Retired legal firm executive, migrated to build a life in Mumbai

In the 1960s, soon after he turned 20 and decided to “try his fate in Bombay”, he mustered the courage to visit Chandramathy’s (he called her Chandu) house in a village near Thrissur and ask her parents for her hand.

“My parents agreed. But he wanted to first prove himself in Mumbai before he called me there,” recalls Chandramathy, 59. An orphan, Ramankutty had grown up in Kilimangalam village.

These days, walking with a crutch for support, Chandramathy, who is partially blind after steroids damaged her left eye, finds it difficult to live without the man who stood by her through “good and bad times”.

Ramankutty died in the July 11 blast at Mahim station on his way back home from his part-time job at the legal firm, LC Tolat & Company — a position he had taken after retiring from there as an executive-cum-stenographer in 2001. His family found his body a day later in the morgue at Sion Hospital .

“I always feared for his life. Our family astrologer, who had predicted that I would lose my left eye, had also said he would die when he turned 65.

I had kept it to myself, praying everyday that it should not come true,” says Chandramathy.

During their early years in Mumbai, Ramankutty and Chandramathy lived with his elder brother in Navy Nagar at Colaba. He shifted to Malad, a Mumbai suburb, a year later and settled down in Kurar Village in the area.

The job at LC Tolat was his second, and he worked double-shift to support his family and pay for Chandramathy’s medicine bills.

“When he retired his salary was

Rs 12,600 per month,” says Chandramathy. “And he got just Rs 3,000 for the part-time job.”

As she talks about her various illnesses over the years — tuberculosis, diabetes and kidney complications — that “drained the family’s finances”, Chandramathy also narrates how Ramankutty would be by her side to comfort her, never once showing “disrespect or discomfort because of her chronic illnesses”. Between 2001 and 2005, when her immune system was affected, her health deteriorated.

While he ensured that she was taken to every hospital from JJ to Jaslok to Hinduja, he also would be there to see that she took her medicines on time. She says he enjoyed cooking for her— “soft chappatis and finely-chopped vegetables, with just the right amount of salt…he would always yell from the kitchen, ‘Chandu, what else do you want?’.”

A couple of months before he died, Ramankutty himself had shifted to kanji (a rice-based gruel) and chamandi. “He was getting older and it was easier that way — he didn’t want to stand in the kitchen for long,” she says.

In his spare time, Ramankutty would advise people on legal matters — he was not trained in law, but understood it well after working in a legal firm all his career.

Members of his co-operative housing society say they had to struggle with all their paperwork after Ramankutty’s death as he looked after the building’s financial and administrative affairs.

Says close friend Balakrishnan Nambiar, 54: “His biggest dream was to get a Lord Ayappa Temple built in Malad (East). He had been struggling for it since 1977.”

Only recently, the Malayalee Samaj of Malad, with Ramankutty at the helm, managed to get the land for the temple.

“His last communication seeking assistance for the temple was to actress Hema Malini,” says son Ajay Nair, 36, eldest of Ramankutty’s three children-the other two are daughters Padmaja, 35, and Indira, 29.

Ajay’s marriage was another of Ramankutty’s dreams, says Chandramathy. Ajay works for Gebbs Insurance, a job he got two months after his father’s death. “I wish he was alive to see me employed,” says Ajay.

Younger daughter Indira, who was supposed to get married this December, has now postponed the wedding by a year.

Chandramathy says she is worried how she will make it to the railway tribunal hearing on January 23 for the compensation claim to be processed. The hearing has been adjourned once because of her poor health. The tribunal has directed her to be “physically present”. “There is no one who can take care of me the way he did,” she says, breaking down. “My only wish after his death was if I could have his first-class identity card. It somehow got lost that night, and so did all the jewellery on him.”

The first-class pass was gifted to him just a month before 7/11 by his daughters, who thought that their father should finally travel in “comfort and class”.