He was probably the jolliest amongst all my friends' fathers. At the age when we were just being allowed to go to our friends' homes unescorted, he was the dad who was not only usually around - even, or especially, if it was late afternoon - but always ready with a slightly risqué joke or three. I still recall trudging up to their third-floor flat with my friend the very first time I visited and being greeted by this silver-haired smiling man who ushered us in ceremoniously and gave us a tour of the flat. After showing us the living space, the bedrooms, and making the usual quip about thrones and bathrooms, he opened the door to a room right next to the stairwell. "And this," he declared with a flourish, "is my puja room!" Looking at my slightly bewildered expression on being confronted with a largish empty room with a faded red carpet on the floor, he broke into his inimitable laugh and said, "This is where I do my Lokkhi pujo, where I earn my keep."

It was then that I understood this was the room in which my friend's father - known to the world as Pandit Shankar Ghosh, but always meshomoshai to me - taught his pupils, many of whom had already by then gone on to carve out their own special niches in the world of Indian classical music. In the close to four decades that I knew him, meshomoshai never displayed the kind of airs that could quite easily be expected of a man who had been lauded and feted across continents and was already considered a living legend. On the few occasions that he tried to explain some musical idea or the other to me, quite possibly the most unmusical person he had ever met, he always sought the help of homely metaphors and images taken from nature to get his thoughts across. A remarkable feature of the man was that I never heard him talk down to someone or underscore his superiority by speaking in terms that only the adept could comprehend.

His son, Bickram, whom I have known since Class IV, a time when one shared one's feelings unselfconsciously, used to complain sometimes about his father being a hard taskmaster, and meshomoshai obviously had very exacting standards, but somehow, I cannot quite imagine him screaming at anyone like a prima donna, as I have seen and heard other artists - few of whom were of his stature - do; he probably got his students to do things his way by using his cutting wit on them, and by the sheer force of his personality - this is something I need to take up and clarify with Bickram sometime.

Something else that didn't strike me at the time, but made me wonder years later, was his apparently total lack of interest in worldly possessions. Meshomoshai did not acquire a car until he was well into his fifties and Bickram was doing his Masters. In all the years that he was a student in the uppity English-medium school meshomoshai sent him to, Bickram had to live down the embarrassment that came with non-possession of a private vehicle (many of our classmates had several in their garages). More surprising, perhaps, was the fact that meshomoshai lived in a rented flat - not until his son made him buy a plot of land, almost by force, did he become, as he liked to joke, "a landlord".

This unworldliness and casual disregard for his own status went hand in hand with meshomoshai's infinite capacity for making friends with anyone and everyone, irrespective of social standing. He got along famously with taxi-drivers, shopkeepers, rickshaw-pullers, doormen, waiters, the parents of his many students and all their relatives - basically anybody whom he encountered. I remember bumping into him at the airport over a decade ago, whilst he was waiting for a delayed flight, and, sure enough, within about half-an-hour he had a little community of listeners whom he was regaling with selections from his apparently endless store of anecdotes. The last glimpse I had of him as I went across to the security check zone was meshomoshai grinning and waving at me, whilst someone stood by with a cup of coffee for him, and someone else choked with laughter at something he'd said. I'm also fairly certain that few among of his delighted audience knew that this dapper man in a fashionable striped shirt and stylishly-cut trousers was the Shankar Ghosh, a man who had reshaped the very grammar and meaning of tabla playing and accompaniment. But meshomoshai never did care about such, for him, trivial matters. Just living fully in the moment was good enough for him.

I sometimes wonder if this almost unearthly disdain for the trappings of power and pelf - something that had enabled him to turn his back on a cushy life in the United States of America where he had been one of the founders of the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California - was somehow responsible for the fact that he never received any of the Padma awards, while many lesser beings went from lotus to lotus. But he never expressed either sorrow or disappointment with this, even though it must have galled him to see other musicians, who had nothing to compare with his contribution to Indian music, walk away with these prestigious awards year after year after year. Maybe it was a generational thing. I have met others from his time for whom, as for meshomoshai, the work itself was reward enough, and who never really hankered after official recognition or national awards.

Meshomoshai passed away last year, on January 22, a few months after his eightieth birthday. He would have completed 82 had he lived, on the 10th of October, this year. As I think back on this remarkable, path-breaking, ever-smiling, ever-generous man, a flood of stories and anecdotes wells up within me, far too many to retell here. I think of the many hours I've spent listening to his tales of travel and music and good company; of how he and mashima, his wife, the celebrated vocalist, Sanjukta Ghosh, always made Bickram's friends welcome and plied us with drinks and eats to bursting; of his fondness for food and his passion for cooking - he even taught Bickram how to make mayonnaise! - of his down-to-earth simplicity and his natural gracious charm, and I cannot but help feel that with his passing the world became just that little bit less colourful and joyous.

For me, as for many others like me, Pandit Shankar Ghosh represented something precious and rare - prodigious talent coupled to a lifetime of consistent hard work that sought fulfilment not in awards or financial rewards, but simply in "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing", to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, another artistic genius from an earlier century. They don't make them like meshomoshai any more.

The author is professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a rural development NGO for the last 30 years