Mala Sen was a warm and kind human being who will be much missed by her friends. “Bad news,” telephoned a friend, who was standing next to Farrukh Dhondy, “Mala has died.”

Farrukh came on the phone and we had a few words. Farrukh and Mala had been married and had then divorced but they really remained close friends and Mala always, but always, spoke in the highest terms about Farrukh. They had met almost as children in Pune and then later, after Farrukh came to Cambridge in the 1960s, he returned to Bombay and persuaded Mala to more or less do a bunk with him to London. From 1965 onwards, Mala settled in the UK.

With Mala, especially in recent years, there was no such thing as a short conversation. She had a lovely distinctive voice, so that in my mind I can still hear her talking.

“All right darling,” she would invariably end most conversations, “come round when you are free and I will cook you some khana.”

I do wish I could have one last conversation with her. Some weeks ago, returning from abroad, I found a message from Mala. “All right darling, call me when you can.” “Darling” was her endearment for friends.

The shortest conversation with Mala lasted, at least, an hour. Just when you thought you were getting to the end of a conversation, she would begin a fresh phase. If you were pressed for time, Mala was not the person you called for a quick chat. She was a near neighbour of mine so that if I drove past her flat, I was always tempted to ring the bell. She had found a stray black cat — or possibly the stray black cat had found her — and she had endless fun watching it come in and out of the window. During a recent spell in hospital, her friends did not tell her that while she was away, her cat had died.

Years ago, I told Mala I was having problems getting hold of a copy of her book on Phoolan. Her gesture was typical. She went to her shelves in her front room where she often wrote in long hand or worked on an old computer.

I have before me a copy of India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi. Inside is inscribed, “For Amit — Here’s the last copy I have! With love, Mala xx”. The date is signed, “19 February 1998.”

I feel very lucky to have known Mala. She never minded if I did not respond immediately to a call. She picked up a conversation from where it had been left. Sometimes, she was wonderfully old fashioned and sent me a note through the post, attaching a clipping from an Indian newspaper with a story which she felt I ought to follow.

When she was writing Death by Fire, her account of the sati incident involving Roop Kanwar in Deorala in Rajasthan in 1987, she went through many stop-starts. Her publisher was getting fed up because she was not delivering the promised manuscript. But Mala was like that. She could not be hurried. I think Mala wanted completely to get under the skin of a story and almost relive the experience of her subject before she could put pen to paper.

She did not eat very much or only sparingly. She would only toy with her food, then light up a cigarette, help herself to a glass of red wine and chat about anything and everything. A favourite topic was train journeys in India. Another was her mother, Kalyani Gupta, who had been married and divorced from her father, Lt Gen Lionel Proteep Sen. If her mother hit town, Mala would hit the phones.

That woman, Mala would say, is driving me mad. Mala was a socialist, her mother was a patrician who adored the good things in life. Finally, Mala got me to meet the woman whom she had described as a dragon. Her mum turned out to be an absolute charmer. We had lunch at the Oriental Club just off Oxford Street, when her mother seemed to me to be someone who had stepped straight off the set of a Noel Coward play. When her mother was in town — the mother would usually stay at a posh hotel or club in the West End and not in her daughter’s modest flat — Mala would have to do the running around which was not her strong point. But the moment her mother flew back to Bombay, she would miss the woman Mala loathed and loved at the same time.

“She wants to go and see a play in the West End,” Mala would complain. “And then afterwards she wants to go out to dinner.”

A blind spot in Mala’s life was her English grandmother — her father’s mother, I think. That is probably where Mala inherited her pale eyes from. Mala would often discuss documentary film ideas — we worked on a couple together — but she had no interest in seeking her grandmother’s roots in England.

With someone with quite a scholarly mind and an instinct for deep research, her attitude puzzled me. “But Mala, here you are — you have been interested in immigrants (she had fought for Bangladeshi immigrants in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London) — and you could find out where your grandmother came from. Who were her family? Do you realise you probably have English relatives in England. Pitch for a documentary, ‘Looking for granny.’”

Mala couldn’t be bothered. I forget her grandmother’s name but Mala told me she is buried in Calcutta. Her family had rejected her when she had married an Indian. She never again came to England. And now, decades down the line, possibly because of the racism she had faced from her own family, Mala rejected her grandmother’s family. May be in time I could have talked Mala round but it was a part of her family’s history that did not excite her.

With Phoolan it was the opposite. When some friends of mine were making a BBC documentary on the making of the film Bandit Queen, Phoolan was proving hard to get. I said I would help them and try and get Phoolan without whom there would be no documentary. I went to see Mala. She rang me back in the evening and said she had spoken to Phoolan. On Mala’s saying so, I flew to Delhi, took a taxi round to Phoolan’s flat. I wondered if Phoolan would be difficult. But, no, Umed Singh, her husband, was waiting. Phoolan first did a little puja and then we went straight into the interview in Hindi.

Phoolan said “Didi” had called and instructed her to see me. And that was that. Phoolan made me laugh on a couple of occasions.

“Phoolan, how could you, such a tiny woman, run a gang?”

“Why don’t you ask Indira Gandhi how she runs the country?”

And, then, “Phoolan, you swear such a lot in the film. Do you feel bad you are shown like that?”

“That’s nothing!” she bristled. “In real life, I swear a lot more.”

Phoolan had a lot of problems — with the film, with her relatives, with trying to settle into Delhi life and with Umed (whom Mala did not quite trust though personally I found Umed quite straightforward, at least, in his dealings with me).

Back in London, I found Phoolan was driving her “Didi” up the wall. In the end, Mala wanted to cut the destructive and demanding Phoolan out of her life. But that was impossible: Phoolan had become a part of Mala. Later, when we discussed Phoolan’s assassination in 2001, Mala would tell me she felt the murder had not been solved but she did not think the killing was delayed retaliation for the Behmai massacre (Phoolan Devi and her men killed 22 men of the Behmai village, allegedly to avenge her rape).

Mala will be remembered by her friends for personal qualities. But when she got depressed and felt she had achieved little in life, I would tell her: “Mala, long after we are all gone, your book, Bandit Queen, will remain and be read. No one can take that away from you. It’s a classic.”

It is.