the weight and intensity of his stories. There was more clear sky to see after that. As another friend of Jeremy, Sanjeev Jain the psychiatrist, said, his was “a graceful sense of outrage and anger”.

The struggle that day to communicate was Jeremy’s commitment to an epic conversation that we had each time he spoke. It had started for me over 25 years ago. That endless thread of a conversation that went circling the globe numerous times to make sense of its un-flat terrain. The un-flatness, and the unflattering human condition and the politics that shaped it, sometimes appeared to be the only theme covering his writing. That was a theme and a thread that anyway needed more than a lifetime to cover.

On November 14, I said: “Sir, I am sure I’ll speak to you next when you are back home in Muswell Hill.” He was at a nursing home. In his usual definitiveness, he said, “I would like that very much my dear fellow, but it seems unlikely.” Was it about Jeremy giving up hope about his flesh and blood future? Or was he applying to himself his trademark dismissal of hope for the world, which I had at times felt excessively dark and unfathomably negative.

Jeremy’s writings had always created an angst in me. My wife who some years ago translated his columns, written exclusively for a Kannada language newspaper, wept each time she worked on his new piece. He was naturally drawn to those who stared at ravines of hopelessness from the edge of cliffs. Someone who had faithfully read his columns for years in The Statesman, the Kolkata newspaper, had spoken about the forceful energy of his reasoning and language.

It badgered you to see the other side, but it was not that blinkered ideological badgering. It was the most humane encompassment with the power of a differently cultivated mind. What Jeremy wrote was the most empathetic commentary of our times. He suffered to write. He always adopted the worldview of those in maximum trouble and extreme distress.

Some obituary references said that he wrote about the working class and the poor. That was such a pity reduction of his work. I felt he never approached things through class or simple identity narratives. He would have balked at them had he read them. Speaking about his book, Pauperland, Jeremy had said: “In recent years wealth has been spectacularly rehabilitated, so the rich are no longer seen as jackals or vultures or hyenas or all the other bestiary of exploitation, as they were seen as in the 19th century. They have become kind of philanthropists and benefactors of humanity. I think this is where wealth creation as a semi-religious doctrine emerges. We are all pensioners of the rich now so that they are models and inspiration.”

Which formulaic class writing or grand theory would capture with such flaming truth, scalding irony and a lived insight, the ugly morphing of reality? Jeremy’s blending of reason and emotion were unique to him.

I corrected my reaction to Jeremy’s writings at some forgotten point. I realised that it was my class and comfort, my larger context, and perhaps the desires of my age too, that was resisting his gloomy interpretation of the world, which sometimes kissed and sometimes smashed like the sea waves. There was never a casualness in his approach.

At this funeral service on December 20 there was a reference to his laughter in the eulogy by Anna Mottram, the British actress. I did not know that laughter. In the conservativeness of my upbringing in Bangalore, one did not try to laugh with his teacher. The fact that I slowly kept my adulation for him in my heart’s pockets, and started having a conversation with him, gently initiated by him, as a cultural departure. A departure that infinitely benefitted me.

I had met Jeremy when he was close to 60 years, by which time he had seen enough of the world to not mind my inarticulateness and ill-formed feedback to his writing. He never ever snubbed me with that proverbial British stiffness and slight, he only deepened the conversation. He was so much different from all that the colonial curriculum had imparted to us of a British life and character. He was like us, I thought. Very much like us. He was like a family elder. He happily fit into that very avuncular Indian role. He had no position to proselyte you into.

Jeremy’s theorisations made with subtle animation of his fingers, were never hollow. They emanated from making greatly invested conversations with the afflicted. His afflicted did not fall into clever categories that academia created. In his invested conversations, he could find in a person of means the same affliction he found in the poor and the deprived. Perhaps there was not another person who made so many friends of strangers while he travelled; while he visited slums and shanty towns; while he walked in parks and strolled the streets. He made sense of their lives for them and for himself.

They were all ordinary people and Jeremy connected them to larger patterns and prejudices of history and society with a brilliance that could be the envy of any writer. They were not just subjects of his writing. With quite a few he continued to talk beyond his columns and books, and with many, quietly, without a philanthropic fuss, shared his royalties and taught their children on Zoom classes. From his writing, one did not think that he belonged to some group, some intellectual movement, to a lobby or clique or a loosely knit approval gang.

Personally, I felt Jeremy was at his searing best when he wrote about emotional deprivations. That is perhaps why he was an extraordinary memoirist. The first book of his that I had read was Colonies of the Heart, published in 1998, which had the story of his mother. His very first book in 1969 was The Underprivileged, a family history that became a fine social document. His last book in 2023 was a book of his memoirs – Private Worlds, which was nominated for the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize.

It is not that his political and sociological writings did not find recognition. Earlier, his book The Refuge and the Fortress on Britain’s attitude historically to immigration and asylum, was nominated for the Orwell Prize. But still, when he scraped the soul and mixed the depths of pain with the strange circumstances of life, he sparkled. The Guardian once said he was reminiscent of George Orwell, but he carried a lot more of Charles Dickens in him, I thought.

Perhaps it is wrong to draw such a crude line between his writings. It is possible to argue that all his books, whether labelled a memoir or not, were shaped by autobiographical currents. They never had the glum pretention of seriousness and objectivity that most academic writing embodied. They did not place method and process over insight. His every punctuation had warmth and every page a few insights. He was deeply suspect of all establishment enabled thinking, and of all writing that took it upon itself to construct an establishment order.

Jeremy had carried the emotional whirlpools of the tanning town of Northampton, where he was born, first to Cambridge University where he studied at Gonville and Caius College, and then to the rest of the world. Most people in Britain would have viewed going to Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s as deliverance from post-War trauma and working-class constraints, but he never turned his back to his ground zero. Jeremy only made it more profound and found a larger place for it in different forms in the world that he strode around in his tall frame.

Jeremy held nothing back when he wrote, whether it was about his mother, twin brother, father, biological father or his friends. He was not showcasing them to the world, but he was having a conversation with them and through them. I often wondered if anybody could speak his private truths with such unsparing honesty. Identity politics, sexual politics, politics of policy, sociology, ethnography, environmental concerns, the deviousness of power, literature, memoir and more, perhaps ran as one large stream inside him.

When I dedicated my second book to him, Pickles from Home, I could find a slice of a poem from a poet I greatly admired in my mother tongue, the great DR Bendre, which nearly captured Jeremy for me: “Have someone with the serenity of cool waters speak the truth with a tongue of flame.” I needed a poet from Dharwad to make me understand a writer from faraway Northampton.

Jeremy was engaged with every book I wrote and every article I published. He wrote a foreword to my English first book in 2008. He accepted the dedication of my second book. He wrote a blurb for a prime ministerial biography I published in 2021, and also to a biographical commentary I published in 2023. In a Kannada book I edited on mother tongues in 2004, he contributed an essay. Even my forthcoming book, he had read half of it till the time it became physically impossible for him to continue. Of whatever he had read, like always, he had sent quick notes.

Besides, he wrote back on every single column I wrote since 2019 with his own ideas on the topic. That was his abiding commitment and openness to a student, whom he loved to refer to as his young friend. In a world where indifference to any serious writing and ideas is common and hurting, to lose a magnanimous reader and mentor like Jeremy is in some ways the death of all writing. It will take some effort to continue writing thinking he is there, somewhere, and reading it, and to make his spirit one’s conscience.

When I went to see Jeremy at his Springfield Avenue home in London for the very first time, I represented myself as a provincial boy. He never said he himself was one, but over a quarter century he had put me on a path of a rootedly cosmopolitan future. My father had with great care blended the local and the universal in me. To what I had inherited and acquired from my father, Jeremy gave it the beauty of language. With mentorship over years, he had caused many big and subtle departures in my thinking.

Jeremy had reached out to the next generation too in my family. He spoke and wrote to my son independently and shaped him with granular compassion for life. He had shown enormous curiosity last year about his evolving research in cell biology, when his own cells were behaving erratically.

He had written about his living with cancer in a piece for the New Statesman, in March 2023: “Since testosterone produced by the prostate is the vehicle that conveys cancer cells around the body, the specific treatment is intensive doses of the female hormone oestrogen… In the no-man’s-land (indeed, no-person’s-land) between treatment and the body’s response to it, the unexpected sudden fluidity of identity, nocturnal insomnia and daily exhaustion, it is difficult to fill the hours, which simultaneously hang heavily and speed by.”

Coming from a conservative family, I was not acquainted with the gay world. He made me aware of it without ever speaking about it in the blistering language of rights. His writings on homosexuality too never advanced its cause but simply placed it in the world, in the middle of nature. It was a new awakening of social justice that happened in me alongside the caste realities of Indian society that were dawning upon me. It was all one borderless language of humanity that he created inside me.

After I read Derek’s message of Jeremy’s passing, I stepped out to get some air. As I wandered around aimlessly, I remembered that Jeremy had called me for three continuous days when my father had suddenly passed away in December 2007. He knew the exquisite bond I shared with him. He knew everything about me and my family. He interpreted my pain, my new situation in life and my sadness.

When my father passed away Jeremy held me together. Now when Jeremy the father-figure is gone, who is to hold everything together? Who is to interpret the chaos? As all this passed through my mind, I stood in front of a green garden wall. It was like the poster of the “Highgate Ponds” painting by Howard Hodgkin that Jeremy and Derek had gifted me in 2015. It was in remembrance of the metro station that I got down to go to their place in London. It hung in my bedroom, and I woke up to it each morning. I will wake up to that life in a frame for a very long time.

It is best to end this conversation about Jeremy with his own words. It is from a story he wrote for my eight-year-old daughter as New Year gift in 2022: “Not many people know that this world is not the only one that exists. It is a world of great beauty, but also of meanness, ugliness and cruelty. There is another world, parallel to this one, where truth, harmony and joy are supreme. And it is not difficult to reach it, although most people do not have the patience or the time to do so. It is separated from this world by only the most fragile curtain, sheer as muslin and light as air.”

Sugata Srinivasaraju is a journalist, author and columnist. He is the author most recently of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi.