The alchemist of Sujan Singh Park

Ravi Dayal could make pasta sound like a four-letter word. "I say, pasta, is it?" he'd say, observing the strings dangling from the end of his fork as fastidiously as an epicure facing earthworms.

Ravi Dayal could make pasta sound like a four-letter word. "I say, pasta, is it?" he'd say, observing the strings dangling from the end of his fork as fastidiously as an epicure facing earthworms. Italian food was Delhi's latest fad, but if there was anyone impervious to fads and fashions it was he. Yet nobody was more stylish, with his Bertrand Russell mop of white hair, the hooked nose jutting out of his thin face, and the way '501' beedis dangling from the tip of his fingers transformed themselves into the thinking man's fashion accessory.

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It was this ability to transform the mundane into the magical that made Ravi Dayal something of an alchemist. He did it to books, sculpting narratives, ideas, and good prose out of rough stoneblocks of writing.

But he also did it to other things. There was a streak of mischievous whimsicality in him that made him see ancient river beds in stony pathways. When he played an overture on his harmonica, he produced sound that made you wonder if an invisible orchestra was hiding behind his diminutive frame. Certain boggy areas of the Kumaon teemed in the monsoon with a fleshy edible fern called 'linguru'; steamed, with a hint of butter it was, Ravi Dayal insisted (despite our sceptical eyebrows), "rather like asparagu". Mid-morning, a faint, melancholic plonking of strings would break the silence in Ranikhet as he sat fiddling with one of his arcane stringed musical instruments. Perhaps he could hear a sarod in those notes.

Ravi Dayal grew up in Nainital. Scampering down a hillside as a boy, he fell into conversation with a man who told him his name was Jim Corbett, upon which the boy squeaked "You're the man-eater!" and ran away. Neither Corbett nor the boy knew that Corbett's biography would one day be published by Ravi Dayal, who was to embody scholarly publishing in India, becoming the first Indian head of the Oxford University Press.

Later he was to start his own imprint, Ravi Dayal Publisher, operating in eccentric and chaotic solitude from a tree-fringed room in his apartment. Out of this room emanated the books on his distinguished list, all edited and proof-read by him, and clothed in idiosyncratic jackets he designed with ink and crayon, innocent of technology. He had strong views on type and book design, loving statuesque fonts like Bembo and scorning pallid, sans-serif upstarts such as Arial. Every aspect of publishing was to him pleasurable.

More eminent authors than we can remember were at the receiving end of his brutally clear-headed, elegantly handwritten, editorial marks and excisions. They were fortunate. Perhaps no editor today, and certainly no publishing boss, has his combination of skills and scholarship. What set him apart was his ability to operate both at the level of building institutions and setting commas right. In later years, when he ran a charitable institution in the Kumaon, he organised not only its infrastructure but also the textbooks and bus money that trainees needed. His intellect and strong opinions, as much as his self-deprecating wit and sense of fun, made Ravi Dayal a formidable man before whom most people's tongues got tied in knots. The garrulous suffered. Once, a prominent sociologist waxing self-importantly eloquent about his own eminence and his new book said, as if conferring a favour, "I do believe, Ravi, that you are the vereh first reader of my book." Ravi Dayal replied with a disarming smile, "Well, frankly, if I hadn't been in hospital with only one book to read, I'd never have read it!" And then, with just a second's pause, "But it was of course very good!"

Yet, when his long-time cook Manju wept over his death, she said, "He never uttered a sharp word to me." Ravi Dayal had diverse friends: the teashop man at a small temple in Ranikhet, many dogs, famous writers, struggling new editors he treated as equals. For those he adopted as his friends his affection seemed a gift they had been inexplicably handed.

His charisma and strength of character made it seem perfectly natural that he, the CEO of multinational OUP, should stand in the lunch queue at the office canteen and serve himself his thaali alongside clerks and junior editors; that he should deny himself an airconditioner when his other employees were struggling under creaky fans; that he should drive to work his own Fiat — spluttering, virtually sellotaped into motion.

Ravi Dayal was a man of strong, difficult, sometimes exasperating, convictions which he wore as insouciantly as his winter mufflers. Editors who never got the chance to work with him must regret it forever. If there was ever a publishing course worth attending, it was concentrated in the man hidden by a paper mountain at Sujan Singh Park.

The writer is editor, Permanent Black