Shonku

 

As I am on the wrong side of 75, information about a friend’s death comes to me almost regularly. A large part of our world is made of friends; with every passing, our personal world shrinks a little: the smile that I won’t see ever again, the phone call that will never come, the bottle of beer that will remain unshared.

My childhood friend Shankar Bose, fondly called Shonku by friends, passed away yesterday after a few days of final suffering.

The message took me back to 1959, when he and I entered the same classroom and would be classmates for many years to come. Shonku was among the most low-key students in our class. (How painful it is to write about a dear friend in the past tense!) He was shy, would talk in a small voice, and wouldn’t be seen in large groups. He would never shout, nor would he stand in front of the class to deliver a speech. But from close quarters, he was just charming. Close friends knew he was a simple soul with a fine sense of understated humour. As we grew up I came to understand that Shonku believed in the American adage “Don’t take life too seriously, you won’t come out of it alive.” He didn’t take life too seriously. I wouldn’t possibly be wrong if I said that Shonku went through the usual phases of life, college, employment, getting married, having a child, and getting old, almost absent-mindedly.

We lost touch after school as our lives moved along two non-intersecting trajectories. Much later, I met Shonku again at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. Finally, when I left my first job and began my second innings in Kolkata, I reconnected with Shonku properly. His naughty smile hadn’t changed in fifty odd years. His behaviour, the way he talked, hadn’t changed at all. I felt he was still the child that he had been in school. A better way of saying that would be, Shankar had managed to keep his childhood alive within himself, something that only a few can do.

When we met again, I came to know that Shonku and I both suffered from a particularly nasty kind of rheumatoid arthritis which begins in one’s early twenties and for which there was no treatment in India until maybe, 2015. Until then, that is, over forty years, one of the main missions of my life was bearing terrible pain and coping with the debilitating disease. The disease was possibly less virulent in my case. While I have been reasonably mobile despite it, Shonku used to suffer a lot. When we met again, he carried a walking stick, although he would laugh off his illness. I believe true to his carefree nature, he didn’t take his problem seriously and didn’t really take adequate care of himself.

But all that is irrelevant now. Everyone lives their own life and Shonku lived his. A simple soul who would never have had an enemy. Goodbye, dear friend.

Bengaluru / 16 August 2026

 

 

GHOST-EYE: A journey into the unknown

If you really wish to enjoy Amitav Ghosh’s latest and his tenth novel GHOST-EYE, it will help if you believe in reincarnation and brought-forward ancestral memory from one’s past life, because reincarnation is a central theme of the novel. I don’t wish to scare you, but it would be a bonus if you believed in “metempsychosis” too. (If you didn’t know the word, no issues; it would just mean you haven’t read Ghost-Eye). Metempsychosis is migration of the soul from the body of a dead animal to that of a human or the other way round. For example, you were an otter in your last life and are reading this now! (I understand there are many recorded cases when little children accurately describe another place and family where they claim to have lived in their previous life. But I remain a sceptic. As I read Ghost-Eye, I carried the burden of my scepticism.)

Amitav Ghosh, a significant literary voice cautioning us about the climate disaster, has used the delicate ecology of the Sundarbans not just as a background, but as a central character in his novels THE HUNGRY TIDE (2004), THE GUN ISLAND (2019), and GHOST-EYE (2025). All of them carry strong messages about saving our planet. Another interesting aspect of Amitav Ghosh’s novels is the ease with which he moves between the past and the present and between continents! (In The Gun Island, between the Sundarbans, Los Angeles, and Venice.) His craftsmanship as a novelist is awesome; his language, captivating. Despite my scepticism, I got immersed in Ghost-Eye in no time.

Soon, I discovered that the arcane title of the novel comes from a protagonist, a Sundarban-based climate activist Tipu, whose eyes are of different colours. Tipu’s “ghost-eye” gives him the power to clearly see the past, the future, and also, things happening far away. And the phrase ghost-eye becomes the signature of a group of mysterious humans with similar abilities. 

Moving on to the story, like The Gun Island, Ghost-Eye too is narrated by Dinu, a middle-aged single man who lives in New York. Dinu tells us the story of Varsha Gupta, a girl slightly younger than him, and who grew up—like him—in Southern Avenue flanking the Dhakuria Lake in Kolkata in the 1960s, although they didn’t know each other. One day, Varsha stubbornly demanded to eat fish and nothing else. She also claimed that in her previous birth, she had lived with her fisherwoman mother in a thatched hut near a river. Both fish and poverty were anathemas for Varsha’s wealthy, strictly vegetarian family. Devastated, they got in touch with Shoma Bose, a clinical psychologist—who happened to be Dinu’s aunt—to counsel Varsha.

A parallel story begins when Dinu is confined in his New York flat during the COVID pandemic. Far away in the Sundarbans, a company is about to set up a large coal-based plant, despite warnings from environmentalists that it would be a disaster for the tidal archipelago. Tipu, who is among the people who are trying to block the project, believes there is a connection between averting the crisis and a former client of Shoma. Through video-calls across unstable connections, Tipu prods Dinu to trace that particular client of Shoma. Digging into his memories of Shoma and bits and pieces of clues, Dinu tries to identify the client like a detective, as Shoma’s professional ethics doesn’t allow her to reveal anything about her clients.

There are two ways of looking at the immensely readable novel. I feel that while Ghosh’s first novel based in the Sundarbans, The Hungry Tide, explores the intersection between nature, folklore, human survival, and science, in his latest Sundarban-based novel, while the first three elements remain, “science” has been replaced by the “paranormal”. Given the wiring in my brain, I cannot be happy about the shift personally.

However, you can also say that reincarnation has been used merely as a literary tool here, Amitav Ghosh—through folklores of the people of the Sundarbans—is actually looking at our past, and the disaster that our future is increasingly looking like

Bengaluru / 14 March 2026

Joining the Khan Market Gang

After an insanely sumptuous breakfast at our New Delhi hotel, my son Ritwik and I went to see the samadhi of a frugal eater who would go on fast at the drop of a hat. Rajghat was a few metro stations and a short autorickshaw ride away from our hotel.

Ritwik, who belongs to the cash-rich-time-poor generation of modern India, had come to Delhi for two days’ work, but didn’t have the time to visit home. So we decided I would spend a Saturday with him. Here is a brief note on the exhilarating day.

At the place where Mahatma Gandhi was cremated in Rajghat, a low rectangular black marble monument has been built. It was designed to be minimalist and simple to reflect the values of the great man. The not-so-great men who killed Bapu are our rulers today. But they haven’t messed with his samadhi, at least not yet, unlike the vandalism they have done in Jallianwala Bagh. Lata Mangeshkar was singing Gandhi’s favourite Gujarati bhajan, "Vaishnava Jana To” when a pleasant breeze blew over the green lawns shining bright under a clear sky in the late-winter morning. Some visitors—Indians and foreigners who incidentally hadn’t come on tourist buses—were sauntering past the memory of the greatest son of modern India. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi still draws people. I am waiting for the day when he reclaims his place in the public life of India.

From a sad landmark of modern India to the beginning of the Indian civilisation. The section on the Harappan civilisation in the National Museum was overwhelming. I had no idea that their pottery was so large, in such varied shapes, and with such intricate designs. When their seals with right-to-left writing come out of pages of books and present themselves in three dimensions, it’s an indescribable feeling for the viewer. Unfortunately, the two most relatable artefacts of the period, the dancing woman and the bust of a bearded man, are in Pakistan. But what is in India is no less remarkable.

What bowled me over completely was a woman’s skeleton excavated in Rakhigarhi in Haryana between 1997 and 2000, which is incredibly undamaged. In his book EARLY INDIANS, Tony Joseph has written that only one of the fifty to sixty Rakhigarhi skeletons (c. 2600–2200 BCE, the Mature Harappan phase) offered DNA good enough for genetic analysis. And that skeleton (not the one in National Museum) settled one question finally. The Harappan civilisation happened before the steppe pastoralists migrated into India. the two groups had no shared genes.

As I looked at the woman wearing shell bangles on her left wrist, she opened a window to my distant past. She reminded me that we are descendants of an incredibly brilliant, peace-loving, mathematically gifted people. If young Indians are a force in the world of technology today, maybe, 5,000 years ago, the woman lying before me had passed on some of the genes that made it possible?

It was lunchtime and after walking many miles, the breakfast was almost forgotten! We weren’t far from Khan Market, where we went up a narrow staircase to reach Khan Chacha’s eatery. I am sure I had done a few good deeds in my previous life which entitled me to savour such a delectable combination of rumali roti and mutton at Khan Chacha’s. Must visit the place again because I doubt if there is a comparable place in heaven, which anyway is an unlikely destination for me.

Khan market, named after Gandhi’s friend Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was set up in 1951 to rehabilitate Punjabi refugees from West Pakistan. Over time, thanks to their enterprise, it has evolved into a first-class commercial hub frequented by politicians, journalists, diplomats, and other well-heeled Delhiites. For this reason, the Sanghi types coined the derogatory term “Khan Market Gang” to describe people who wear Western clothes but not a tilak, who read books, speak English, and are generally unaware of the original phase of the acche din two millennia ago. I noticed that the incorrigible Khan-Market crowd is yet to soak in the “sanskari” vibes and many of them still enjoy meat and reading. (Also, women’s clothes showed a distinct lack of disinclination towards the decadent West.)

To cater to readers among them, there are wo terrific bookshops in Khan Market: Bahrisons and Faqir Chand. We happened to walk into Bahrisons, which had books stacked from floor to ceiling, where Ritwik and I got exactly the books we were looking for. (Faqir Chand, a few blocks away, looked almost identical.) On top of that, there were copies of Amitava Ghosh’s latest novel _Ghost Eyes_ signed by the author. Ritwik grabbed two copies, one for a friend.

By then, I was quite tired and wanted to retire. But fortunately, I remembered that the National Gallery of Modern Arts (NGMA in short) which we had crossed in the morning wasn’t far away. For a long time, I had wanted to see Tyeb Mehta’s Human Landscape once again. And a Hemen Majumdar painting of a woman who was startled and embarrassed, presumably because someone had seen her while she was undressing.

Ritwik hadn’t visited NGMA, which has the finest collection of modern Indian art from Rabindranath Tagore to Bikash Bhattacharya. For the following three hours, Tagore, Abanindranath, Nandalal Bose, Ramkinkar Baij, Binode Behari Mukhopadhyay, Amrita Sherghil, Maqbul Fida Hussein et al took us to another world. I saw Tyeb Mehta’s painting again and was as amazed as I was the first time, but I couldn’t find Hemen Mazumdar or the large canvas of Jogen Chowdhury. (Why?) I was transfixed as I stood before a simple FN Souza drawing of a man in a few strokes. His haunting eyes gobbled me up for a while. It is a shame that NGMA doesn’t allow photography and hence I cannot show you the picture.

While our taxi went through a tree-lined avenue with embassies on either side of the road, I thought the areas we covered yesterday, i.e., a triangle with Aerocity, Rajghat, and Khan Market at its vertices, was possibly one of the finest urban landscapes of our time.

To wrap up, let me not forget say that contrary to popular belief, the Delhi people we met were almost epitomes of politeness. None of the three autorickshaw drivers we met tried to fleece us. Rather, they asked for modest amounts. Once, when we had to travel much longer than what the auto driver had initially anticipated, he didn’t grumble. And he was visibly pleased when I paid him for the extra distance without his asking for it. The oldest among the three, sixty plus Suresh Pandit, a proud brahmin and a true vegetarian, drives 20+ kilo metres from his East Delhi home to the Khan Market auto stand. Pandit said he was struggling to make ends meet because the app-based taxies were driving auto rickshaws out of Delhi roads. I was tempted to ask him if he realised that the political party he supports is doing exactly the opposite of what Gandhi prescribed, they are making life more difficult for the people who are already vulnerable.

 
I didn't ask him the question and he smiled warmly when we parted.

.

 Bengaluru / 08 February 2026

 

My Friend Pradip

 Last Thursday evening, as I sat through idleness and incessant rain outside, there was a phone call from an unknown number. It was one of those Bengaluru days when dampness reigns supreme and you tend to look more inward than outside. The call was from Kaberi, my friend Pradip’s wife. Kaberi said, ‘Your friend has left us today.’ The line was bad; I could catch little of what else she said.

I hope I won’t live long enough to receive many more such phone calls. But I won’t say it came as a shock, neither will I say I was devastated. What I can honestly say is this: since that moment, a dull, impalpable sadness has been hanging around me like the all-encompassing mist in rural Bengal in an evening in Hemanta, the often-unnoticed season between autumn and winter.

The phone call took me back to an indeterminable date in mid-1969 when Pradeep and I sat in the same classroom for the first time as undergrad students. Pradip, good looking and exceedingly fair, was mostly in kurta-pyjamas-slippers. His kurtas were invariably in light pastel shades, I didn’t see him in flashy clothes even as a teenager. We became friends easily, although we were very unlike. Pradip was quiet, never gloomy or angry, and always smiling, none of which adjectives fits me. In Bangla, Pradip means an earthen lamp. It won’t be an exaggeration if I say Pradip radiated happiness, which too is a kind of light. I believe Pradip never fought with anyone. I haven’t heard anyone say one negative word about him. That, in substance, was my friend Pradip Brahma.

While I lived in hostel, Pradip lived in a rented house with his mother. For some reason, I never visited their house in Santiniketan, although after graduating, I went to their Dhakuria home a number of times. It was a simple no-frills middleclass home.

Pradip was a disciplined hard-working good student. He did well at studies, but his BSc marksheet was unspectacular, as far as I can recall. After graduation, he didn’t join the Master’s course like most of his classmates. He did want to study further, but his family couldn’t afford it; he had to find a job quickly.

Back in the early 1970s, job opportunities were a negative number in West Bengal, which was going through the bloodbath of a failed revolution. Simultaneously, several economic factors including militant trade-unionism combined to drive away capital from Bengal. Major, century-old companies shifted their base away from Calcutta: Britannia, Brooke Bond, Lipton, ICI, to name a few. Thousands of manufacturing units, including a leading company, Metal Box shut down. The once thriving industrial estates in Howrah, which had begun under pioneers like Alamohan Das in the previous century, was turning into the death-valley of small industries that it is today. “Wagon breaking” would soon become an industry in itself. In front of their Chowringhee head office, jobless Metal Box workers sat under a red flag on a rug, shaking Bourn Vita tins partly filled with coins with a slit on its lid. Bourn Vita boosted their lives in the most perverse way then. They sat on the rug until death did them part, while the states whose names uppity Bengalis pronounced with disdain moved past. “Madrasis” had stopped coming to Calcutta for penpushers’ jobs; the reverse migration of Bengalis to South India for livelihood was yet to begin.

As unemployment stared at me, I had no idea how I could even look for a job, barring responding to rare adverts of job vacancies. But Pradip believed it wasn’t a problem. One just had to try hard. I was with him in one of his acts of trying hard when he and I barged into the office of the India Meteorological Department in Alipore with our CVs in plastic folders.

Although we were unsuccessful that morning, Pradip did find a job by trying hard. I don’t recall what kind of work it was, but I am sure it would have been one of the lowest paying sit-down jobs an educated person would accept. [After reading this, Pradip's daughter Rupsa told me that her father actually worked in a rice godown. It was far away from Jadavpur University, where Pradip would attend classes after his day's work. Rupsa also told me that her father had never even scolded her.]

Many in such a situation would spread roots under their desk and retire as a grumpy old man after wasting 35 years of their life. But Pradip enrolled for a three-year part-time MSc in Physics at Jadavpur University where he attended classes in the evening. If you don’t know how enormously difficult commuting was in Calcutta then and how tough physics is at the Master’s level, you won’t perhaps appreciate what impossible an unspectacular Pradip achieved in three years of work plus study.

Then he did his PhD from—if memory isn’t playing me false— the Indian Institute for Cultivation of Science in Jadavpur. He joined as a lecturer Sir Gurudas College in the city, from where he retired 10 years ago. There too Pradip showed his academic commitment. Instead of watching TV serials in the evening, he kept working on Solid State Physics through his college job and even after retirement, when he once told me, ‘I have published at least one paper every year since I began research.’

He need not have.

My transferable job took me away from Calcutta and I lost touch with Pradip soon after graduation. We picked up the thread in 2000, when I left my job and returned to Kolkata. Pradip was happily married then, his wife Kaberi, herself a highly competent person, too taught at a college. Their daughter Rupsa studied engineering and got a job at campus placement which took her to Japan. She and her husband work and live in Singapore now with their little son.

While Pradip did exceedingly well in his career and personal life, a neurological condition troubled him in the last inning of his life. Neurological medicines, which are invariably toxic, slowed him down and added kilograms to his once fine body. When I saw Pradip moving with difficulty, I recalled he was one of the finest table tennis players among us. And like in his life, he was never aggressive while playing table tennis. He would block all your smashes with infinite patience until you hit one into the net or go beyond the table.

He blocked the relentless aggression of a neurological disease for ten years or more until 7 August 2026. But ultimately, everyone has to lose the last match.

Goodbye, my friend. At last, you have managed to draw a few drops of tears in my eyes.

Bengaluru / 12 August 2025