Collector of stories

His admirers have always loved Sankar’s ability to capture the world of the ordinary Calcuttan. With The Middleman now available in English, his work is being “discovered” by the West. Nilanjana S Roy meets the bestselling author

During lunch at the guest house in Delhi where Sankar is preparing for a day’s worth of interviews, the writer makes a small but revealing gesture. As the kitchen majordomo places a bowl on the table, Sankar stops in mid-sentence, lightly touches the man on his arm in a gesture of thanks, and says a few words to him, picking up a conversation they’d been having before any interviewers arrived.

 

Sankar’s inner recorder rarely switches off. He remembers tiny details about Bimal Mitra and other writers who ruled the bestseller lists with him in Bengal. He can describe the men who worked with him in his first business office, occupying tiny corners of a large room, down to the last detail of the poplin shirts they wore. He often puts interviews on pause to ask the interviewer about his or her life; later, at a book discussion, his attention is on the audience and on his fellow participants. The habit of observing, of collecting other people’s stories — especially those who are often invisible — runs strong in him; he’s built a paperback empire on it.

There are many ways in which Mani Shankar Mukherji, better known as Sankar, could tell his story. He could start with the success of his first book — Kata Ajanare (So Much Unknown) — as it was serialised in the redoubtable Bengali magazine Desh. Or he could start with the late maestro Satyajit Ray’s admiration for Sankar’s portrayal of the corruption and stagnation of Calcutta in Jana Aranya (The Middleman), which became one of Ray’s most searing films. He could even start with the story of his recent triumph at the London Book Fair, where the literary world celebrated the “discovery” of the bestselling author who’d been feted in Bengal for decades while remaining invisible outside the borders of India.

Instead, in almost all his interviews, Sankar starts with the story of his mentor — the last British barrister in India, Noel Barwell. “He was the first person in my life to offer me encouragement. He told me that one day, I would be somebody. I have never forgotten him.” As Barwell’s clerk, the boy from Howrah who’d had to give up his dreams after the death of his father found two things — an inexhaustible appetite for books, and the kindness of the man who would become his teacher. He read everything in Barwell’s office, down to the dreariest law reports; and Barwell gently showed him how to get over his discomfort with English, how to play host at a dinner, and a hundred other things. Most of all, Barwell gave the young writer-to-be something he’d never had before — a belief in himself.

If statues had cost Rs 100, or if the Calcutta Municipal Corporation had been willing to name a road after an Englishman in those nationalistic times, Sankar might well have continued as a clerk, working his way up to office manager in one of the many buildings he describes with absolute accuracy in Seemabaddha (Company Limited) or The Middleman. Instead, he repaid Barwell in the only way he could: by writing about him, in the hope that perhaps Desh or one of the other magazines might take a short piece. Too shy to “harass” the editor, he came back after a month’s delay to see whether he had been rejected, only to find that the editor had been waiting impatiently for the writer to return.

Sankar’s gifts as a writer have been constant since his first book — he has the popular touch, the ability to capture the bustle and heartbreak behind the façade of a grand hotel (Chowringhee) or the desperation of the unemployed in an age of joblessness (The Middleman). His critics sneered when he got details wrong — “bread-and-breakfast” instead of “bed-and-breakfast” was an easy mistake for someone who’d never been outside Calcutta to make — but his fans loved the way he captured the world of the ordinary Calcuttan while also offering a glimpse of the hotels and boardrooms where they would often be denied entry.

He says with some amusement that the literary world in Bengal never took to his style of writing: “The only prize Chowringhee won was a prize for best bookbinding.” And while his books sold in lakhs in Bengal — a new ‘Sankar’ would be read on the trams, peddled by roadside hawkers, bought along with the vegetables and fish to be devoured with equal relish by ordinary office-goers — it took 45 years for Chowringhee to be translated into English.

That leads you to Sankar’s second favourite story about his career as a writer. After the success of Chowringhee led to a demand for a bagful of Sankar at Frankfurt, London and other centres of the literary industry, he was often asked why he hadn’t approached foreign publishers previously. “It was my Bengali arrogance,” Sankar explains. “Let them come to me, I said. I won’t go to them.” And so they have, asking for more.

Perhaps the reason why books like The Middleman and Chowringhee have lasted is because Sankar has the two essentials you need to be a bestselling author — he’s a great listener, and he has an easy, fast-paced style that often descends into melodrama, but is always entertaining. He spent a lot of time in the innards of hotels, chatting with everyone from the doormen to the chefs and the managers, in order to write Chowringhee; and his exposure to the seamy side of business gave him an insider’s look at the lives of the women who often appear as golden-hearted whores in his works.

His most recent bestseller, a life of Swami Vivekananda, is fuelled by his trademark curiosity. “I have always been interested in Vivekananda — he lived in Chitpur, not far from where I grew up — and researching his life, I discovered much that was surprising. His obituary in the Calcutta papers was carried one day after his death, for instance, and said merely that Narendranath Datta, Matric Pass, was no more. So that’s a mystery— I try to solve it, though I treat his life with respect. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about — writing is like wresting date juice from pebbles, anyway — but I believe you must have respect for your subject.”

It’s an unusual statement for a bestselling author to make, but it’s utterly consistent. From Barwell to the anonymous young businessman who inspired The Middleman when Sankar glimpsed his worried, innocent face at a crowded crossing, to the distraught, beautiful and corrupted women who drift through the pages of Chowringhee, Sankar has set down their stories with as much fidelity as he could summon. His reward has been lakhs of readers in Bengal — and now, a growing set of international readers beguiled by the stories of the boy from Howrah who never stepped out of Calcutta, and never missed the wider world.

THE MIDDLEMAN
Author: Sankar
Translator: Arunava Sinha
Publisher: Penguin
pages: 192
Price: Rs 200