A few days later, he came up with another slogan for one of Britannia’s new creations, the orange-flavoured “Delite,” and this I liked very much for it spoke to me of his whole personality: “Your taste is our Delite.” I handed it to my father, who liked it as well. But once it reached the offices of Britannia Biscuits in Bombay, it was, I think, forgotten.

On my last visit before I left for England, I found that mastermoshai had already left his copywriting days behind and moved on to new things. He had set up a shop with his servant, from which they sold cooking oil to customers. “I’ve instructed Ganesh,” he told my aunt, “to make his hand tremble a little while measuring out the oil.” He added, in explanation, “These are hard times.” On this occasion, I did not stay in my uncle’s house, but in the flat my father had bought many years ago, which now, at last, was furnished. It was the flat to which my parents would move after my father’s retirement. My mother told me not to waste my holidays and to make use of my time by taking Bengali lessons from mastermoshai. “After all, he is a learned man,” she said. Thus, for the first time, mastermoshai came to our flat. It was a different world inside the flat, but he regarded our affluence and difference without envy; he was not embarrassed or diminished by it. He reminisced to me about a man he had once known, the son of a maharajah, who could no longer step out of his great mansion because he could not understand the world. We sat, in an air-conditioned room, at a study table by a great window that looked out on trees and old, aristocratic houses. The book we began to read together was the slender Chhelebela, or Boyhood, by Tagore.

“Are you enjoying it?” he asked me at one point.

“I like it very much.”

“Of course,” he informed me, “you cannot understand, beneath all its lightness, its spiritual rhythm.”