Mornings are glorious in Santiniketan. I was visiting Santiniketan in the sixties and staying in the home of the Vice Chancellor of ViswaBharati University. There was a sizable lawn next door and, early one morning, I woke and saw a man going around and around in a circle.
 
As I walked up to him, I saw a tall, bearded foreigner and was about to say Good Morning in English. He pre-empted me, by speaking in Bengali, and that too sardonically, “Finally, you are awake!” He justified the dig with his next sentence, coupled with an elaborate gesture of his arm, “Bright morning!”
 
Paul Detienne had displayed his three most characteristic ploys in the very first minute of our encounter. He could speak Bengali better than a native. He loved sarcasm. His arms, like his face, was not just expressive, they were dramatically demonstrative.

These were not features one expected in a Jesuit missionary. But Detienne seldom did anything very expected. When he said he was Belgian, I quickly suggested, “Why don’t we talk in French? I want to improve my spoken French.” He countered, “But I want to improve my Bengali. I’d rather we talk in Bengali.” After some haggling, we reached a deal. He will speak to me in Bengali; I will speak in French.
 
That created what Thurber would have called “a hullabaloo of misunderstanding.” Since I worked in an office near Park Street and he was often there for his work, our paths crossed frequently, and we stopped and talked at street corners. We attracted attention. Passersby stopped and chided me, “What’s wrong with you? That sahib is talking Bengali and you are talking some gibberish. Can’t you be polite and talk to him in English?” One time, when went to the Flury’s tea shop for some coffee, two persons, after hearing our conversation from the next table, came to help me, “It is all right if you don’t know English. Just tell us what you want to say in Hindi, and we will translate it for him in English.”
 
Detienne relished such confusion. He would pull their leg and say, “English is a far cry for him. He can’t even speak Bengali well. I am trying to teach him a little bit.”
 
Sometimes he would drop by my office. If I was busy, he would not waste his time, but talk instead with my secretary, my assistant, or even the receptionist. In short order he knew their name, where they lived, whether they were married, what they liked to eat. One time my assistant made the mistake, while serving him tea, of using the word ‘sugar’ instead of the Bengali equivalent, and Detienne said, “If you are a Bengali, and you don’t know the Bengali word for sugar, you need to improve your language. If you know the word, but choose to use a word from another language, then you need to improve your idea of yourself.” He said it gently and with a smile, but he detested the practice he had noticed of Indians mixing English words while speaking an Indian language.
 
I took him home to meet my parents and my brothers. He told Ashis, “I have a better beard than yours,” and he deliberately poked Pritish by mispronouncing his name as British. My mother wanted to know about his family and Detienne disclosed that all his brothers, six of them, were priests in different countries, mostly Africa, except one. His mother had apparently said that she needed one near her and would not let him join the Jesuits. The youngest brother was to get married, and Detienne wanted the bride to wear a sari, a Benarasi, for the evening reception. My mother dictated the steps involved in wearing a sari; I translated her words into French and my secretary typed them out. We helped Detienne buy a beautiful sari and he carried it to Brussels. But my mother’s instructions or my translation was poor, and the bride had to seek emergency help from the Indian Embassy before the reception. But, reported Detienne, the bride looked gorgeous and he was the hero of the evening.
 
A heavy price for my nomadic life is the number of friends one lost in pre-internet days. When I connected with Detienne again after twenty-five years, he had mellowed somewhat, but he still retained his proclivity for sarcasm and dramatic gestures. He was a literary celebrity, for he had produced a stream of witty, enjoyable books that had gained popularity among discriminating readers. I took it as a great compliment when one or two remarked that some of my own writing reminded readers of the flavor of Detienne.
 
I have a whole collection of Detienne’s books. I woke up early this morning, made a cup of coffee and walked out on the deck with a Detienne book. I looked at Detienne’s picture on the cover and half expected him to jump out, make an oversized gesture and say, “Finally, you are awake!”
 
I turned the pages and, toward the end, this is what I came across:
 
“My time has come to leave. I have finished all that I had to say.
​But not quite.
I will hope to see you again.”

I never understood my father’s unbounded affection for the young man. It bordered on admiration. I admired men who wrote good poety or played good cricket. What did father see in the small, thin man who limped as he walked, from a sad legacy of polio?
 
During those post-war years, inflation was a big topic and father invited a friend, a reputed professor, to give a talk on the subject. Strangely, father asked this young student to preside and introduce the professor. The professor knew the student too and suggested something stranger. He wanted the student to speak and he would preside. That’s the first time I heard the man. I was in school and knew nothing of inflation or economics. Yet I understood everything he said and realized the importance of inflation for ordinary people.
 
Some years later, when I had joined college and begun exploring my father’s library, I was surprised to find a thin book, For Democracy. The author, I recognized from the photo at the back, was the young person father liked so much. He had written a book! Curious, I started on it. I was spellbound.
 
Few books, beyond Aristotle, Freud and Marx, have influenced me as much as that modest book. It gave me the clearest idea of what a democratic society means. It certainly does not mean Modi’s India or Trump’s USA, majoritarian societies that mistreat or disempower minority groups. But, more than what it said, the way it said it changed my way of thinking.
​
It took little for granted and argued step by step, in the most limpid prose, leading the reader from the premise to the conclusion in clear, simple, unambiguous reasoning. I am not easily impressed, but the book bowled me over.
 
I was deeply moved and impressed. I immediately took his address from my father and went to see him in his tiny apartment. He made tea and we talked for a long time. He talked like nobody else I had encountered, nor have I met anybody since. He listened intently, as if his life depended on it. Then, before he responded to you, he summed up what you had said, often presenting it better than you had done. If he agreed with you, he said why and carefully mapped the area of accord. If he disagreed, he graciously laid out the grounds.
 
He was the living Bible of good exchanges, scrupulously courteous and punctiliously fair. He took the best interpretation of what you said, either to build on it or, if he thought it wrong, take each strand, analyze it fairly and discard it, often with your agreement. 

​I later saw him in public debates, with top-notch scholars and silver-tongued politicians, reducing them to rubble in minutes. He used the simple device of cutting through metaphors and verbiage, and laid out their logic in the sunlight of crystal-clear words. He eschewed drama and embraced direct talk. He supplanted sound and fury with simple syllogism. He was passionate in his faith in fairness and ardent in his loyalty to reason, and, thank Heavens, he won each time. David-like, he quietly slew the Goliaths of slick orators, glib lawyers and pugnacious party leaders.
 
Then I got to see the other side of him when I joined the university and encountered him as an instructor. I felt comfortable with him and thought of him more as a counsellor than a professor. I discussed all manner of things with him, whether it was an unobliging girl friend or a confusing family issue. I had no hesitation turning up at his home if my mind was troubled. He would make me listen to Bach and make me coffee. His patient hearing and thoughtful clues were just the salve my restless heart needed.
 
My years overseas cut off our personal contact. I heard of his administrative role in two universities where political activists paid him scant respect and scantier heed. I heard of painful rumors that he twice tried to end his life. I wanted to talk to him again. I was to visit Kolkata on a World Bank mission, and I called from Washington to make sure that I could meet him.
 
On a gloomy autumn evening, I finished my work downtown and directed the rented car to his Lake Town home. He looked older and frailer, with a graying forelock and thicker lenses. But his smile was radiant.
 
We were meeting after a decade, but an intangible nexus had endured. I told him of my new life abroad, my work and my family. He talked of the intervening years, the tumultuous experiences of his work as a university head and his current thoughts about society and its evolution. He continued to write, he said, then ruefully added that he was not sure anybody was reading or paying attention.
 
We had tea together and time seemed to have slipped away.
 
When I left at dusk, he limped to the door to say goodbye. From the car, in the pallid evening light, I had my last view of the man who had taught me how to think straight and how to speak direct. Maybe some activists and politicians did not care for him. I did. To me, he was special. He was always what his name said he was, untarnished.

My parents were both Bengalis, but they came from different states with very different genealogies. They came to know each other, in a very limited way then permissible, only because father’s sisters went to the same college as my mother and they became friends. Amazingly, that friendship lasted as well as the marriage itself. An astounding example was that when a sister, my aunt, was murdered in her home, my mother, defying all well-meaning dissuasion, decided to go there herself and cleaned the blood spots personally.
 
My parents were, like other couples who succeed in making a go of their marriage, were both similar and different. Father was outgoing and gregarious. He loved company and made no secret of it. His work fortunately permitted endless socialization. He invited friends and strangers alike at the drop of a hat, to the occasional discomfiture of mother.  He played tennis, his adversaries invariably turning up eventually for tea at our home.
 
Mother was essentially a more introspective person. She went along with father’s bent for hospitality, ardently cooking up a storm when father overdid and invited a large number. But she shone best in one-on-one talk with people she really liked. She had been an educator, but for many years she was just a homemaker rearing her children, yet her wits were razor-sharp. She listened quietly and avidly, but when her views differed, she expressed them gently but articulately.
 
In societies where it is customary for children to pay adoring homage to their parents even when the parents are far from ideal, it may seem invidious for a son to comment objectively on his parents’ relationship. I do so in an earnest effort to understand the air I breathed and the untraditional template I saw. Of their three children, I lived the longest with them, even through my college and university days, and saw their relationship change direction many times. Yet there was a vibrancy to their link that somehow endured.
 
The clearest sign of that was the way they handled their differences. Given their different backgrounds, their perspectives often varied. Mother came from a relatively comfortable middle-class family; my father had been through financial straits. He had a streak of concern about security that my mother, though cautious, usually lacked. Father came from a small family, his two sisters had careers and were independent; he tended to seek friends outside. Mother was the youngest of a huge family and was the darling of her brothers and sisters; all her thinking started with them. Father loved travel and was prepared to rough it. Mother was essentially a homing pigeon, liked nothing better than a pleasant palaver over a cup of tea.
 
It is interesting the way they reconciled their oddities. Father handed over family finances to mother entirely, trusting her scrupulous record-keeping, and felt free of worries. His sisters were old friends of my mother anyway; he went about developing a warm and close relationship with two of mother’s closest brothers. Mother wasn’t keen on travel but went along with father’s enthusiasm for vacation travel twice a year; at other times, she let him travel on his own, if he wanted.

​I cannot recall more than two occasions when they had an overt conflict of views. One time mother, clearly upset, went out of the house (I wouldn’t stop following her and walked beside her), but she only walked round the block and came back home in an hour. The rarity of their overt differences, I am certain, was because they never missed their early-morning and late-afternoon tea together, where children could join but were not really welcome. I have scant doubt that those were occasionally covert negotiating sessions.
 
When I visited friends, I immediately noticed a surprising difference in their family. You could see immediately the lack of power parity between their parents. The males clearly dominated, took major decisions; the women went along, though often resented it, sometimes harbored a grudge. At home, mother’s soft voice and dulcet tone scarcely concealed that she was a fully equal partner. Mother was the early riser and made their private morning tea. The day she took a job and went back to work after many years, father started making the tea. When they moved to a new home near her place of work, mother took back the function. When father retired from work, he swiftly resumed the charge. They shared work – and they shared power. Father never learned to cook, just as mother never learned to shop. They both learned to respect the other’s preference even while they followed their own preference.
 
Mother was a teacher and administrator before she married. When she went back to work, she again assumed a similar role. She did well and was loved and admired. I knew her capability at first hand. So, I was surprised, in fact a little disappointed, when father died suddenly in a botched surgery, she seemed to come apart. I had not anticipated her acute vulnerability. Then I realized that that was the dark side of a successful relationship: when it works, it is very pleasing; when it ends, it is very crippling.
 
I needed to wait. The mother I knew returned in time, a little aged, a little scarred, but return she did. It was a measure too of my father’s legacy of magic in her life. She savored her new innings. At ninety, I asked her, “Tell me, which was the most remarkable year of your life?”
 
She replied, without a moment’s pause, “Why, of course, this year.”

After two years in the factory, I had a prize post in the company’s headquarters, and went to work on an elite street of the city. The hitch was my boss didn’t want me. I had been foisted on him by the works director who believed, inexplicably, that I was ‘a man of ideas.’ My boss wanted his nephew to take the position and treated me as a pariah. I needed to get on his right side. How I had no idea.
 
My boss was a golf champion. I hated the game. He was a regular club goer. I shrank from the idea of joining a club and drinking beer with him. I had to think of something else.
 
His secretary was a pretty, short-haired woman. On the briefest acquaintance, Stacia said to me, “You are going to be trouble. With your outlandish ideas, you are a threat to this company. I will call you Menace instead of Manish.”
 
With that witty renaming, I saw an opening. I knew she had a master copy of all letters sent out. Could I have a copy of the boss’s letters, I asked, say the last 500?
 
“Why? You will understand nothing without the files,” she replied.
 
“I don’t want to understand anything. I just want to find out his style.”
 
“Good grief,” she said, but later quietly passed me a huge sheaf of his recent letters. I could have kissed her.
 
I studied the letters thoroughly over the weekend. Clearly my boss followed certain iron rules. One, the letter must be short and sweet, reeking of friendliness. Two, it has to strike a positive note, even if you are saying No.  Three, any complicated things you have to say should be separate, in an attachment. Four, cut out legalese or formal phrases, say things simply. The biggest rule: always sound like an affable, eager-to-help uncle.
 
I meditated on these rules as if my life depended on them. I swallowed them all.

​The following week two of my reports came back from the boss with the notation ‘Good,’ followed by a third that had ‘Excellent’ scribbled on it. More ‘Excellent’s in the next two weeks. The third week the boss called me in.
 
“You have a way with words,” he murmured. I had never seen a smile on him before. “I want you to do something for me.”
 
He had been invited to give a talk to the Material Management Association and he wanted me to prepare some talking points.

​I saw him two days later. I said, “Instead of talking points, I have written the entire speech for you.”
 
He eagerly took the papers and glanced. Then he nearly jumped.
 
“I am supposed to talk about managing materials. You start off with golf!”
 
“Nobody wants a stuffy discourse. They would be bored to death. You need to tell a story about materials management. What better story from a golf champion than one that starts with golf?”
 
He was still dubious, “This looks pretty short. I have to speak for at least ​a half-hour.”
 
“People go to sleep after twenty minutes. Even if they are listening to Demosthenes. If they want more, let them ask questions.”
 
I left him still shaking his head in disbelief.
 
The next week he called me in his office and, miracle of miracles, offered me tea and biscuits.
 
“Your speech was a great hit.” That ‘your’ was honey in my ears.
 
“They listened,” he practically beamed, “and then asked a lot of questions. Wow!”
 
On the way out, I crossed Stacia in a fetching blue dress. She inquired, “Menace, what is he so jolly about today?”
 
“I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe he is in love with you.”
 
She struck me with the folder she had in hand, but I quickly sidestepped and returned to my office.
 
The next five years I wrote every speech and presentation my boss made anywhere.
 
Years later, when I was working in the World Bank, the President intended to prepare a note endorsing Mother Teresa for the Nobel Prize. Since I was the only staff member who was from Kolkata and knew the Mother personally, I was asked to contribute.
 
I don’t remember what I wrote but, later on, found myself ghostwriting quite a few speeches. I still believed in stories instead of discourses.

I was lucky to find a job the moment I came out of the university. I felt I wasn’t so lucky that the job was in an industrial town an hour’s drive from the city. I had no car. I would take a train Sunday evening, arrive and stay in the apartment the company had allotted me during the week, and Friday evening return to the city. I resented the exile from city life. I thought sullenly of friends who had found jobs in the city and could explore its charms with new-found affluence. I forgot, of course, to think of the friends who had found no jobs at all.
 
For the next two years I used the local trains at least twice a week, sometimes more if there was a mid-week holiday. Very rarely I used a company car to visit the city, and thrice I accompanied a colleague who used his motorbike like a lance through urban traffic. Slowly I got used to the local trains, their plain look, hard plastic seats, numerous stops and piercing whistles. I began to like them.

What I liked most was the cavalcade of people who joined me on this fleeting passage. It changed a lot, and that was the beauty of it. When I briefly met Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author, in Washington he narrated how he had grown up insulated in his father’s house, meeting only the elite of Lima. When his father, concerned by his ‘effeminate’ affinity for literature, put him in a military school, he got to meet the children from all layers of society. My family wasn’t elite, and my parents cultivated a variety of friends, but the local trains let me rub shoulders with a far greater variety of people. There were the affluent who needed to make a short trip and preferred the rail to a dusty car voyage; the middle-class professors, clerks, salesmen, students and housewives making their regular trips for work or pleasure; and the vast number of simple folk, factory workers, female domestics, delivery men and all kinds of small traders on their usual round. Most were ready to talk when they sat next to me and I asked a question or two, and a few were amazingly forthcoming.
 
Mala, who sat opposite me and changed a bandage on her arm as the train moved, was candid when I asked how she was wounded. “An animal,” she said. “An animal did it. My husband. He drinks more than he earns. When I say anything, this is what he does.” Her family does not want her to leave him, and he may create a problem with her little child. She has to work at a quarry during the day and endure his abuse at night.
 
Two college students who travelled with me gave me an object lesson. Bijon, who commuted to the city every day, for he couldn’t afford to live there, returned to his village every evening, exhausted, quickly munched some puffed rice and went to teach poor boys in a night school. Arijit, even younger, did his classes and then proceeded to his cleaning job in the city restaurant before returning late to his town. “Why a cleaning job? Why can’t you get some better work?” I asked, only to be dumbfounded by his reply, “My illiterate mother is a maid in three houses and does cleaning. I want her to know that, though I read and write, I too do a cleaning job.”
 
Professor Adhikari, a balding, bespectacled man, said he couldn’t live in the city, for he had a bedridden daughter in a small-town charitable hospital, but he did not really mind the commute. “I am widower,” he explained, “and I rent a tiny room next to a club. It is very noisy. The club members never listen to my request to keep the volume down. The three hours I spend on the train is the quietest period I get to study.” Embarrassed, I stopped asking him any more questions, and he returned to a book he had already taken out of his cloth bag. As if to reassure me, he warmly said goodbye to me when he left, and even expressed the hope that he would see me again.

Rather different were ebullient Sujit and Romola, brother and sister, who were going for a weekend picnic and wanted me to vacate the window seat for them. I did so readily and was promptly rewarded with scones and pastries from Flury’s, a confection titan. As we talked, they revealed that their mother, ill for a while, had passed away six months ago – and, further, their father was set to remarry in eight weeks. I did not have to be a Freud to divine that their high-spirited picnic was, alas, a ruse to avoid a weekend encounter with their father.
 
My most memorable encounter was with an elderly man, indistinguishable in appearance from others of his age and but indefinably distinguished in his bearing. Eyes riveted on him the moment he entered the train. Before sitting next to me he politely nodded his head, as if to seek my approval. As the train started and I started reading again, he gently coughed and asked, “The book you are reading, isn’t in English, is it?” He had noticed the title and I explained that it was a French novel by Marguerite Duras. He then talked of the advantage of knowing a foreign language, citing the unusual reason that the ‘foreign’ then does not remain foreign. He asked what I did, and then reciprocated by saying that he was a union leader and politician. He talked frankly of the problems of his double role and narrated how he had embarked on union activity from a deep sense of injustice to workers. He spoke of the need to balance the fair with the practical, the right with the acceptable. Spellbound, I listened to a masterly analysis of what is and what should be.
 
Two years later, I was transferred to the company’s headquarters in the city and my odyssey in local trains ended. It seemed to me that the phantom train, carrying a vast and varied assortment of interesting people, that had been traversing my life every week, bringing me the exciting savor of worlds unknown, had suddenly lost its way in an impenetrable fog. No more whistles, only the honk of an impatient city car.

​My father, with his widowed mother, was ejected from his father’s home. His uncles wanted the house for themselves. Another uncle, more distant, took pity on him and found him a job in a printing shop. He did well later on and we lived in a comfortable apartment in a large building, of which he had supervising charge. Perhaps because of his modest beginning, he had an immoderate respect for the common man. He tried, in every way, to imbue his sons with the same respect for people who worked for us, the gardener, the gatekeeper or the janitor.
 
The incident I remember most clearly was the occasion when his lesson failed.
 
I don’t remember how young my brother and I were at the time, but we were young enough not to be able to peer out of the dining room window without standing on a chair. We would stand on two chairs at the two large windows of our third-floor apartment and watch the busy street that ran in front of our home.
 
The traffic on the street was of endless interest to us. There were few cars those days, mostly pedestrians, a few handcarts and rickshaws. We competed in identifying people we knew, Mr. Bose the doctor or Hafeezji the tailor. There were two familiar beggars, one very old and the other quite young, and there were also boys from the nearest slum who came to play soccer with us. Between my brother, less than two years older, and me there was stiff competition: the winner was the one who identified a target earlier.

​At some point something quite different drew out attention. Our gatekeeper, Ramji, a tall, gaunt man who always wore a crisp khaki uniform, sported a bright scarlet turban. He might have been a man of modest means, but he was very fastidious about his appearance. Early every morning he would bathe, dress, come out on a small open porch on the ground floor next to the building and sit on a stool to tie his turban. We marveled at the huge length of his turban strip and how he wound the strip around his head. He went around and around with the long strip until he had a neatly, tightly wound turban around his august head. Spellbound, we watched this ritual every morning. It was a spectacle far more interesting than the trivial things we saw on the street.
 
As we watched this show morning after morning, an intriguing idea sprang from nowhere. I wish I could claim authorship of the original idea. I cannot. My brother was very conscious of his elder status and he was, admittedly, quite devilishly inventive. His imagination had been doubtless stirred by the breathtaking sight of the huge red turban and the eye-catching process of its daily construction. We talked for several days about the idea and developed it. It would take some doing, but we felt we could execute the task to perfection.
 
And so it was that on a bright summer morning my brother and I got up early, and quickly ate our cereal, so that mother would be quickly out of the dining room, leaving us free to carry out our mission without interference. (We both doubted she would take to our idea with any enthusiasm; in fact, she might try to dissuade us.)

​We stood on our chairs and held our buckets carefully, and looked at each other, waiting for Ramji to emerge, bathed and dressed. After an eternity, he did. He sat on the stool and, with his usual punctiliousness, tied his turban. As he did the last round, my brother looked at me and nodded his head. I tilted the bucket and let the entire load on Ramji’s nearly turbaned head.

​He was dumbfounded for a second. There was no rain, he must have thought, how come the sudden avalanche of water. He jumped up and was about to look up for the answer when my brother, with perfect timing, tilted his bucket and poured a bucket load of water on Ramji’s uptilted face.
 
Mission accomplished, it remained only to place the empty buckets in the bathroom and return quickly to our desks, to pretend to do classwork and gloat over our pinpoint accomplishment. The pretension did not last long.
 
In less than six minutes we heard our father roaring our names and asking us to come to the living room in a second.
 
We came and saw Ramji standing in his uniform and disarrayed turban, dripping water all over the living room carpet. Father looked livid with rage.
 
“When he told me, he had been drenched, I thought it was some rascal from some other apartment. I am shocked to hear from this poor man that it was from my own apartment. How could you do such a terrible thing?”
 
We, of course, had no answer.
 
“You must respect all people. Especially, people who are good enough to work for us. I am ashamed, and you should be ashamed too. I want to hear you two express your apologies to this wonderful hardworking man. Promise him you will never do such a horrendous thing again.”
 
We did.
 
“I want you to fold your hands and ask for his forgiveness.”
 
We did that too. This was a bit too much for Ramji. No employer had done such a thing for him.
 
“They are just boys,” he said to my father, “I have already forgiven them. Let us all forget about it.”
 
He quickly left the scene. Our father growled some more and then he went to his office.
 
That evening my brother and I avoided father and stayed at our desks longer than usual.
 
When mother returned from her sister’s place late in the evening, father, still grouchy, started telling her of the extraordinary misdeed of her children.
 
From my desk, I could hear mother say, “Tell me first what they did!”
 
The next moment I could hear our mother’s girlish giggle.
 
I knew then that the episode was finally over.