Not long before the 1965 India-Pakistan war, Ranjit was one of a three-man delegation to Dhaka, then capital of East Pakistan, to discuss border problems with West Bengal. The team's leader was his namesake, Ranjit (better known as Ronu) Gupta of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), chief secretary of West Bengal. The third member, Raghu Banerjee, director of land revenue and land records, isn't part of the story. But the background of the two Guptas must be explained for those who are not familiar with the nuances of Bengali society.
Bluntly put, the difference was between sahib and desi. Like most anglicised Bengalis, Ronu Gupta belonged to the Brahmo Samaj; Ranjit Gupta was a Hindu. Ronu Gupta's grandfather, B L Gupta, ICS, CSI, was one of the first Indians in the ICS. His father, a barrister by training, was secretary of the Legislative Council in British India, his daily attire in Delhi and Simla the striped trousers and cutaway coat that went with a top hat. Himself a Cambridge man, Ronu Gupta had vowed to enlist in the French Foreign Legion if he couldn't get into the ICS. Indrajit Gupta, home minister in the Deve Gowda government, was his only brother. His only sister was Kunwarani Lady Dalip Singh of the Christian branch of the Kapurthala royal family. His wife was the daughter of the famous barrister, P R Das, and his English wife.
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With all that, Ronu Gupta was reticent and retiring. He practised yoga, read voraciously and turned down at least one gubernatorial appointment. He hated publicity and parties, unlike his policeman namesake who gloried in being called Top Cop. Ranjit Gupta played polo, fancied himself a connoisseur of Scotch, dabbled in archaeology and loved the social whirl, making up in personal flamboyance for the relative modesty of his middle-class background in pre-partition Dhaka where he was brought up. Their neighbour in Dhaka was another middle-class Bengali Hindu professional called Adinath Sen, whose son Debnath was married many years later to a beautiful and talented young East Bengal Hindu girl, Roma Dasgupta, from nearby Pabna district. Long after East Bengal became East Pakistan and the middle-class Hindu community had uprooted itself and settled down in Kolkata, Roma made a name for herself in films as the immortal Suchitra Sen.
So much is history. What Ranjit told me in 1965 was that being in Dhaka he was anxious to see his childhood home but couldn't find the house. Pakistan had designated the sleepy mofussil town its second capital, and though Dhaka was nowhere near as crowded as today, it was no longer the overgrown village of Ranjit's childhood. But though he couldn't recognise his house, he remembered the street name and asked a bunch of youths hanging out at a streetcorner for directions. "You want Suchitra Sen's house?" they replied excitedly and promptly led him to the long dead Adinath Sen's home. He could place his own paternal abode from there.
The point of the story was that legend outgrows and outlasts reality. Suchitra Sen had never lived in that Dhaka house; possibly, she hadn't even visited it. But fame knows no borders, and she was as much Bengali East Pakistan's public heroine as she was West Bengal's. Not only that. Myth and lore firmly identified her with her father-in-law's home. East Pakistanis even regarded her as their own, their gift to Kolkata, West Bengal and India.
Ranjit made a very readable little article out of that episode which attracted considerable attention in Kolkata when I published it. His simple narration style made it an appealing tale. As has often been said, almost anyone who matters in West Bengal - Ronu Gupta being a rare exception - is originally from East Bengal. The tale struck an immediate chord of nostalgia in many readers. Suchitra Sen was then at the peak of her cinematic glory, and any invocation of her name was bound to be popular.
A month or so later, I found myself in Dhaka for family reasons and A K Roy, India's deputy high commissioner, asked me round one afternoon for a cup of tea. The American consul-general who lived nearby strolled over, and conversation soon turned to the border problem with West Bengal, the three-man Indian delegation's visit and - inevitably - the article that had appeared over Ranjit Gupta's name in what was then the only English-language newspaper in the eastern part of the subcontinent.
I learnt then that the article's authorship had intrigued the expatriate community of American, British and other European consular officials, businessmen and their wives. So little happened in Dhaka in those days that a mention in a leading newspaper was excitement in itself. The excitement was personalised because they had all met the two Guptas and Banerjee, and could relate to the story in some remote fashion.
"We wondered which Gupta it was," said the American consul, "and talked about it. The consensus was it couldn't possibly be the polo-playing, scotch-swilling, highly Westernised policeman. It had to be the quiet, introspective civil servant!" Roy and I burst out laughing, much to the American's bewilderment. He is probably still shaking his consular head in wonder and saying to himself that Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, wasn't far out when he mused as a small boy that since the world was round, Indians had to be standing on their heads.