My Father, Samarendra Kumar Ghosh, and the Family That Came Home with a Few Clothes

My father, Samarendra Kumar Ghosh, was not the sort of man who needed a motivational poster behind him. He would have found the poster unnecessary, probably badly printed, and morally suspicious if bought at full price.

He rose before dawn, took a cold-water bath at five in the morning even in winter, read the Gita, and then somehow did not become the kind of religious man who tried to beat science out of his son with a rolled-up newspaper. This, in Bengal, is not a small achievement. We are a civilization that can turn fish curry, football, grammar, god, politics, and the price of coriander into full-contact sports before breakfast.

My father believed deeply. I did not. Yet he never made disbelief feel like betrayal. That is the first thing I want to say about him, because it is the rarest thing. He had faith, but not the cheap plastic kind sold in bulk by shouting men. His faith was old, private, disciplined, and strangely roomy. It had windows. A boy could breathe inside it.

His name was Samarendra Kumar Ghosh. His father was Khagendra Kumar Ghosh. His mother was Sharoshi Bala Ghosh. My father’s grandfather was Jatindra Kumar Ghosh, and his grandmother was Sushila Sundari Ghosh. Further family notes mention Krishna Kumar Ghosh and Sharshanta Moni Ghosh, though that last name comes with a small family cough attached to it. Oral history always does this. It gives you a brass plate, a broken key, three names, two places, and then says, “Now manage.”

So we manage.

The Ghoshes, from what my mother remembers, came from Bikrampur near Dhaka, from something called the “sixteen houses.” I do not know whether that meant sixteen related households, a para, a clan cluster, or one of those old Bengali phrases that once had a precise meaning and now floats around like an umbrella after a storm. But the phrase has flavor. Sixteen houses. You can almost see the courtyards, ponds, mango trees, women talking from verandas, men discussing impossible matters with great confidence, and children being told not to run near the water while immediately running near the water.

Then the family map stretched.

My paternal grandfather, Khagendra Kumar Ghosh, went to Rangoon, now Yangon, and worked in the post office. That little fact is like a match struck inside a dark room. A Bengali man from the Dhaka side, in Burma, handling letters in the imperial machinery of a world that still believed paperwork could hold the planet together. During the Second World War, he even travelled by plane to deliver mail. Imagine that. A family that later knew rented houses, pension uncertainty, and ordinary Bengali arithmetic once had a man flying with letters during wartime.

A letter was not a small thing then. It was news, money, grief, instruction, hope, and sometimes disaster folded into paper. Today we send a thumbs-up emoji and think communication has occurred. Our ancestors crossed seas and jungles and collapsing empires carrying envelopes.

Then history lost its temper.

The war came. Rangoon became unsafe. Bengalis there faced turmoil, fear, and the sudden ancient instruction given to displaced people everywhere: take what you can, leave the rest, do not look too long at the door. My grandfather gathered a few clothes and came away. Not a full household. Not dignity packed in trunks. Not the leisurely relocation of people with options. A few clothes.

That phrase sits in the mind.

A few clothes.

A family can spend generations acquiring cupboards, land, utensils, certificates, books, gossip, pride, brass lamps, and one impossibly heavy wooden bed that no one likes but everyone is afraid to throw away. Then history comes with its shoes on and says, “Two minutes.”

My jethu was born in Dhaka. My father and one kaka were born in Rangoon. My four pisis were born later in Naihati, after the family came back and rented a house. That is how our family geography is written: not with borders, but with births. Dhaka. Rangoon. Naihati. Later Sinthi.

If you put those names on a table, you do not get a family tree. You get a railway map after a cyclone.

My grandfather earned about one hundred rupees a month in service. In those days that was not a joke amount, though modern people hear “one hundred rupees” and immediately think of a sad packet of chips and two bus rides. Money must be read with its time attached, like medicine with dosage. One hundred rupees then had shoulders.

When he left the job, he did not receive everything due to him. He became a pensioner. That sentence too has the full taste of Bengal. Serve properly, suffer historically, get less than promised, survive anyway. We have produced many such men. Thin files, strong spines.

There were family connections in Sinthi, in North Kolkata. Someone’s father’s house. Someone’s sister’s husband. Someone older who helped my grandfather buy land. Bengali property history is never a clean document. It is a crowded room. Everyone is related, half-related, angry, grateful, dead, or misremembered. One person says “our land,” another says “their side,” a third says “ask your mother,” and the fourth has already misplaced the deed under a pile of old electricity bills.

Out of all this came my father.

Not as a grand monument. As a man.

A man with discipline. A man with a morning routine that would kill a softer species. A man who could believe in Vishnu and still let his son chase electrons, equations, astronomy, biology, computers, and all the other mischievous tools with which science has been quietly dismantling superstition while pretending to be polite.

To him, I was not merely his son. I was an avatar of Vishnu, sent to bring prosperity to India and perhaps the whole world. This was a large promotion, offered without salary, housing allowance, or travel reimbursement. Also, an atheist avatar of Vishnu would create a clerical crisis in heaven. Some junior divine official would have to open a new file, sharpen a pencil, and mutter, “This one is complicated.”

But the point was not theology.

The point was love.

My father believed I was meant for something large. He looked at me and saw not the anxious, half-broken, middle-aged man I became, sitting in the shanty boondocks of Calcutta with a laptop, a rice cooker, a consulting invoice, and the personality of a tired monsoon cloud. He saw promise. A dangerous thing to give a child, promise. It warms him. It also follows him around later like an unpaid creditor.

I did not become what he imagined. I did not bring prosperity to India, never mind the world. At fifty-one, I can barely bring order to my own room. Some mornings even making tea feels like negotiating a treaty between hostile nations. The kettle waits. The cup waits. The brain says no. Outside, Calcutta continues its magnificent daily circus of horns, dust, vendors, app notifications, collapsing pavements, and people forwarding political wisdom they have not read.

Still, I had something many children do not.

I had a father who gave me books.

Books are not objects in childhood. They are trapdoors. One moment you are in a Bengali household with homework and mosquito coils; next moment you are among stars, dinosaurs, Roman roads, strange machines, prime numbers, black holes, and the private suspicion that adults may not know as much as they pretend. My best days were his days: book fairs, science, mathematics, the happiness of being allowed to think without being slapped back into obedience.

This is not sentimental decoration. It matters.

A child who is allowed to think becomes troublesome. He asks why. Then he asks why not. Then he asks who benefits if nobody asks why. At this stage society begins to regret the books.

My father cherished critical thinking, though he might not have used the fashionable phrase. He liked honesty, simplicity, authenticity. These are noble qualities, which is to say they are commercially disastrous. In modern India, a man who tells the truth is often treated like a leaking ceiling. Everyone agrees something should be done, but nobody wants to stand directly under him.

Say simple things, smile, nod, forward devotional graphics, praise the powerful, abuse the powerless, and you may pass through society like a greased suitcase. But ask for evidence. Ask for fairness. Ask why corruption has become so ordinary that people now defend it as culture. Then you will discover how quickly a friendly room can develop winter.

Make people reach for a dictionary and they may forgive you.

Make them reach for a conscience and you are finished.

This is where my father and I meet again, though he is gone. He gave me the habit of not bowing before nonsense just because nonsense has put on perfume. He gave me the suspicion that dignity is not the same as status. He gave me the right to think, and thinking has not made me rich, popular, or relaxed. It has made me, if we are being honest, rather difficult.

I am a Bengali atheist with a Hindu father’s moral discipline inside me. To a lazy observer this may look like contradiction. It is not. People confuse disbelief with emptiness. My father did not leave me empty. He left me with standards.

His religion was not a wall. It was more like an old house with many cracks, some light, and a courtyard where questions could sit down. He seemed to understand that religion was humanity’s early attempt to answer the terminal questions: death, suffering, injustice, loneliness, the absurd fact that we are born without asking and billed throughout the stay. Science later came with better tools. But science did not cancel the ache. It only described the bones of it more accurately.

I do not believe what he believed.

But I know why he believed.

That difference is civilization.

My life now is not heroic. Let us not put a garland on a broken chair. I live as a middle-aged, lower-middle-class Bengali man on the edge of Calcutta, with bipolar depression and anxiety, earning barely through consulting, trying to write, trying to think, trying not to become bitter enough to curdle the milk. The world outside has become louder, thinner, faster, and less patient. Even the algorithms seem to prefer a man who says one sharp sentence, adds fire emojis, and leaves before thought becomes visible.

I, unfortunately, was raised among books.

So I write too much.

I digress.

I return.

I remember.

The family line came from Bikrampur, moved to Rangoon, fled war, rented in Naihati, settled around Sinthi, and eventually produced my father, who produced me. The gene stops with me. That is not a dramatic announcement made from a balcony during rain. It is plain arithmetic. No child follows. No little Ghosh will inherit this odd mixture of stubbornness, sadness, science, memory, and badly timed honesty.

A whole migration ends in one room.

There is comedy in that, if one has a strong enough stomach. There is also grief. A family that crossed borders, survived war, adjusted to Bengal again, bought land with help, lived through pension shortfalls, raised children, preserved names, and carried its gods and habits across geography now arrives at a man typing into a glowing rectangle in Calcutta, hoping strangers will read him before scrolling away to a video of a cat insulting gravity.

But perhaps that is not nothing.

Writing is also a form of carrying.

My grandfather carried letters in wartime. My father carried discipline, faith, and expectation. I carry sentences. Smaller load, perhaps. But the road is not easy.

I cannot repay my father with the prosperity he imagined. I cannot become the divine instrument he hoped for. I cannot even pretend belief for decorative purposes. But I can honor him in the only way available to me: by refusing to lie about him, about myself, or about the world.

He was religious, and he made room for my atheism.

He was disciplined, and he gave me freedom.

He dreamed too greatly for me, and I failed too humanly.

He came from a family history of movement, loss, recovery, and stubborn survival, and he gave his son a childhood in which thought was not a punishable offense.

That is a large inheritance.

Not land. Not money. Not status.

A mind.

And on certain mornings, when the city is already sweating, the tea is too sweet, the news is foolish, the rent is real, and the future looks like a lane blocked by hawkers, scooters, and one philosophical goat, I still feel him somewhere near the edge of my thinking.

Cold water at dawn.

A book in the hand.

Faith without cruelty.

Hope without accounting.

A father, in other words.

A rare thing.