When news came on Friday afternoon that Shankar (Mani Shankar Mukherjee) had passed away, it felt as though a familiar street in Kolkata had suddenly gone silent. For many of us who grew up in Bengal in an era when books were our most steadfast companions, Shankar was not merely an author. He was an atmosphere; a moral weather system; a way of seeing the city and, through it, ourselves.
In homes where bookshelves were prized possessions and afternoons stretched languidly under slow-moving fans, his novels sat within easy reach. They were gifted with ceremony and affection — at birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. If you did well in your exams, someone would inevitably hand you a copy of Chowringhee.
If you were stepping into the professional world, Seemabaddha often followed. For the introspective and the romantically inclined, there was Kato Ajanare. Later came Aka Aka Ekashi, proof that time had only sharpened his understanding of solitude and survival.
And, of course, there was Jana Aranya — perhaps the most unsettling of them all.
Books that travel across generations
Those books travelled across generations. They were inscribed in careful blue ink: “With blessings,” “On your wedding day,” “For your new journey.” One elderly relative once joked that no Bengali marriage was complete without Shankar. Everyone laughed — but no one thought it odd. His books were not decorative gifts; they were maps for navigating adulthood.
What set Shankar apart
What set Shankar apart was his extraordinary ability to turn Kolkata into both setting and protagonist. In Chowringhee, the grand hotel on the city’s iconic thoroughfare became a theatre of ambition and heartbreak. Beneath the chandeliers and polished floors, he revealed the precarious lives of those who served and those who were served. Glamour shimmered, but fragility was never far behind.
In Seemabaddha, he dissected corporate ambition long before it became fashionable literary terrain. The climb up the professional ladder, the silent compromises, the ethical grey zones — Shankar captured them with an insider’s precision. Success, he reminded us, often carries invisible invoices.
If Seemabaddha examined ambition within institutions, Jana Aranya ventured into the harsher terrain of survival outside them. It followed a young man navigating unemployment and moral erosion in a city that offered few easy choices. The marketplace in Jana Aranya was not merely commercial; it was existential. Everything seemed negotiable — goods, loyalties, even conscience. For many readers, it was a deeply uncomfortable mirror. It stripped away the romance of striving and exposed the raw nerve of desperation.
Together, these novels formed an unofficial trilogy of aspiration and compromise. The hotel, the corporation, the marketplace — each space illuminated a different facet of the urban middle-class dream. Shankar did not judge his characters harshly, but neither did he absolve them. He observed, patiently and unsentimentally, as they navigated desire, duty, and the relentless pressure to “make it.”
Then there was Kato Ajanare, tender and restless, exploring distance and intimacy in ways that felt startlingly modern. And decades later, Aka Aka Ekashi returned to the theme of loneliness with the wisdom of age, reflecting on what remains when ambition has run its course.
Reading Shankar in those pre-digital decades was an immersive act. Books were not consumed; they were inhabited. You lived inside that hotel lobby, that corporate boardroom, that cramped office where a deal hung in the balance. You could hear the trams clatter, feel the humidity cling, sense the unspoken calculations in every handshake.
He loved Kolkata deeply, yet he never romanticised it. He captured its colonial hangover, its intellectual ferment, its bureaucratic lethargy, its quiet tragedies. He chronicled the rise of the Indian middle class — its hunger for respectability, its fear of failure, its uneasy dance with modernity. In doing so, he gave narrative shape to a generation’s anxieties.
As tributes poured in, one realised how thoroughly he had shaped our moral imagination. He taught us that cities are not abstractions but accumulations of individual choices. That institutions are built on human frailty as much as on policy. That survival, in a competitive world, often tests the boundaries we once thought inviolable.
With his passing, an era dims — the era when one waited eagerly for the next instalment in a magazine, when book fairs were pilgrimages, when a novel could define a decade of one’s inner life. Yet his relevance endures because ambition, loneliness and compromise remain constants.
The shelves in many Bengali homes still hold those dog-eared copies, their pages yellowed, margins occasionally underlined. They are more than relics. They are inheritance.
And as long as someone opens Chowringhee on a quiet afternoon, wrestles with the dilemmas of Seemabaddha, or confronts the uneasy truths of Jana Aranya, Shankar will continue to do what he did best: hold up a mirror to Kolkata — and ask us, quietly but insistently, what price we are willing to pay for the lives we choose to lead.