Covid-19: Son in Bangalore sings to dying mother in Kolkata, Twitterati overwhelmed

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A son singing a popular Kishore Kumar number on video call to his mother on her death bed about 1,900 km away seems to be straight out of a scene from a tear-jerker movie. But that’s precisely what took place on May 11 between Sanghamitra Chatterjee, the ailing mother in Kolkata, and Soham Chatterjee, her son, who was away in Bangalore and could not visit his mother.

1,900 kms away

The incident that took place via the phone of Dipsikha Ghosh, the doctor at Kolkata’s Apollo Hospital, has gone viral on social media after the doctor tweeted about it.

The song that Soham sung for his mom was ‘Tera Mujhse Hain Pehle Ka Nata Koi’ from the 1973 film ‘Aa gale lag jaa’ for which Rahul Dev Burman scored the music.

Broke down midway

The doctor made a video call to Sanghamitra’s son, as she had earlier done to the family members of critically-ill patients. Soham began singing the song but broke into tears in the middle.

“Today, towards the end of my shift, I made a video call to the relatives of a patient who is not going to make it. We usually do that in my hospital if it’s something they want. This patient’s son asked for a few minutes of my time. He then sang a song for his dying mother. He sang ‘Tera Mujhse Hai Pehle Ka Nata Koi’. I just stood there holding the phone, looking at him looking at his mother and singing,” wrote the doctor on Twitter.

Numbed nurses

“The nurses came over and stood in silence. He broke down in the middle but finished the verse. He asked her vitals, thanked me and hung up. Me and the nurses stood there. We shake our heads, our eyes moist. The nurses went back one by one to their allocated patients and attended to them or the alarms of vents/dialysis units. This song is changed for us, for me at least. This song will always be theirs,” Ghosh wrote.

Within a few hours, it went viral on Twitter. Until Friday afternoon, it had received 47,000 likes and more than 12,000 retweets and 2,000 comments.