Jyoti Basu wanted to return home one last time. On Sunday afternoon he did return. But in a hearse. The last wish of the leader whose wish was the command for millions remained unfulfilled.

“After Jyotibabu was admitted to the hospital on January 1, he kept asking me to take him back to Indira Bhavan. On the day of his hospitalisation, I had told him that I would take him back to Indira Bhavan in a day. Every day, he would remind me of the promise. He wanted to breathe his last in his home,” Joykrishna Ghosh, Basu’s aide for decades, said minutes after the leader’s death was announced.

As soon as the news reached the house where Basu’s heart lay throughout his battle for life in an ICU barely kilometres away, a wail rose inside. “Every eye in Indira Bhavan was moist. Even during his last days, when he was very ill and could barely talk, he would ask those who would enter his room about everyone. All the employees were his family members. All of us at Indira Bhavan have become orphans after his death,” said Nilkanti Das, who served the former chief minister for 10 years.

Ghosh, too, could not stop his tears when he returned from the hospital to the desolate house to fetch Basu’s clothes and other personal belongings that were later put on his body. “I have been with Jyotibabu for so long that I have forgotten what life is like without him. I will cherish his memories,” Ghosh said at the Indira Bhavan gate.

The two-storeyed house in Salt Lake’s DE block was Basu’s home for two decades. His son Chandan and daughter-in-law Rakhi had tried to convince him to shift to their FD block home but he had not budged, said family sources.

Across the city, the CPM flag on a bamboo pole at 55B Hindustan Park was at half mast. A poster on the wall read “Prayat comrade Jyoti Basu amar rahe”. From this house the CPM patriarch had set out for Raj Bhavan in June 1977 to be sworn in as the chief minister for the first time.