Around 700 crore hearts sank on October 13, 1987, when the great Kishore Kumar rested his eyes for the final time. The country lost one of its most iconic voices just seven years after losing the legendary Mohammad Rafi. Within a decade, two of the most important Indian singers of the past 100 years were gone, and the throne inside the recording booth was now empty. In a recent interview, Kishore’s son Amit talked about his father’s final years and shared how his father knew that the end was nigh.
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Talking to Radio Nasha, Amit narrated a story about performing shows with his father, and how, during one of those shows, a herald of Kishore’s death came to him. “He suffered an attack in 1981, and he was bedridden for at least six months. But my father, being the restless and stubborn man he was, started doing live shows pretty soon. So, we went to Assam in 1982 to do a show, and there we met a tarot reader. My father consulted him, and the tarot reader declared in front of everyone that he only had seven years left to live, and that’s exactly when he passed away.”
Amit shared that he, in fact, wasn’t present with his father during his final moments and was performing shows in the US with Govinda, Asrani, and a couple of other people. He said, “I had gone to the US with Govinda and Asrani to do a couple of live shows. The last show was in Toronto, and my father had given me a huge list of movie DVDs and laserdiscs to buy. He told me that he wouldn’t let me enter the house without them. So I decided to buy everything on my way to the airport on the day we were supposed to go back. The day came, and I got a call in the morning from Shomu Da (Shomu Mukherjee). He asked me, ‘Amit, when are you coming back?’ A couple of other people talked to me on the phone, and I asked them where my father was. Finally, Shakti Samanta broke the news that my father was no more.”
He added that he couldn’t really understand how to react to the news, but that the people around him helped him deal with it and return to India with the right state of mind. Amit said, “Govinda and Asrani didn’t even come to my room while I was on the call because they already knew what had happened. Once I put the phone down, they all came in to console me, including Kulbhushan Kharbanda, who was very sweet to me. He consoled me throughout the flight. But he had not been well for a while, and I think the failure of my marriage also broke him. He couldn’t understand why something like this was happening to his son.”
