Bioscope Man

by Indrajit Hazra

  Shabitri may well have succeeded in her pretence, her life’s great game (no, I wouldn’t call it deception). But her own blood betrayed her, as one’s blood usually does. It was I who shattered the night-quietness with one single slingshot of disturbed air: ‘Ma!’

  I remember the evening the way one remembers a few-seconds-ago fall by the painful bump on one’s head. I had been unable to sleep, and looking out from the balcony into the courtyard that was bathed in weak moonlight, I struck a match to light my cigarette. Suddenly, in that yellow flash of sulphur that normally travels not farther than a few millimetres, I saw an outline swiftly changing in the line of my vision. I chugged on my cigarette, briefly suspending a sequence with Durga and me in a future bioscope, and walked back into my room.

  I made it a point to make my departure from the balcony a little more voluble than I normally would, and then, taking my slippers off, tiptoed back to the door of my room. Going by my instincts, it would have been any time between two-thirty and three-thirty at night. Peering from behind the door curtains of my room, I only saw the balcony railings, complete with two motionless saris hanging from them, illuminated by the aforesaid moonlight. There was no one there.

  Watching bioscopes and being in them give people an extra ability to notice lines of light and shade. Light directors and cameramen notice this most keenly, but everybody in the bioscope business has the ability. Standing behind the curtain, noticing nothing but a still-life, I was quite certain I had seen someone in the tiny flare of the matchstick. I don’t know what made me do it, but after some healthy minutes, I slunk out from behind the curtains, careful not to throw any shadows, tiptoed a little distance down the long balcony, and stood outside my mother’s room.

  During the day, Shabitri’s door was kept open, with only the curtains blocking a direct view. But ever since electricity entered the Chatterjee household, the curtains would flutter like slothful moths at the wind churned up by the metal fins of the new ceiling fans. At night, the complete blockage of view was disrupted every few seconds by these sighing electric-fan-fuelled curtains. I stood outside my mother’s door, making sure that beyond the tip of my nose nothing could be seen from inside.

  The first thing that I thought as I fixed my limited vision on to the darkened interior was that somehow Dr Talukdar had entered my mother’s room. But before I could play out what I would do once I found the doctor inside, I saw a movement. This time it was a clear and crisp movement, a vertical line of blackness cutting through the rest of the darkness and moving ever so slowly.

  ‘Abani, is that you?’

  It was my mother’s voice and I was petrified. A split second later, the fear vanished, as I realized that it was my father who had died and was liable to haunt me, not my immobile but living mother.

  ‘Abani, quiet now. Come here.’ It had been her raised hand, gently waving, that I had seen earlier.

  ‘Ma!’ It was one sharp sound that came out of my throat, like a single loud clang from the nearby temple. It’s remarkable how in the deepest end of the night, unless you keep on creating the sound, a loud but second-short racket can go completely unnoticed. During all the months of bombs being flung by coffee-fuelled seditionists across the city in the dead of night, no one actually reported hearing any blast. And yet, the slightest report of crackers, made somehow louder by its duration, had the ability to irritate a whole citizenry.

  My quick and frantic burst of words—gibberish, really—that followed were mere hoarse whispers that melted away in the moonlit courtyardscape. Shabitri sprung up from her bed and, in a mock-stern manner that wasn’t at all feeble, whispered, ‘Quiet, Abani! Keep quiet and come in at once!’

  In the same firm but familiar voice, she told me to shut the door behind me. As I waited for the darkness of the room to settle before me so that I wouldn’t knock down objects, she was already speaking, more normally now. I even detected a girlish glee in her voice that I had long forgotten.

  ‘Surprised? Sit here next to me and be very, very quiet.’

  Even if I could only see the vaguest contours of her face, I could make out that her eyes were open and that she was smiling.

  ‘How are you able to open your eyes? How can you move?’ I was, as you would expect, flabbergasted.

  In the shortest two hours of my life, I heard Shabitri Chatterjee explain how and why she had decided to stop moving in the presence of other people. And to make it absolutely credible, she had stopped moving even when she was alone. It wasn’t only my father’s downward spiral and the accompanying grief that had made Shabitri pretend to be immobile to perfection. There were many other reasons which, she told me, ‘you’re too young to know about, Abani’.

  It was only in these last few days, after news of Tarini’s death had trickled up from his room to hers, that she had started to feel restless. She still didn’t want to give up what she called ‘the luxury of just existing and doing nothing’, however, so she stirred herself out of complete immobility only briefly, and only when everyone had fallen asleep—or—as in my father’s case—died.

  Even as she filled me in about her twenty-six months of ‘mind-wandering’, talking in mirthful detail not only about the immense will power that was required to refrain from waving away mosquitoes and scratching mosquito bites, but also the discipline required to become comfortable with the horror of urinating and passing faeces in bed, all I could think of was her not intervening and putting a stop to Dr Talukdar’s activities. But sons cannot ask their mothers to clear up matters such as this. So I listened quietly to her telling me about the supremacy of the mind over the body, and how when one pretends something down to its minutest details, one starts successfully lying to oneself. And that once this happens, it stops being a lie.

  ‘And you become what you pretend to be,’ she said, gripping my fingers that must have still smelt of freshly burnt tobacco.

  She only said it once and that too almost as if in passing, but I figured that if she didn’t want anyone to know her little secret, I wouldn’t be the one to let it out. Which makes it even more awkward for me now, some thirty-five years after that night, to talk about her pretence, considering that it is also thirty-five years after her death, for only a fortnight after we talked in her room, my mother Shabitri passed away in her sleep. It was as sudden as her fall and I still think I did the right thing by not telling anyone, not Shombhu-mama, not Abala, not the pink-tongued Dr Talukdar, about her big secret. I just wish she had cleared the bit about her allowing—for it was an allowance—the doctor to use her body in the fashion that he had over months, and possibly years. She could have explained why in a matter-of-fact tone that may not have left me witless.

  But in a way, I’m glad she didn’t. For sons don’t expect their mothers to shed any light on such matters. It’s just not right.

  Around this time, there was another departure. None of us at Alochhaya had expected Shombhu-mama to actually leave the city for good. He was, of course, always talking about moving to Bombay to make pictures of his own, motion pictures that wouldn’t be stifled under the ‘Lalji philosophy of always catering rubbish to the rabble’. It would be wrong to think, though, that Shombhu-mama didn’t appreciate the public—what he called the ‘audience’. After all, it was he who kept telling everyone that if there’s one thing that mustn’t be forgotten while producing bioscopes it’s that bioscopes are made for the eyes, not for empty air. But he was deeply suspicious of Lalji clinically discussing what the public wanted—‘what the public are preferring’—before venturing into a new production.

  ‘He’s racist. He has something against Bengalis, it’s bloody obvious.’

  Shombhu-mama was also getting increasingly frustrated stuck behind the camera and not doing some Horen-Ray-style megaphone-shouting of his own. What made him sink deeper into his own comforting puddle of pity was that he knew the craft of light exposures, camera speed, lens sizes and life in the cutting room better than anyone else at Alochhaya and yet he was sti
ll not recognized as being ready for directorship.

  He had heard that J.F. Madan, his old employer, was besotted by directors from Bombay. This trend would permeate to other studios including Alochhaya and that would be the end of any chance at all of Shombhu from Krishnagar making the grade. Bombay was clearly on his mind when he burst out of an elaborate indoor set one day after the director had said that any superimpositions, double exposures or other camera trickery would ‘ruin the tone of this bioscope’.

  This time, in a fit of furrow-munching depression, Shombhu spared the person he believed to be the source of all his problems: Lalji Hemraj Haridas. Instead, he railed on about people I had never heard him gnash his teeth about before.

  ‘That Tilak is a fool! Gandhi didn’t get elected in the Subjects Committee of the Congress and he’s bent the rules to get him in. And this Gandhi wants to make Hindustani the language of India and turn us all into Marwaris. What next? All of us turning vegetarian?’

  But I don’t think creative frustration alone was the reason Shombhunath Lahiri upped and left town one fine day.

  One evening, after meeting up with him outside the Elphinstone, we went to the Dilkhusha for some kabiraji and mutton cutlets. Shombhu-mama, for some convoluted reason he had once given me, refused to travel in my automobile. I suspect it had something to do with his theory that ‘luxuries make people soft and destroy civilizations’. So I sent Narsingh and the Model-T back, while we walked our way to the nearby Dilkhusha.

  As we ate our kashundi-dipped and onion-cucumber-beet-accompanied morsels of meat, a gaggle of chattering young men sitting at the table next to us suddenly stopped talking. One of them, with thin, generously oiled hair plastered to his skull, looked intensely at me. By now, I was used to people recognizing me in public. But this stare was hostile. They looked like students—not the shirt-trousers sort, but the kind who made a point by wearing their dhutis and panjabis as if they were banners.

  ‘You know, Abani, there’s a rumour that the city is flush with Australian money. Here, I found this in my pocket after I had bought paan from the shop yesterday,’ Shombhu-mama said, and took out a small quarter-anna coin and placed it on the table.

  ‘It’s a quarter-anna coin.’

  ‘Flip it over,’ he said.

  The profile of George V looked familiar enough, with the beard and a tiny elephant depicting the Empire of India dangling on a chain from the royal neck. The words hugging the rim of the coin—‘George V King Emperor’—also looked reassuring enough.

  ‘Flip it,’ Shombhu-mama repeated, as he crushed his cigarette into the battered ashtray that lay between us. Instead of the usual ‘One Quarter Anna’ and ‘India 1916’ below a dividing short line on the other side, the words ‘One Half Penny’ and ‘Commonwealth of Australia 1916’ was inscribed on the metal surface.

  I looked up at Shombhu-mama.

  ‘I have a feeling that the government is planning to merge all the dominions into one country.’

  ‘But why Australia?’

  ‘Because it’s one of the biggest countries in the Empire and it’s full of Englishmen. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

  Shombhu started explaining how the coin on the table in front of us and many more like it were being made in the City Mint. He had a friend who knew someone who had a tea shack in front of the mint. He had apparently found himself with a whole stash of ‘Australian’ coins. According to Shombhu’s friend—who knew the tea shack person—it was part of a much bigger conspiracy by the authorities to redistribute money.

  ‘The next step is to redistribute people across the Empire,’ said my uncle before starting to chew on the crumb-fried stub that forms the handle of a mutton cutlet. As he burbled on, I saw the three student-types get up and move towards the door. One of them, the one who had been staring at me, frowned. All of them left.

  The Dilkhusha, for all its size, has a single tapering entrance—not a wide, open one like Niranjan or Baishakhi. Shombhu had gone to the restaurant’s corner where a wash basin awaited him. As he was coming towards me, shaking his hands to dry them, and his face showing signs of the pleasure one attains after an oily, carnivorous meal, I cleared the bill. Without sitting down again, Shombhu said that we should be on our way home. It was already twenty past nine.

  This was a time when the trams were moderately crowded, less full of bodies than even an hour before, but not as near-empty as they would become an hour later. A tram, unlike a train, with which the Chatterjee family was more familiar, was a benevolent vehicle. It travelled at a luxurious speed and did so without making its passengers feel that they were not part of the immediate surroundings. Its pace was like Shombhu-mama drawling ‘One one thousand, two one thousand’ aloud as he rotated the camera’s handle, cranking things down to 14 or 16 frames a second in an even, exact speed—unless he needed to slow things down for a comic sequence.

  Neither of us got a seat. The next coach was practically empty, and inviting, but being ‘Ladies Only’ we couldn’t take up the offer. Hanging on to the wooden handles, looking like a lazy Christ with my wrists wrapped around them, I saw the city clank past me frame by frame. Some fifteen years had passed since the first electric trams had started running. Now, there were no more of those forever collapsing, constantly defecating Waler horses pulling tram cars. Like the bioscope, the tram I was travelling in was a smooth, astounding welding of technology and aesthetics.

  It was time for us to get down. By the time I saw Shombhu-mama extricate himself from the tram-mouth tangle, I was already facing a familiar street.

  Adjusting his shirt, Shombhu said, ‘Crowded for a weekday, isn’t it?’

  Walking towards the mouth of the lane to our house, I was about to say something innocuous, when I saw two men with halos on their heads walking briskly towards us. A more careful glance revealed that there were no halos; their hair was simply bathed in oil and the otherwise unilluminating streetlight was bouncing off it.

  That was also when I noticed the chalk mark on the back of Shombhu-mama’s shirt. In the straggling hurricane lamplight from the paan shop we had just walked past, the white mark on the white shirt looked yellow. Even in the receding light, the chalk mark stood out like an ink blot.

  ‘Shombhu-mama, there’s a mark on your shirt.’

  I was about to brush it off, when he walked back towards the paan shop, and turned to look at what I was talking about in the small mirror hanging in the shop. His face changed in shape as well as in quality as he did this. The blood inside its well-defined contours seemed to stop flowing. His face turned taut and pale. The barely visible scrawl on his shirt was in the shape of the figure ‘8’. It was only after I looked at Shombhumama’s terror-stricken face that I recognized the sign.

  Here I must digress. For a little history that will better explain Shombhu-mama’s terror and his subsequent departure from the late Tarini’s and Shabitri’s household, from the city, and from my bioscope life. Sometime in 1904 when the government announced its plan to divide the province into a neat half, an anti-Partition movement began. I vaguely recall my father, then still a trusted employee of the East Indian Railway, lecturing visitors like Nirmal-babu from next door with considerable passion about how ‘criminals’ were on the loose, and how these lumpen Bengali youngsters were just ‘pretending to do something noble and heroic, when all they are are scheming murderers and pilfering thieves’. It became apparent only much later that my father was not alone in holding such an opinion.

  Pankaj Pal Chaudhuri, the head of the Pal Chaudhuri family—at whose mansion I saw one of my first bioscopes—and the driving force behind the very successful United Jute Company, received a letter in January 1910, which summed up what these ‘swadeshi nationalists’ were really up to:

  Respected Pal Chaudhuri-babu,

  On the occasion of the 1st of Baishakh, we wish you a happy and prosperous year ahead. As you must be already aware, six honorary officers of our Finance Department have taken a loan of Rs 9,658-1
-5 from you and have deposited the amount in the office noted above on your account to fulfil our great aim. The sum has been entered in our cash book in your name at 5 per cent per annum.

  As we thank you for your generous gesture, we also think it wise to remind you that the Government of the United Republic of Bengal will not permit anyone in your family to enjoy your enormous wealth if you were at any time forced to co-operate with the Government of India authorities. For it is our understanding that it would be better if the rich men of the country, like your honourable self, subscribe monthly, quarterly and half-yearly amounts to the GURB Finance Secretariat.

  Once again, we wish you a joyous and profitable new year. Thank you for your continued support.

  Yours sincerely,

  Finance Secretary,

  Government of the United Republic of Bengal (GURB)

  While this was all very dramatic, it was also baffling. Things became clear a whole six months after the letter landed on Pankaj-babu’s desk, when six men forced their way into the accounts department of the United Jute Company. Between them, they had one pipe gun that hadn’t looked very menacing, but no one wanted to take a chance. Badal Biswas, the chief accountant, was there at the United Jute Company office when the robbers appeared. He later told Pal Chaudhuri with a wan look, ‘They were young. And they were very polite.’ That was all he could say about them.

  The six had walked out with more than nine and a half thousand rupees, threatening Biswas and others at the site of the crime not to call the police or else … Pal Chaudhuri had to go to some length to see to it that news of the robbery was not published in the newspapers. His business depended a lot on reputation. If anyone started to think that the United Jute Company had become a terrorist-funding operation, it could mean the end of his business. So he did what he was told to do in the letter—he kept quiet.