‘Dear Reader’ by Sankar is about making of a writer, and a Bengali icon

Bindu Menon

Bengali writer Sankar’s heart-tugging memoir isn’t just a personal account, documenting his rather serendipitous journey. It is also a moving tribute to the people who encouraged him and shaped his life. Along the way, he offers witty, perceptive insights into typical Bengali traits, a searing look at social mores and inequities, a critical takedown of Calcutta, of which Sankar was once the sheriff, and a historical unravelling of Bengal, before and after Partition. It is a personal story told with much honesty, humour and humility. First published in Bengali in 2015 as ‘Eka Eka Ekashi’, the English translation, ‘Dear Reader: A Writer’s Memoir’, has been deftly executed by Arunava Sinha.

Sankar’s transition to writing happened quite inadvertently, when he decided to honour his deceased employer, Noel Barwell, the last English barrister of the Calcutta High Court. It was the genial man who introduced Sankar, then a “luckless, bewildered” young typist, to the world of books and also to the Spence’s Hotel in Kolkata, which became the inspiration for ‘Chowringhee’, his later bestseller. Since he couldn’t afford to build a statue or name a road after Barwell, a young Mani Sankar Mukherjee decided what he thought was doable: write a book about his beloved boss. That’s how ‘Kato Ajanare’ (The Great Unknown) was born, as was the writer, Sankar.

In his memoir, Sankar writes with an easy familiarity, as if taking the reader by hand to the school where he studied and later taught for a while, the lively addas, Calcutta icons like the Writer’s Building and Flury’s, the celebrated world of Bangla theatre, and the grand hotels, where cabaret dancers, who were “kindness incarnate”, often treated him to imported chocolate and an occasional haircut for the poor lad who couldn’t afford one. Sankar dedicates a chapter to formidable women like Binodini and Shefali, who strode the Bengali stage, and demonstrated the courage to write about their lives, no holds barred.

There is much affection when Sankar recalls the women in his life, especially his mother and grandmother. There’s an incident where a frail old man, far away from Calcutta, takes much pain to locate Sankar’s house. He demands to see Sankar’s mother but suddenly takes ill in their house. Sankar later learns that the man has heart-related and other ailments but had risked his life to meet not the writer, but his mother. “There’s no point meeting writers, you can get to know them through their writings. When I saw the leaf, I felt the urge to see the tree itself, that’s why I am here,” said the man, before prostrating before Sankar’s mother. Needless to say, the mother and the reader, Subodh Roy from Chinsurah, forged a lifelong bond.

As countless such characters — literary personalities, neighbours, relatives, colleagues, industrialists and so on — flit in and out, the narrative, which follows no particular chronology, often gets repetitive and rambling. Yet Sankar’s skills as a raconteur, nostalgic nuggets and colourful visual language make up for any shortcomings. It is not surprising, therefore, why many of his novels were turned into movies. ‘Chowringhee’, an Uttam Kumar-Supriya Devi blockbuster, is regarded as a cult movie. Sankar’s two other stories, ‘Seemabaddha’ (Limited Company) and ‘Jana Aranya’ (The Middleman), were part of Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy, the third one being Sunil Gangopadhyay’s ‘Pratidwandi’.

For a writer who was dismissed as a one-book author and who developed a five-year-long period of angst between his first and second novels, Sankar doesn’t miss the opportunity to take a swipe at Bengali arrogance or lack of moderation. He minces no words too when he tells why he prefers Howrah over Calcutta. “A city is the victory column of a society, which humans themselves create through discipline and combined initiative,” he writes, and asks, “Is Calcutta even a city?”

Sankar recalls asking his mother, “Who is greater, the writer or the reader?” Of course, the reader, she said: “It is the reader who becomes a writer one day. Someone who has never been a reader will never be a writer.” He couldn’t agree more.