There were still hardly any art galleries in Calcutta. And the idea of buying a painting — and not a print — was still an unusual one. But recently, at a cocktail party in a superior’s bungalow in Delhi, Pramathesh’s wife had noticed an original Nandalal Bose. Not that she’d known it was an original; but someone told her it was. Returning to their flat, she’d said it might be a good idea to buy a decent painting for their drawing room; it would be their first stab at creating a status that would be in accordance with Pramathesh’s professional life. Now, Ranjit racked his brains and said, “Well, I know where Gopal Ghosh lives; we could go there.” Of course, owning a Gopal Ghosh may not be owning a Picasso; but his paintings were held in high regard. Just as Pramathesh’s career as a chartered accountant and an employee was at the fledgling stage, so was the Indian art world, with its ambivalences and lack of self-belief. Paradoxically, it was those who might be accused of not understanding art who would nourish it, unknowingly, through this delicate moment, setting up a concomitance between its life and theirs. It was as if their lives were destined, in some sense, to be connected and to grow together, though this must not be seen to be so.
So the two men decided to meet in front of the office itself in Chowringhee, at a quarter past ten on Saturday, before the seven-storeyed building. An old, moustached watchman who had nothing much to occupy him hovered in the background while Pramathesh waited for Ranjit to arrive. When he did, Pramathesh instructed his driver to remain parked where he was. From there, they went in Ranjit’s white Ambassador, the driver in front wordless, down a main artery, which was fairly deserted on a Saturday, towards one of the by-lanes in an area quite far from both New Alipore and the company guest house; Pramathesh, in fact, didn’t know what it was called. Here, they came to a ground-floor flat in an old two-storeyed house in a narrow lane facing, and flanked by, other houses not unlike itself. They were not sure if they should just walk in, but when they did, finding the door open, they saw no one inside; only the ceiling fan hung immobile above them. The painter, emerging into the living room a few minutes later to discover them, didn’t seem to mind their intrusion. He was wearing a dhoti and a shabby jacket himself, and looked abstracted; he glanced at the two men in their pressed shirtsleeves, trousers, and sandals, and appeared to make a shrewd appraisal of why they were here and who they might be. “Was it you who just came up in the car?” he asked, to which Pramathesh said, a little hesitantly, “Yes.” He finally sold Pramathesh two of his paintings very matter-of-factly, bringing them from a room inside, one showing a pale, white forest, in which the trees were crested with white blossoms, with probably a peasant woman walking in it, and the other of a group of figures, possibly pilgrims, walking dimly past a mountainside. One might have missed their appeal; indeed, Pramathesh had to summon up something forgotten inside him, something from his early youth, in order to respond to them. It was not a faculty he had to use often, or of late; and he wasn’t altogether sure of his judgement. At any rate, without quite knowing why, he bought the two paintings for one hundred and fifty rupees each.
Two days later, Pramathesh left Calcutta. As had been apparent, he continued, as the next decade unfolded, to do substantially better than Ranjit Biswas. His rise surprised even him. Ranjit remained more or less stationary, with the prospect of a small promotion in the next five years; while Pramathesh was transferred to Bombay, and made general manager at the Bombay branch. The last old master he bought was a Jamini Roy, in 1969, again on a visit to Calcutta in the winter. By then, Calcutta was in decline; the branch was experiencing a series of lockouts, and Ranjit was sounding more and more beleagured and nonplussed, as if he’d just found out that he was fighting the battle alone. “It’s difficult to be in control anymore, bhai. They”—he meant the workers—“are the bosses now; we run behind them,” he said, a little self-conscious in his defensiveness, and partly because Pramathesh was now, technically, no longer a colleague; the old banter had a slight fakeness about it. Jamini Roy was already an old man, and, during this visit, Pramathesh went to the painter’s house with Amita, his wife, small and bright in a printed silk sari, about to assume life in Bombay; the old man, in a vest and dhoti, tottered out, and signed the paintings on the floor. When asked innocently by Amita, “What time of the day do you paint?” he responded like any cantankerous old man, “How can I answer that? Can I tell you when I eat, or drink, or sleep?” Upside down on the floor before them lay the paintings, the ideal figures with over-large eyes that did not see, the repetitive shapes in repose.
It’s not as if Pramathesh and Amita Majumdar spent too much time thinking about these paintings; Bombay didn’t give one much time to think. They moved from drawing room to drawing room as the couple themselves moved about in Bombay, from Worli to Kemp’s Corner to Malabar Hill. And it wasn’t as if they were insensitive to art; nor were they pretentiously artistic; they were content to display them, respectfully, on the walls. Of course, they — the paintings — did coincide with that part of the couple that was defined by their natural ambition, by Pramathesh’s career and his concern for the future, but in an odd way, so that the paintings somewhat transcended, or ignored, these vivid concerns. They were probably an unexplored part of their lives. Meanwhile, Jamini Roy, who’d already seemed so old, died peacefully in 1972. Gopal Ghosh died in penury and neglect about five years later, his last days an alcoholic stupor, often drinking himself to sleep on the pavement, and being carried home by passersby.