Dubai: A Canadian expat of Indian origin died at the age of 102 in Dubai today.
Nibha Chatterjee, aka Dida, “died peacefully at home”, her grandson Bobby Rakhit, with whom she lived, told Gulf News.
He said, “Dida suffered a stroke recently and was paralysed on one side. She was hospitalised briefly and was discharged a week ago.”
“We are very heartbroken. It is sad, but she lived a full life,” he added.
Dida, who relocated to Dubai from Montreal at the age of 98, had shared her eventful life journey exclusively with Gulf News when she celebrated her 100th birthday on July 31, 2022.
The following year, when she turned 101, she shared the secret of her longevity.
“I am still in the pink of health – it must be the Dubai sun,” she had said, her impaired vision in one eye her only undoing at the time.
“I eat well and people say, I have a dry sense of humour,” she had added.
Sharing a short video of her 102nd birthday celebration this July 31, Rakhit said she was quite in her element even then.
Dida’s move to Dubai was under trying circumstances during the pandemic. Just a few days before she was to fly down from Canada, she had suffered a bad fall with a broken cheekbone and fractured wrists, following which she was hospitalised.
Doctors has told her she would not last the night and that she was on her “death bed”. But she had defied the odds, recovered and made a new life for herself in Dubai.
“She inspired everyone around her with her sense of calm, discipline and positivity,” Rakhit noted.
