“Who can predict what form grief will take,” says Subimal Das, 49, a sculptor in Kolkata. Silicone sculptures of Samit Dutta’s parents, Arun and Hena Dutta, in Kolkata. He has been taking on some unusual commissions lately. For 25 years, he says, he largely sculpted celebrities (in hyper-realistic silicone). Mahatma Gandhi for a museum in Patna, Virat Kohli for an amusement park in Haridwar, Rabindranath Tagore for the West Bengal Assembly building. Since 2021, business has picked up, with the bulk of it coming from a new direction. Families are approaching him for statues of: a missing son, a wife lost suddenly to the pandemic, a beloved professor. He has created about 50 such sculptures in four years, for families from West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The figures he crafts are often dressed in the clothes of the lost loved one, and eventually positioned to fit into the house they once inhabited. Prices start at ₹3 lakh. Each likeness is first shaped in clay. At this stage, the family is invited …