TO-DO LIST

• Develop slums by constructing highrises where the dwellers will be rehabilitated • Clear pavements and roads of hawkers, especially in business districts • Lay a pipeline so that the clean water from Garden Reach reaches all the booster pump stations • Improve the sewage system.

The young priest was clearly taken aback. He had just finished evening prayers ? albeit a bit abruptly ? when he was confronted by a man who seemed to know his past. It was just past seven, and the temple in Puri had till then been pulsating with the sounds of drums and gongs. The priest suddenly stopped chanting the mantras, pointing to a prayer schedule on the wall that said the evening prayers would continue till 7 pm.

That was when the visitor from Calcutta ? a successful high court lawyer called Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, holidaying in Puri with his family ? casually asked him if he had embraced priesthood after his girlfriend left him. The priest looked in the lawyer’s eyes for a while, and then asked him how he knew.

Clearly, Bhattacharyya, Calcutta’s mayor-in-waiting, has X-ray vision. Reclining with a broken leg on a divan in his living room, he is relating his Puri experience to a group of visitors when a saffron-clad, middle-aged man with matted hair walks in.

He has come from the corporation’s engineering department to greet the just-elected CPI(M) candidate from ward number 100. Bhattacharyya thanks him and then asks him politely why he had taken sanyas while still working at the corporation.

“It was all ordained by God,” the man answers. Bhattacharyya ignores the reply, and asks him instead when his wife left him. The man looks uncomfortable. “That was in 1992, after our final visit to Tarapith (a pilgrim town in Bengal),” he says.

“Well, you must have gone there to smoke ganja despite your wife’s protests,” Bhattacharyya says. “I tried hard, but could never break the bad habit,” the man replies, sheepishly.

The 54-year-old would-be mayor smiles. He attributes his ability to “read people and situations fast” to observation, a trait clearly honed by years spent in courtroom battles.

In Puri, for example, he says he saw that the young priest’s heart was not in his work. In his drawing room he found it odd that a corporation employee would become an ascetic “for nothing”.

All he did was put two and two together, he says. But then, his ability to do his sums right has always helped this former science student from Ashutosh College, who began life on the roof of a hotel in Kalighat, where his father, a refugee from what’s now Bangladesh, lived with his wife and six children in a cramped rented room.

So, years later, he did his calculations first when the CPI(M) leadership, especially chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, asked him to fight the corporation poll as its mayoral candidate. Bhattacharyya calculated the political cost of refusal against his lucrative legal practice. After all, by now, he had become one of the most sought-after legal brains in the city. “It’s not just my family, but several others depend on my practice,” he says, explaining why he was “initially hesitant” when the offer first came up in March.

But in the end, he decided to take the plunge and, as it turned out, it was not a miscalculation.

For Bhattacharyya ? who took up law because he was too “independent-minded” to work under anyone ? this is going to be a first. Fresh from Calcutta University Law College, he walked through the portals of the imposing Calcutta High Court building in 1978. In 1993, he was appointed a judge, but he refused when he was asked to serve at the Patna High Court. A year later, he was declared a senior advocate by the high court, something unusual for a lawyer his age. In 1998, he accepted Tripura government’s offer to be the advocate-general on the condition that he would operate from Calcutta.

Politically, though, he has had older links with the Left. Way back in 1969, he worked for Sadhan Gupta, the CPI (M) Assembly candidate from Kalighat. His ties with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee go back to the early Seventies when Bhattacharyya was secretary of the party’s Kalighat-Bhawanipore local committee. Not surprisingly, Bhattacharyya feels that their 35-year-old relation would help him as mayor in carrying out the city’s development.

The city means something to the would-be mayor. Asit Banerjee, of the South Calcutta Physical Culture Association in Kalighat, recalls how he and Bhattacharyya had fought together to revive a local library. And he remembers his recitations of Nazrul Islam’s and Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry.

For, clearly, it’s not politics or law that is his first love. Friends and colleagues insist it is literature. Atanu Roychowdhury, a junior lawyer, says Bhattacharyya “reads as much literature as law”.

Bhattacharyya, who is a fitness enthusiast, says he loves non-fiction. On a coffee table in his drawing room lie Life With Picasso and a Bengali book on Tagore. On his office table, Writing Social History and Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge mingle with legal books.

Too bookish, his critics would say. After all, they believe that he has been out of active politics for long, and would be a pushover at the volatile corporation. “The real game will begin in three months when the Opposition turns up the heat on the present board. We will know his mettle then,” says Subrata Mukherjee, his predecessor and, some say, a former client.

Even some friends are not sure if he will emerge unscathed from his new role as mayor. “I don’t know whether the political situation will allow him to deliver. He is too decent a person to wade into the murky waters of municipal politics,” Swati Gangopadhyay, a long-time associate, says.

But those who know him say he is a hard nut to crack, pointing out that he had spent 15 days in jail for participating in an agitation against the dismissal of the Ajay Mukherjee-led United Front government in the late Sixties when he was barely 16 years old. Bhattacharyya acknowledges that his tenure at the corporation is going to be “a huge” challenge. “But I am looking forward to it,” he says.

X-ray vision?