The stars who open a doorway to the past

Icons provide the soundtrack for the way we would like to imagine ourselves, reminding us that we too are touched with stardust

- SANDIP ROY

The end of each year comes with many rituals. 

There's the "Word of the Year", "Newsmaker of the Year", "Books of the Year".

And then there is the annual "People we lost this year" list.

2023 has seen its fair share of loss in the world of culture. Tina Turner. Matthew Perry. Ryan O'Neal. Gina Lollobrigida. Burt Bacharach. Raquel Welch. Harry Belafonte. Milan Kundera. Sinead O'Connor. Bishan Singh Bedi. Vani Jairam. Gitanjali Aiyar. Sumitra Sen. Gufi Paintal. Anup Ghoshal. And that is to name just a few.

Some of those deaths make front page news. Some are names I have never heard. There are always a few I thought had died years ago. But the ones that cause a real pang are those I had not thought about in years but at one time meant so much to me. Those losses feel truly poignant, as if opening a hidden doorway to a time I had long forgotten.

They bring back memories not just of a song or a book but everything that had happened around them-a secret crush, the loss of a pet, an ice-cream sundae, the first cigarette or the first swig of Old Monk with coke. It's a reminder of a person we had once been, someone we had long forgotten about, someone we have outgrown, someone who thought reading Ayn Rand and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was the height of rebellious cool and learned about sex in dogeared hand-me-down copies of Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins.

Tina Turner was the first rock star whose poster I had pinned to my cupboard in my bedroom. I remember it clearly, that short black dress, the boots, the shag hair. Gitanjali Aiyar reading the nightly news was a masterclass in diction and delivery. Harry Belafonte's Jamaica Farewell was in my DNA as were Anup Ghoshal's joyous songs from Satyajit Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Bayen films. We hummed those songs, watched those actors on screen, read those books and at some point left them behind-the debris of childhood and adolescence.