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