Reading
an excerpt of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Man Booker nominated The Lowland http://nyr.kr/17RVhVo
the other day, I remembered a long-lost old friend. His name was Shyam Guha. He
was an Art Director in the Calcutta office of Clarion-McCann. http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ I got to know him rather
well in the late sixties and early seventies. We became friends working together
on ad assignments on most of his fairly frequent visits to the Bombay office.
Shyam
was a gem of a human being. He was probably the only innocent and guileless Bengali
I came across in Clarion’s Bhadralok
mafia during the eleven years, seven months and four days I worked for the
agency. He was loved – nay, revered – by all the studio guys although none of
us could quite fathom the reasons for him being invited once too often to
Bombay because we had a surfeit of Art Directors and Visualizers of our own.
Rumour
had it that the guys sent by the head office suits were spooks trained to keep
an eye on the locals and report back. None of us believed it of Shyam, though.
In fact, we used to look forward to his visits eagerly. I used to rib him about
the spooks business and he would take it sportingly. There was definitely some
truth in the 007 rumour, though. There definitely were spies from the Bong skies
among us. One of them was a suit who chewed the bones as well as the meat of a
chicken dish served to him. I can vouch for this trait confidently as he used
to come home to dinner at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ
at times. The other was a creative guy who would visit us occasionally and
spend the whole working day strolling around the office presumably trying to
catch snatches of conversation in the corridors and at the water fountain.
As
for Shyam and I, sometimes, we would taxi down to the Strand Book Stall during
the lunch break for a quick browse. I remember Shyam gifting me a copy of the
Marguerite Duras screenplay of Hiroshima
Mon Amour, a Calder & Boyars paperback with the
signature black and white cover. Shyam also regaled me with his tales of almost
daily after-work tippling at the legendary Calcutta landmark, Olympia Bar http://bit.ly/15YWMfH in the company of his
like-minded colleagues.
His
other repertoire of stories included those about the Naxalites who then were a
recent addition to the Calcutta scenario. Both of us were sympathetic to the
cause these urban guerillas were battling for. Shyam did not seem to know any
of the Naxals or their families personally. He also had not witnessed any of
the street battles. What he was passing on to us was chiefly hearsay although
his narratives were always compelling and riveting. Whenever he came home to
dinner, this was one topic of conversation Ujwal and I used to look forward to
listening.
During
his Bombay sojourn, Shyam usually lodged with the Bombay Resident Director,
Subrato Sen Gupta, now deceased. The Sen Guptas apparently did not have a spare
latch key for the front door of their palatial Neapean Sea Road flat. So Shyam
had a curfew to observe whenever he planned an evening out. He had to be back
and in bed by 11:00 p.m., the family retiring hour, exactly one hour before the
witching hour. This deadline was the theme of our favourite parting shot every
time he took our leave hurriedly and distractedly after dinner.
By
the time I decided to quit Clarion in 1976, Shyam’s visits to the Bombay office
had petered out. We lost touch with each other because both of us were bad
letter writers. The “out of sight, out of mind” bug was also probably at work.
