The main surprise in Pramathesh’s life came from his son, who took up the violin and Western classical music in a serious way when he was a teenager. What had begun as an eccentric but admirable pursuit after school hours became something more than that. One day, the boy came back from school and said, “Baba, I want to study the violin.” Pramathesh was too disarmed to raise an objection just then; and, as he remained unable to come up with one after two, then three, years, he saw, fondly but with a lurking feeling of helplessness, that his son would level out what he had striven for, that all the sense of certainty and dull, precious predictability and self-sufficiency he had naively built up would now—he was almost grateful for it—become, whether his son succeeded or not (because success in the arts counts for so little), less quantifiable, like a new beginning. His son and grandchildren would lead a life quite different from what he’d thought they would. He sent his son to study the violin in London, and this rendered him almost bankrupt, though his “almost bankrupt” was still substantially better off than most of his countrymen. He and Amita moved, after his retirement in the mid-eighties, to a spacious apartment in West Bandra which he had bought twelve years ago for two lakh rupees; they lived here alone, with a servant, going out together now and then to walk in the lane, while their son, finally, settled in the U.S. and married there, making several abortive attempts to inaugurate a career as a musician. The paintings went with them to Bandra, and gazed upon Pramathesh’s life without understanding its trajectory, but forgiving it nevertheless by not giving it too much importance. Now and then he gazed back at the paintings, considering what, or who, had given birth to that procession of figures by the mountainside, or that pale forest; those shadowy colours pointed to something he was still content, in his deliberate withdrawal from the imagination, not to understand. Jamini Roy, however, stayed in the drawing room, immutable; and Gopal Ghosh, who had been forgotten by the art world and then lately recovered and re-estimated, was like an enigma that had glancingly touched Pramathesh’s working and his private life, near and utterly distant. The world that had produced that curious art, those daubs of green and bold lines, that one never knew, in the end, what to think of, had long ceased to exist; he had made an inroad towards it, by chance, for some other reason, and touched it without ever entering it anything but superficially. History, as if to compensate for that passing, and in a belated consciousness of its own importance, had added to the paintings a value that neither Pramathesh nor the painters would have at first dreamt of; while taking away from him, gradually, his working life, his youth, and the bustling innocence of his adult certainties.