OBITUARY: Sans Papier: Anil Bhatti as I Know Him

It is difficult to speak of a person whom one loves. In Anil Bhatti’s case the difficulty lies rather in that one feels loved by him even before one comes to love him. That is my difficulty in speaking of him. And one trembles, one stutters, one flounders – one is too late to love and to speak of love, the other is already gone: for there is too much to say and so few words at one’s disposal. To begin with that extraordinary moment when we met first, more than two decades back: I immediately felt loved. There is something that he saw in me, although I have never been directly his student, at least in the institutional sense of the term; and he loved that ‘something’ in me. It took me ages to understand what it is that he saw in me and loved. I have come from elsewhere, I have not joined the Centre of German Studies as his student, I am ‘no one’ for him: not his student, nor his friend, nor his relative.