Sankar,the conscience-keeper of the Sixties Calcutta,gets discovered outside of Bengal and India. And he cant stop chucklingIt all began with a parting shot. If it wasnt for Noel Barwell,the last English barrister practising in Calcutta,Sankar might have never written a word. The last time we met,60 years ago,he said,You are an exceptional person and one day the world will acknowledge it. This single utterance changed my whole life, recalls Sankar,whose initial ambition was to build a statue of Barwell in Calcutta. I had no idea that it would cost the kind of money that a lowly Bengali clerk like me did not possess. He then thought of naming a road after Barwell,but soon realised that the naming of a road after an English barrister in newly independent India would not be favourably looked upon. So 16-year-old Mani Shankar Mukherji,a college dropout and sometime clerk,wrote Kato Ajanarey (So Much Unknown),a novel about the life around the law courts in Calcutta in the 1960s,and became a reasonably well-known author called Sankar by the time he turned 20. But the boy from Howrah says he could have never imagined that with the English translations of his popular works such as Chowringhee and now The Middleman,the rest of the country and now the West would come calling. You know,the effort to reach England from Bengal began more than 100 years ago, says Sankar,as he eases into his chair,smiling cheekily,as if letting me in on a little secret. The 76-year-old Bengali writer has braved Delhis oppressive heat to attend the launch of The Middleman,the English translation of his acclaimed story Jana Aranya,by Penguin India,and is telling me all about his first trip to England to attend the London Book Fair earlier this year. I never thought my train would go beyond Asansol. But then neither did Rabindranath Tagore and,oh boy,did he try valiantly! The organisers lodged us on 97 Cromwell Road in Hampstead and Rabindranath also lived on Cromwell Road in 1912 when he came to England to get his works published! says Sankar excitedly. The conscience-keeper of the Bengali middle class of the 60s and 70s has been feted in his mother tongue,but it is only now that the West has begun to get a taste of the compassionate worldliness of his novels and of Calcutta,the city that he has documented so closely all these decades. Sankar acknowledges that the recognition from beyond Bengal has been a long time coming,but humbly says its all his fault. You see,its my Bengali arrogance. I always thought that I shall not go to the world,the world should come to me. But I was very surprised when Ravi Mirchandani of Atlantic Books came to meet me in Calcutta,he said he came to meet only me, says Sankar. Chowringhee,Sankars classic about the Shahjahan,a hotel that has a novel in every brick,was published by Atlantic Books in the UK recently and Sankar is thrilled to read full-page reviews of the book in The Independent,The Guardian and The Sunday Times. I feel good about believing in a World War II advertisement that showed a bottle of Horlicks and said Not available yet but worth waiting for, chuckles Sankar. Both Chowringhee and The Middleman have been excellently translated by Arunava Sinha who has retained the humanity of Sankars language and his well-timed humour that treat his characters and their predicaments with a spoonful of empathy and just a pinch of irony. Sankar,once berated as a one-book author,still writes in his home in the middle of South Kolkata. I realised early in my life that when you are criticised or humiliated,your worst problems are your friends and well-wishers. One of them asked me not to waste my time writing about high-society life that Id depicted in Chowringhee and to come closer to the soil and soul of the city, says Sankar,who began to write about the agonies of the overcrowded human jungle that is the city the trials and tribulations of ordinary people under pressure to feed their families,a place where morals are constantly eroded and yet the conscience-watch has not stopped ticking. But today Sankar is treading new terrain: he has completed his manuscript on the last years of Swami Vivekananda titled Achena Vivekananda (The Unknown Vivekananda) and the book is to be published by Penguin next year.
