Guwahati, August 29
Sixtyseven years ago at the height of World War II, Tarani Kanta Roy of Sarbhog in Assam’s Barpeta district, who was at the time a doctor with the Indian Hospital Corps, was asked to report for duty, at the Allied Forces headquarters in Singapore. Though his wife was seven months pregnant and their first son was only 18 months old, he chose to respond to the call of duty leaving the two behind with his ageing parents. However, he promised his wife, Kiranbala Roy, he would come back once the war was over. Little did she know she would never see him again.
About three years later a colleague who was also a doctor and captured by the Japanese army, informed the family that Roy, had been killed on February 13, 1942, when the Allied Forces hospital in Singapore, where he was working, was destroyed by heavy bombing by planes of the Japanese air force.
It was only on August 8 this year that Roy’s granddaughter, Bidisha Kalita, and her husband, Pulin Kalita, both of whom are now settled in Singapore, came upon his resting place during a visit to the Kranji War Cemetery in the island republic. Inscribed on the sepulchre were the words ‘Their name liveth for ever more: Tarani Kanta Roy-doctor and Satya Paul Khosla-doctor.’
“It was a great piece of news for us. I feel proud my father’s martyrdom was duly honoured and the
family is relieved of a burden on the heart,” noted theatre personality Dulal Roy, Roy’s second son, told The Tribune.
Dulal, who was yet to be born when his father left for Singapore, said: “A colleague of his once told us during the aerial attack on that fateful day my father was attending his duties unflinchingly amid the bombardment. Till her death my mother, who never believed my father had died, awaited his return.” He added the family members are planning to make a trip to Singapore to pay their respects to Roy at his tomb.
At the time of Roy’s death his father, who was a ranger in the Assam Forest Department, had done his best with his limited resources to get some information about his lost son but in vain. Knowing he would never return home the old man constructed a small house in Guwahati’s Shantipur locality for Roy’s two sons -Hemendra Kumar and Dulal, naming it ‘Orphan Kutir’.
