He never treated his work as special. Even when he came back from a song recording, he never brought the cassette back home. A far cry from young lyricists today, who subject all their guests to their latest song, goading them to say ‘Wah-Wah’! He never actually puts pen to paper till the night of the deadline. Then there is a furious cleaning of drawers, numerous letters that get replied to, a number of inconsequential things that get attended to. I’m sure the creative process is occurring simultaneously over the radio blaring, children laughing, children’s friends over, taash going on in the house. The family is never made to hush up because he is writing; in fact the door of his study is always open so he can keep in touch with the outside world as well. I once changed the position of his desk away from the door because I felt he needed greater privacy. Mummy protested he would hate it. Came evening and predictably Abba made her change it back to the original position. He writes only with a Mont Blanc pen and has a huge collection of them. Every now and again, he takes them all out, looks at them lovingly and then puts them back under lock and key. When a friend of mine presented me one, Abba pinched it although he possessed three identical ones and wrote my friend a ‘cute’ letter giving reasons why the pen was safer with him than with me!

Few people know that he has a tremendous sense of humour and can be a first-rate mimic. He can laugh repeatedly at family jokes and makes Mummy act out incidents he finds funny again and again. He laughs till tears spill out of his eyes. Looking at his serious face, could anyone believe that!

I was once trying to put his eye drops for him. He has the tiniest little eyes in the world and would blink furiously every time I touched them. Inevitably, the drops would spill over to his nose or ear. Suddenly, he held my hand and started narrating a tale. ‘There was a young prince once who was the despair of his father’s life because he could do nothing well. The king finally found a marksman who swore he would turn the young prince into a skilled archer. After about six months the prince decided to display his skill. Swish-swosh went his arrows all over the room and felled everything within sight. Finally the king and the teacher decided the only way they could be safe was to stand right in the centre of the target since that was the only place the prince’s arrow would never reach!’