Shadow Of His Father

 In the quiet lanes of Prabhat Road, Pune, where Gulmohar trees flamed red in April and the air carried the scent of roasted corn from roadside stalls, lived Rajiv Das Bandopadhyay, 45, a writer whose name was both a blessing and a burden. His father, Sanjeev Das Bandopadhyay aka S D Bandopadhyay, was a literary colossus—winner of the Sahitya Akademi, Jnanpith, and Padma Bhushan. Sanjeev’s novels were etched into the syllabi of Pune, Delhi and Jadavpur University. His prose was like monsoon rain—dense, lyrical, and cleansing. Rajiv, by contrast, wrote with the precision of winter light—clear, sparse, and quietly aching. 

Rajiv had inherited not just his father’s Bengali cheekbones and contemplative eyes, but also his gift for language. Yet, in literary circles from Kolkata to Mumbai, he was always “SD’s son.” At readings, people asked him about his father’s metaphors, not his own. At Sahitya Sammelans, he was introduced as “the heir to a great legacy,” never as a writer in his own right. 

Two years ago, Chaitanya Prakashan - a small but respected publisher in Pune offered Rajiv a contract for three books. It was a quiet vote of confidence, like an oil lamp lit in a dark temple. Rajiv began work immediately, writing short stories set in Pune’s changing landscape—auto drivers who unknowingly quoted Rumi, techies in Hinjawadi who dreamt in Sanskrit, old women who ran WhatsApp poetry groups. Unlike his father, he dressed casually – jeans and casual shirts, wrote while sipping lemongrass tea. Unlike his father’s sanitised writing room, Rajeev’s study filled with the scent of sandalwood and the sound of Bhimsen Joshi or a Mozart playing softly in the background.

Rajiv was no less than his father. He had once written a story about a retired postman in Sadashiv Peth who wrote letters to strangers to beat his loneliness. Another, about a young woman in Baner who translated her grandmother’s dreams into Marathi Haikus. His prose was quiet, but it lingered. His metaphors were not grand, but they were precise—like the way he described grief as “a ceiling fan that keeps turning long after the power is gone.” 

Then, one morning in July, SD Bandopadhyay passed away in his sleep. The monsoon had just arrived, and the rain fell like grief—persistent, unrelenting. The literary world mourned. Newspapers printed his photograph with the caption “The Last Sage of Indian Letters.” Rajiv, dressed in a simple white kurta-pyjama, lit the funeral pyre in Vaikunth Crematorium among a sizable crowd of fans and who’s who of the literary world, his hands trembling not just with loss, but with the weight of inheritance. 

A month later, Rajiv’s first book, "The Mango Tree at Tilak Road", was released. It was a quiet collection of stories about Pune’s forgotten corners. Critics pounced. 

“Derivative,” wrote one.

“Lacks the philosophical depth of his father,” said another.

Social media mocked him. Memes floated around comparing his prose to “a schoolboy’s diary.”

Rajiv was surprised. To avoid answering abstract questions comparing his writing with that of his father’s, he stopped attending literary events. He didn’t realise when his shirts changed, from the casual colours to shades of grey. He stopped shaving regularly and sported an unshaven look, avoided eye contact at cafés like Pagdandi and Waari Book Café. 

His second book, "The Rickshaw and the Rain", came out six months later. He was expecting recognition for the way he had chosen subjects for the stories. The book was a meditation on urban loneliness. It was harshly criticised. It flopped. Bookstores started returning unsold copies. Rajiv stopped writing. He spent his days walking along the Mula-Mutha river, watching egrets and discarded plastic float side by side. He even compared the unwanted floating plastic with his own life. 

He no longer spoke much at home. His voice, once warm and full of quiet wit, had become a whisper. He avoided mirrors. He stopped humming his favourite songs while strumming his guitar.

Ira, his 19-year-old daughter, watched this slow unravelling with growing unease. She was a student of literature at Symbiosis, and had always regarded her father as a quiet genius. She remembered childhood evenings when he would read her stories—not his own, but ones he admired—Mahasweta Devi, Kamala Das, and occasionally, his father’s.

She had seen him cry once, reading out a passage from Pather Panchali. She remembered the fun they used to have when he sang to her using the guitar. To her, he was not just a writer. He was a man who felt deeply, who saw poetry in the mundane, who once described the sound of a pressure cooker as “a mother’s heartbeat in a hungry home.”

One evening, she returned from college wearing a faded denim jacket over a mustard kurti, her hair tied in a messy bun, her eyes sharp with empathy and quiet fire. She found him slumped at his table, staring at a blank page. 

“Baba,” she said, sitting beside him, “do you remember Dadu’s story "The Clay Lamp"?”

Rajiv looked up to her and nodded. 

“You wrote "The Rickshaw and the Rain" with the same ache. Dadu’s lamp flickered in a village. Your rickshaw stalled in a city. Both stories are about stillness in motion.”

He looked at her, surprised the maturity she displayed.

“And in "The Mango Tree on Tilak Road", — the one about the old man who writes letters to his dead wife — that’s more tender than anything Dadu wrote. You don’t write like him, Baba. You write like you. And I like that.”

She pulled out three books—two by Sanjeev, one by Rajiv—and read passages aloud. She compared Sanjeev’s "The River’s Silence" with Rajiv’s "The Rain on Karve Road".

“Dadu’s river was mythic,” she said, “but yours was personal. His silence was philosophical. Yours was emotional. That’s not lesser, Baba. That’s so different. It’s fantastically amazing! How did the critics miss these subtle nuances?”

She quoted a line Rajiv had written: “The rain didn’t fall. It remembered.” She paused. “That’s not imitation. That’s poetry written on the raindrops.”

The following days, she discussed stories from his book and how she thought they were significant. Rajiv listened to her intently. One day he felt his eyes well. Something inside him softening like wet clay. Her voice was steady, her analysis sharp. She spoke of rhythm, silence, and emotional architecture. She reminded him of who he was before the world told him otherwise.

That night, he began work on his third book. He titled it "Unfinished Works of S.D. Bandopadhyay". It was a clever sleight of hand — part homage, part rebellion – like he was mocking the world, laughing at its hollowness. The stories were his, but he framed them as fragments found in his father’s drawer. He wrote with fire now, not fear. The book was released in December, just as Pune’s winter turned the air crisp and the bougainvillea bloomed.

Critics were stunned. 

“A literary resurrection,” wrote a well known Newspaper.

 “A masterful blend of legacy and innovation,” said the biggest selling newspaper of India. 

Readers flocked to buy it. Book clubs debated its authorship. Rajiv received a new contract—three more books, sequels to the “unfinished works.” 

Some days later, as he sat in his study, watching the sun set over Law College Hills, Rajiv felt a strange hollowness. The world, he thought, was fickle—like a kite that changes direction with the wind. People criticised without reading, judged without knowing. Careers were made and unmade by those who had never written a line. He remembered a critic who once called his prose “soulless”—a man who had never written a story longer than a tweet.

He thought of how names sell books, not stories. How narratives are set and people follow blindly without giving a thought. How the market worships legacy, not craft. How applause is often an echo chamber of ignorance. He felt bitterness rise in him like smoke from damp wood. 

And yet, he would continue to write. Not for fame. Not for validation. But because stories lived in him like monsoon frogs—hidden, waiting, singing when the time was right. He would write under his father’s name. The market had spoken. RD Bandopadhyay did not sell. S.D. Bandopadhyay did.

It was disheartening, like singing in someone else’s voice. But he accepted it. Not with bitterness alone, but with quiet resolve. 

He looked at Ira, who was now reading his manuscript with a pencil tucked behind her ear. Sensing him looking, she looked up and smiled at him, and in that moment, he knew: the world may be fickle, but meaning is not. And if his words could reach even one soul, even if disguised in another’s name, they were worth writing.  

After all, the river flows even when no one watches. And some stories, like truth, find their way—no matter whose name is on the cover.