This I am trying to learn from her. These last two years with Nirmala—coming toward the end of life—have been as the beginning of my life.
“Nirmala,” I tell her after we return to the hotel in the early evening, “after his interviews, Jogesh is meeting with his distributor. It will take time. Why not you come in to my room?” In the solitude of the hotel hallway, I hook my finger inside of one of Nirmala’s golden bangles.
Mrs. Sen grew up in a good and sophisticated family; she is well educated, has fine tastes and normal values. I find myself moved that such a woman would even dream of deviating from the regularities of married life for my sake. But some flicker of hesitation is there in her angel face. She looks down at her watch; she glances along the hallway. Like one of the lonely housewives so sensitively portrayed in several of Jogesh’s early films, Mrs. Sen struggles daily with her unhappiness, although life is slowly coming around.
“That sounds lovely,” Nirmala Sen finally sighs, as if I am the microphoned fellow at the front of the bus, urging her to get down and admire the view of some bridge or glassy building. She scrutinizes the wallpaper, while allowing her soft shoulder to lean against mine, and my heart explodes in bliss. Even after two years, I am overjoyed each and every time she accepts my embrace.
Only people the age of sixty-plus can properly enjoy love. This I have recently concluded. Fools in their twenties run behind firm little girls with no thoughts and no experiences, as foolish as I was myself, even paying good money to have my way with the poor prostitutes. My wife—yes, she was pretty, in the photograph, but we had no concept of how to please each other. We each grew accustomed to our mutual sourness—I even used to blame it on how old her flesh had become.
How wrong of me. Now see—I cannot resist Nirmala’s drooping parts, the globular expanses and scored surfaces, the sinking into. Now see how I like to fall down with flesh my own age! I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t. Leave it for the youngsters the skinny and smooth and indistinct each-others.
With one necessary condition: if the old person is someone with whom I am soul-catchingly in love.
“In two days,” I remind Nirmala, later in that evening. “In two days, we will not be required to hide and skulk.”
Nirmala is hurriedly wrapping herself again in her red sari, carefully fastening her diamond earrings. She combs her thin white hair and ties it, then corrects her makeup in the mirror.
In two days I meet with Mr. Jefferson Bundy. Mr. Jefferson Bundy is a film producer working in Hollywood, California, and on Saturday he is flying across America to meet me. Quietly, over the last two years, I have written a screenplay, a true labor of love, which the wonderfully named Jefferson Bundy, it seems, has read and admired. I have wanted to write a screenplay for my whole life, but it has taken Nirmala to give the motivation and courage. It is a classic story: love triangle. Presuming I secure financing from Jefferson Bundy, I will no longer be beholden to Jogesh for my livelihood, and Nirmala and I can finally proclaim our love. I will become a filmmaker in my own right here in the U.S., and all will be thanks to Mr. Jefferson Bundy. Mr. Jefferson Bundy: how I love repeating that hearty name; it may hold our future, our abundant American future.
Now Nirmala turns to me, a note of worry in her voice. “But who knows what he will say? He might have discouraging news.”
“Please don’t worry, Nirmala. All signs are pointing in the other direction.”
I recline in the bed and flick the remote—it is Wyler’s The Little Foxes: look at the funny shaving mirrors, the unusual, well-chosen props.
Before she steps out the door, Nirmala places her eye against the peephole and mutters a brief prayer.
“Simply come back to bed.” I mute the television and flop onto my belly. “No need for prayers.”
She turns, offering me a longing and a worried gaze—how she would love to return beneath the covers. “There is a need,” Nirmala says softly. “Very big need.” Then she slips quietly out the door and into the hallway.
2
That evening, Jogesh Sen’s film is premiered. Before the screening, Jogesh’s American publicist has arranged for all attending crew and cast to join together for a photo session outside of Lincoln Center. We stand in the stiff wind and grin and mug for some god-awful thirty minutes. Jogesh repeatedly rearranges his British houndstooth muffler, smoothes his oiled silver hair against his head.
“Damn wind, Chotu, eh? Isn’t it bothering you?”
“Luckily, I don’t have any hair for the wind to bother it.”
“It must be cold for you poor bald men in this country. Look, you are getting goose pimples on your scalp.”
In this way, we mock and banter, while in my stomach, I almost cannot stand it anymore. Like Jimmy Stewart to John Wayne in Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, why not tell Jogesh everything, plainspoken American, and simply have it out? Dear Jogesh, I am in love with your wife. Plus I hope to quit you to stay in U.S. and make my own film, taking Nirmala with me. How do you like them mangoes, old friend? But some element of Nirmalite prudence restrains me.
“Hey, Chotu,” Jogesh continues, as the photographer replaces her lens. He presses his long fingers into my shoulder. “Thank you for keeping company to Nirmala these past two days. She would find it very difficult to see the city on her own. What a shame I don’t have the time to enjoy it with her.”
Jogesh has always called me Chotu, although I am six years his elder—it is because, at five feet and six inches, I am somewhat small.
“It is nothing to thank me, Jogesh,” I assure him.
Now he leans to my ear. “Hey, Chotu. This afternoon, I asked the valet to deliver my new screenplay to your room. When you have extra time, can you please read it over and begin sketching up some storyboards? Some people here may be interested in it.”
A new screenplay, so quickly? I am stunned, although by now I should be long accustomed. It has taken me two long years to craft the single screenplay of my life. It will probably be the last screenplay of my life, as I put all my available materials into it—a triumph, but a bloody difficult one. And meanwhile, fresh from his latest success, Jogesh is delivering to me the seventh screenplay of last four years—the twenty-oddth of his career—completed, it would seem, in the midst of his travels.
To calm myself, I fire a cigarette, causing fastidious Jogesh to take one step away from me. “Must you, Chotu?” he asks.
The publicist also chides me. “Sir, could you please put that out?”
“Just two puffs,” I promise, rocking my head affably. “Please-please, continue photographing.”
But the photographer has pulled her head away from the camera. Everyone is waiting for me, and Jogesh clucks his tongue impatiently.
“Oh, very well,” I cry, stamping out the cigarette in the red carpet beneath my feet, and grinning as per the photographer’s instructions.
There was a time when I was taken with him, just like everyone was. What, after all, was life before I met him? Hunched over my easel under the ceiling fans in the ad agency, at the old-already age of thirty, one of dozens among rows and rows sketching soda bottles and biscuit tins. Each of my concepts had to be redrawn one hundred times to answer the whims of this foolish client or that imbecile executive. Why should they respect my opinion? My parents had come to Kolkata straight from the village; I drank home brew at the dhaba, not G and Ts at the Tollygunge. To save myself, I removed my emotions from it, making the work mindless, so that the main challenge lay in calculating my movements to avoid any drop of forehead sweat or cigarette ash from falling on the drawing paper.
I would have liked nothing more than to be a Gauguin and say: To hell with society, I create only for myself. But I had to be practical: at night I went home to my wife and mother and younger sister, all of us living together in three rooms, all of us relying on my job. What a noisy flat that was! I didn’t know yet what a life I was missing. Those three women were tasteless, tactless, strewing their knickknacks all about th
e house, kitten posters and stamp-pressed Ganeshas and little plastic boys whose penises spout water—mass-produced doodads as are found in city bazaars. “Don’t remove them; it is our house, too,” they would insist to me.
So, I was thirty when Jogesh joined, fresh from university, a young, handsome star of a copywriter from one of Kolkata’s prominent families. He looked over my shoulder while I was sketching on the day we met. I was preparing a storyboard for a television ad: a family picnicking in a hill station, their clothes all brilliant white thanks to Rim! Brite-And-Clean clothes soap.
“Your composition reminds me of Jean Renoir’s film Partie de campagne,” the voice behind me said in tailored English. “Have you seen it?”
Who was this proper young sahib wandering the wrong departments? I wondered. His tall shadow obscured my easel; his European cologne invaded my nose. Was he trying to flatter or to mock me? One could never trust these privileged types.
“A lovely movie,” I answered in a neutral tone, trying to figure what the boy was up to. It is only incidental that I was lying. Difficult to admit, but I had not yet even heard of Jean Renoir or Partie de campagne. How much I had been missing! Not speaking French, I even thought Jogesh might be referring to some Malayali film.
“One day I will make a film like that,” he informed me, quite plainly. “It will be set in the Bengal countryside, using deep-focus shots as suggested in your beautiful storyboard. The story will revolve round a real Indian family, none of this popular humbug, and our local actors will act.”
I turned and looked up at him: I could not help laughing at the boy’s simple confidence and plain ambition, and Jogesh also laughed. Perhaps it was artful naïveté, but the impression he gave was of a talent so robust it could not be constrained by our normal, disingenuous Indian modesty. I was taken immediately by these qualities, even as I envied his lack of encumbrances, his youth and privilege, that allowed him to make such plans.
As for his own fondness for me, that is easily explained. He saw how I could sketch a scene even after five glasses of local brandy at our after-work dhaba, capturing every nuance of pertinent detail. He appreciated my thoroughness with an ad mockup, my considered choices for the props on shoots. He admired my aesthetic values.
He took me to all foreign film screenings, asking my opinions, in turn giving me such an education. (The Americans became my favorite: Ford; Hawks; Hitchcock; Nicholas Ray.) He wanted to prepare me because I had skills that would be necessary for him, and since our first film, he has relied entirely on me to create the visual scheme. It was I who urged him to shoot half of Calcutta Nights in black-and-white (village scenes) and half in color (city life). I sketched the costumes vivifying the family’s progression up the social ladder. I carefully picked the furniture for the successive homes. And, of course, I drew up the storyboards that he was clutching in his hands as he instructed Anant on how to frame the shots. In effect, I created the visual world through which Jogesh’s cinematographer moved the camera.
And Jogesh’s skill? He was a manager and manipulator of people—a director, through and through. How he could talk! With such confidence, making each crew member feel they were the crucial link in a grand endeavor.
Jogesh quit his job in the ad agency to make that film. It was some two years after he had started at the agency. He simply walked up to my easel and bluntly he informed me: “I have submitted my notice, and so should you. Bibhutibhushan, I have secured financing. In twelve weeks’ time, we will begin filming my screenplay.”
I was speechless, exhilarated. Who else but Jogesh could make me even to think of quitting my cushy job, and facing the fury of my mother and young wife—both so quick with an insult.
“Bah bah! Where did you find the money, good friend?” I laughed.
He showed me then a small square photograph of a girl with huge eyes and creamy skin, staring into the camera with a wise and weary gaze even at her tender age.
“Our mothers play bridge on Sundays. Our horoscopes match perfectly. And her father—I am happy to inform you, Bibhutibhushan-brother—is unspeakably wealthy.”
That Jogesh married for money was not the most shocking thing; in those days, very few of us married for love. What surprised me instead, in her quiet way, was Nirmala herself. At their winter wedding, as the priest babbled prayers and relatives anointed her, and later at the Tollygunge, as one by one the eminences of Kolkata society offered their empty blessings, this strange girl remained calm and apart, neither impressed nor intimidated, succumbing not at all to the whirl of pretension, rocking her head and smiling as needed. Her face was barely out of childhood, plump and sweet; but her eyes were like the eyes of 3-D Jesus glued to the dashboard of the car belonging to our soundman Mr. George—compassionate and knowing eyes, eyes aglow with the sad wisdom of two thousand years, mysteriously following you even if you move left, if you move right.
In the reception line, I made some swift, jovial little crack about all the overstuffed babus that even Jogesh didn’t capture, nor my own wife. But a knowing smile flitted over Nirmala’s mouth, a brief intimacy between us. At that moment, even through her silence, I became allied with her. I would not have been bold to have called it love, but in fact it was. And thereafter, at functions and parties, or visiting Jogesh’s home office, I always went out of my way to attend to lonely Nirmala, to ask what magazine she was reading, and make some small joke and pull a smile from that face. She was so bored, with a mind like hers, in a house filled with servants and nothing to do. How could Jogesh be so preoccupied as to ignore this treasure? When she visited us on set, amid all those grave and intent persons, where everything was pukka tension, she in turn would seek me out, because I would always give her a little time, and we’d share some wry comments on the serious goings-on.
“Bibhuti-bhai, cheer me up. Tell one of your jokes,” she used to beg of me, making my eager heart to melt. I would assume a voice or make a funny sketch: Nirmala’s face on the body of a swan; Jogesh’s sleek mug attached to a peacock or a wolf. It was the great pleasure of my day to elicit those satisfied giggles. She was my perfect audience.
Such diversions were entirely to Jogesh’s satisfaction, for it took away some stressful burdens from him, freeing him to focus on his job—to focus, that is, on whichever beautiful and sophisticated actress happened to be on the set that day.
“What is he telling to her so earnestly?” Nirmala would ask me.
“Just directions, move this way, that way, speak more loudly and so on.”
“Taking a long time for such simple directions, isn’t he? Doesn’t she know to move without his touching her like that?” Jogesh was bending over the actress, whispering animatedly, then pausing to listen. Taking her arms and moving them gently, like doll’s arms.
“Indeed. We could all be eating dinner by now if he didn’t take such a fuss over the actors. Vain creatures, actors; they will suck up all the time if you allow them. Look here: my own face on a swinging monkey!”
“What?”
“A monkey, swinging from a tree! Jumping into the water with the inscrutable swan.”
“Looks nothing like a monkey.”
“It does!”
“Chup. Enough nonsense,” she said, smiling despite herself. “It’s not amusing.”
For all those years, we were not unfaithful. We were not malicious. At that time, nothing could have happened between someone such as Nirmala Swan and someone such as Bibhutibhushan Mallik, even had we met each other as unmarried persons. As our local films repeatedly remind us, this is the tragedy of our Indian system.
It would take more than thirty years. My sons would have grown, and through my connections, found jobs on Kolkata film sets: one a script supervisor; the other a cameraman. My own marriage would have further devolved into a graceless and purely practical arrangement, completely lacking sensuality. All of us would have grown into old people. And, while Jogesh was abroad and she was using the home computer, Nirmala would have stumbled into
his open e-mail inbox, and read the fond and familiar message from the Mumbai Actress: final, irrefutable proof. And only then would she call me to her home and fall, weeping furiously, into my arms.
“Oh, God!” she cried, scratching her arms with her nails, pulling her own hair with her fist. “How could he have done this?”
“Ah-ooh-wa, careful, careful,” I cooed, holding her arms gently to her sides and pulling her close against my breast—where she melted, where she melted.
“I want to kill him!” she wailed. “I want to cause him that much pain.” Patiently, I flicked away her tears and kissed her on the hair—at first like a brother would kiss, and then … before our eyes our long-waiting love finally found its door and came into the beautiful open. Our children were grown; we were finally free to do as we pleased, society be damned.
Of course, we still kept it only between us, for how could I proclaim my love for Jogesh’s wife while remaining dependent on Jogesh for my livelihood, while also living in small-minded and clannish Kolkata? We met monthly, weekly, whenever I found a stolen weekend, a private afternoon. Nirmala’s fury at Jogesh had released a passion so intense, which she had never before acknowledged; while I myself discovered in her such universes of thoughtful tenderness. Nirmala would make me tea, would ask after my health, and then her watery wide eyes would drift, lost and anxious. That look, I learned, was the precursor to love. Until, mutually assuaged, we shyly wore our clothes again. She would offer me tea once more, also sweets. She would straighten my shirt and fold up the packet of sweets into my hand (for the long drive). She would walk me to the door and close it only after I had rounded the corner for the taxi.
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I Am an Executioner Page 16