Shovon Chowdhury (1964-2021) was a writer with a razor-sharp wit whose work blended the bizarre with the profound. His first novel, The Competent Authority, was a finalist for the Hindu Literary Prize, 2014; Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, 2014; Crossword Book Award, 2014; and Tata Literature Live! First Book Award, 2013.
I possibly met Shovon-encountered may be a better word for the first time on 19 June 1986, the day we arrived at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta campus. I would imagine that his rich baritone would have caught the attention of all of us standing in queue for registration and allotment of hostel rooms. In any case, over the next couple of weeks, he had become an essential member of our friend circle of about a dozen young people who worked (or did not), played, and lived together for the next two years.
To the rest of us, Shovon appeared intriguing, perhaps even weird. He was the only person we knew who was still reading Marvel comics and was quite unembarrassed about it. He could talk about the origins of the X-Men and the Avengers and the connections between the various series that built the all-conquering Marvel Universe of today. Not only did he know the backstories of all the lunatics whom Batman fought but also how different teams of writers and artists had interpreted and altered the dark knight character over time.
And he actually listened to The Carpenters! What grown man ever did that? All right, he also listened to Pink Floyd and the Doors, but still, his tastes in music were distinctly suspect.
We soon discovered that he was exceptionally well-read. He could hold forth on the idioms and metaphors in Hamlet, and the arcane allusions in T. S. Eliot's poetry. He was an authority on every great science fiction author we had never or barely heard of. He also seemed to have read most of the classics in Bangla literature. This was quite extraordinary, since he was born and spent the first ten years of his life in England, and had been relocated to India with hardly any familiarity with his 'mother tongue'.
He had a deep knowledge of military history, from Julius Caesar to the tank battles in the Second World War.
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