“He was even shy of receiving compliments,” said Roberge. To Roberge, the greatest mark of Ray’s appreciation for him was that he often addressed the French-speaking priest in Bengali, “in spite of my lack of elegance in that language, and the fact that Ray knew both English and Bengali so well.”

“Ray’s screenplay manuscripts were an art by themselves,” Roberge says, “hand- written in Bengali, with notes in English for his set-designer, with sketches here and there, and occasional staff notation of fragments of music”. One Sunday morning, Roberge found Ray in a disturbed mood. A few well –known personalities of the city had visited him earlier to go through some of his manuscripts. After they left Ray found the Charulatha screenplay missing. Ray was almost sure who the culprit was. “I asked him whether he was planning to take any action, and he said no, and explained to me that he did not want to hurt the reputation of the person. I was absolutely stunned by his humane concern,” said Roberge.

Like Rabindranath Tagore, Ray strode his time like a colossus. Roberge writes, “It is as if all Bengal was in Manikda: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the humble, the peasants and the city persons, children, teenagers, adults and old people, men and women.”

Philosophically too, Roberge feels, Ray took off where Tagore signed out. If one compares the last major prose piece by Tagore, “ Shabhyatar Sankat” ( Crisis of Civilisation), which he wrote at the beginning of the Second World War, which contains his immortal