Bestselling author Sankar shares his much misunderstood, stereotyped belonging

SMELLING fish and seeing through (and through) his looking glass is something that comes to Mani Sankar Mukherji as easily as escaping these comes to you. Call it Bangla brilliance at its best, or vain old intellectual indulgence, but to Sankar, it's life. The pages of his books, like wings bestowed upon a caterpillar then called Calcutta; today, the Kolkata of crowded, colourful flights of freedom. His reflections of the city of trams and shams are as stark as they're dark, and yet, enlightening in portraying the beauty and the beast of what it is to be Bong.

"In this world," reads the afterword in his latest English translation of the semi-autobiographical The Middleman, "compulsion for money could make a mother give up a daughter to the trade, a brother push forward his sister, a husband lead his wife in."u00a0 Satyajit Ray was the first to call him after reading those lines in the original Jana Aranya. This time, we called on the gentleman as he walked about in bathroom slippers, while his protagonist Somnath Banerjee wore his shoes and visited prostitutes that came along with the struggle that followed his father's demise.

From Chowringhee to The Middleman, hasn't Kolkata grown on you so much that you've grown out of it?
All my life, I have struggled in this city. It's a strange affair that continues to enrich me. You can love many women, but just one city.