Kitty Menon: Fragments of a Life Less Ordinary

I knew Kitty Menon for a much shorter time than most of you assembled here. I had seen her from a distance in the 1980s when I visited the CPI(M) office at 14 Ashoka Road as part of my work as a reporter with The Telegraph newspaper. But I got to know Kitty only in 1992 when I joined the Party as a wholetimer and worked with INN, alongside the People’s Democracy and Lok Lahar office, on the ground floor of AKG Bhavan. Kitty was already past seventy then, nearly forty years older than me. But we soon became friends and the big gap in age and experience never came in the way. Kitty was like that. She was unique. She is one of the few people I know who never pulled rank, never talked down at people far less accomplished or experienced than her, never harked back to the ‘good old days’, never pretended to have all the answers – even though her faith in communism, her conviction that it would one day triumph remained unshakeable till the very end. And despite all the hardships she had faced at a personal level through the years, she had an enormous zest for life which was infectious. I worked at the Party headquarters for seven years, but even after I left and went back to the ‘bourgeois’ world I had come from, my friendship with Kitty did not fray.