Two days later, Pramathesh left Calcutta. As had been apparent, he continued, as the next decade unfolded, to do substantially better than Ranjit Biswas. His rise surprised even him. Ranjit remained more or less stationary, with the prospect of a small promotion in the next five years; while Pramathesh was transferred to Bombay, and made general manager at the Bombay branch. The last old master he bought was a Jamini Roy, in 1969, again on a visit to Calcutta in the winter. By then, Calcutta was in decline; the branch was experiencing a series of lockouts, and Ranjit was sounding more and more beleagured and nonplussed, as if he’d just found out that he was fighting the battle alone. “It’s difficult to be in control anymore, bhai. They”—he meant the workers—“are the bosses now; we run behind them,” he said, a little self-conscious in his defensiveness, and partly because Pramathesh was now, technically, no longer a colleague; the old banter had a slight fakeness about it. Jamini Roy was already an old man, and, during this visit, Pramathesh went to the painter’s house with Amita, his wife, small and bright in a printed silk sari, about to assume life in Bombay; the old man, in a vest and dhoti, tottered out, and signed the paintings on the floor. When asked innocently by Amita, “What time of the day do you paint?” he responded like any cantankerous old man, “How can I answer that? Can I tell you when I eat, or drink, or sleep?” Upside down on the floor before them lay the paintings, the ideal figures with over-large eyes that did not see, the repetitive shapes in repose.

It’s not as if Pramathesh and Amita Majumdar spent too much time thinking about these paintings; Bombay didn’t give one much time to think. They moved from drawing room to drawing room as the couple themselves moved about in Bombay, from Worli to Kemp’s Corner to Malabar Hill. And it wasn’t as if they were insensitive to art; nor were they pretentiously artistic; they were content to display them, respectfully, on the walls. Of course, they—the paintings—did coincide with that part of the couple that was defined by their natural ambition, by Pramathesh’s career and his concern for the future, but in an odd way, so that the paintings somewhat transcended, or ignored, these vivid concerns. They were probably an unexplored part of their lives. Meanwhile, Jamini Roy, who’d already seemed so old, died peacefully in 1972. Gopal Ghosh died in penury and neglect about five years later, his last days an alcoholic stupor, often drinking himself to sleep on the pavement, and being carried home by passersby.