The only stag in his group of friends, he was offering anjali at the local Puja pandal on Ashtami, fervently seeking a girlfriend from the goddess, when he spotted her. She was in Class VI. He was just into college.
Thus started a courtship that took the boy outside the gates of South Point High School every day once her classes gave over. “I even bought a second-hand jeep to impress her,” winks P.C. Sorcar Junior.
He did, so much so that he brought her home as his bride, five years later, in May 1972.
To mark the occasion 45 summers later, the first family of Indian magic had friends and family over for a party at Middleton Chambers, on Middleton Street, that had Prodip Chandra and Joysri exchanging garlands all over again. “Today instead of chanting mantras, we pledge to be born as husband and wife in our next birth too,” said he. “But I have given him a condition — that I be born as husband this time,” retorted she. P.C. Sorcar promptly agreed and added that he would want to bear all their three daughters, “however fat I may become”!
The Sorcar girls — Maneka, Moubani and Mumtaz — had put up an exhibition of pictures of their parents, the earliest dating back 50 years. “I had followed her family to Darjeeling. I sought her father’s permission to take her to the bungalow of my brother-in-law, the district magistrate, to meet my sister. We had our first photo taken there,” a beaming Sorcar told guests.
The evening ended with a sumptuous dinner and the cutting of a ‘wedding’ cake.
Sudeshna Banerjee
Pictures: B. Halder
