Sankar acknowledges that the recognition from beyond Bengal has been a long time coming, but humbly says it’s all his fault. “You see, it’s 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, Sankar’s 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 Sankar’s 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 I’d 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.

... contd.