The death of Sarada, his wife of 33 years, in 1974 was something that former Supreme Court judge V.R. Krishna Iyer found almost impossible to come to terms with.
Sarada became a cardiac patient one year into Mr. Iyer’s stint as Supreme Court judge. She had to undergo multiple surgeries first in Delhi and then in the U.S.
The jurist spent a fortnight by her bedside at a hospital in the U.S. It was under the trying circumstances of that hospital room that Mr. Iyer wrote his landmark judgment in the Samsher Singh case, which the former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee termed the “greatest contribution to our constitutional jurisprudence,” in an article written in The Hindu .
“My wife Sarada and I had a happy span of conjugal, intellectual, aesthetic, ideological, philosophical, spiritual, and public-spirited commonality of interests and a hundred other common bonds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Wandering in Many Worlds”.
A recent visit to his house Satgamaya revealed how much his beloved wife meant to him. There were pictures of Sarada everywhere, from the bedroom and dining room to the room he used as his office.
In one of the rooms was kept, carefully covered in a piece of silk, a veena, which she used to play.
