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