“Don’t come. I’ll tell you when I’m better,” said Deepayanda on the phone last week. I – we – knew of his pleurisy.
In another time, Deepayan Chatterjee was holding my hand through the rigour of subbing copy at a desk in the fourth floor of ABP House on Prafulla Sarkar Street in Calcutta.
The blue pencil and the red pencil were figures of speech till Deepayanda explained their significance.
That year, after a motorcycle accident, Kuru (Kuruvilla) assigned me to the desk because my foot was broken and I couldn’t walk. Raja (Rajagopal), who was later editor of The Telegraph, was, besides Deepayanda, the chief. In our lingo, the chief was always the chief subeditor. It was their job to taste the news that came in typewritten or telexed copy.
Business Standard was then in the ABP group. It was Aveek babu (Aveek Sarkar’s) venture, not of his grandfather Prafulla Sarkar, after whom the street is named. It was a small paper with a big punch. The one that punched above its weight.
Deepayanda came into this world of ours. His father was Boudhayan babu, the economist with whom he had issues; his mother taught English in the college from where my Ma graduated; and he was performing on stage, cutting a lion’s figure.
I have never seen a handsomer man than Deepayanda. Six-plus feet tall, we stood eye-to-eye, as the shells flew and my son was dying.
In Kargil, Iraq and Afghanistan, it was always Deepayan Chatterjee at the other end of the sat phone, with Sarveen, Harshita, Raja, taking the copy in the adrenalin rush, and a shell whistling past.
Even as he did all of that, Deepayanda also held my shoulders in the tea shop as my son was passing into an eternal coma due to an insidious brain tumour after having had congenital heart disease.
Deepayanda, travel well, in my son is my father.
In the whistling of the shell,
In the crackle of the wire,
You stood ringing a bell,
Speak to conscience, be honest, Deepayanda, always upright.
He cut a lion’s figure. With frizzy hair on his head and a beard across face, his looks belied the taskmaster he was.
Sujan Dutta is an independent journalist.
