Priya and Sanjay after his release last month. File picture

New Delhi, Sept. 27: A jail coupon for Rs 2 that Sanjay Dutt had handed his sisters on Rakshabandhan remains one of their most treasured possessions.

That was in 1994 when Sanjay, then an undertrial in the Bombay blasts case, was lodged in Thane jail.

“We had taken thalis with us and tied a rakhi on his wrist. Sanjay looked sad and said ‘I have nothing to give you… but I’ve saved these coupons for you. This is all I have’,” Namrata and Priya write in their co-authored book Mr and Mrs Dutt — Memories of Our Parents.

The book will be released tomorrow at a function to be attended by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.

“It was an extremely emotional moment. It was the first time we saw dad break down and cry. When mom passed away we knew his despair, but he refused to shed a tear in front of us,” the sisters write.

The book ends shortly after their father Sunil Dutt’s death in 2005 and does not mention Sanjay’s conviction and sentencing.

Sanjay going to jail in 1993 was the darkest period in the lives of the Dutts after Nargis’s long and unsuccessful battle with cancer. Besides, they had to grapple with “financial problems” as there was “no money coming in and the legal expenses were mounting”.

It was equally hard for Sanjay’s nieces. Namrata’s daughters “kept wanting to meet their Sanju mama. I believe they had to be told, as the other kids in their school were talking about the case”, Namrata says in a chapter written by her.

“Sanjay sat behind the prison and the two girls sat on the other side. It took Siya a long time to understand what had happened to her uncle. She was so traumatised that she couldn’t speak to Sanjay for 10 years.”

The book also contains a letter Sanjay wrote to Priya from jail. “You know, Pri, today I washed my room — I put water and then Dettol soap, took a jhadoo and really did ‘safaee’ like we used to do on our terrace and now my room is all shining.”

The book has a letter from Nargis to Namrata. Writing on an Air India flight on her way to America, Nargis says: “Please look after Sanju. See that he does not get mixed up with those silly boys again. He is too stupid in his head, he does not realise what he is doing and how it is going to harm him.”