Such blatant criminal activities were gradually linked to violent terror actions. There were stray bombings (the handmade bombs mostly landing in ponds or puddles without going off), shootings (in which no one was shot, only ricochets ricocheted) and a general sense of foreboding in the city. This fear was not overbearing. Life went on, but unclear unrest hung in the air like the moon during daylight—present and nearly invisible. Only after an ‘action’ would this be turned temporarily into minor, private panic. Then it would subside again and return to being the background migraine it was. In the case of Tarini Chatterjee, the ‘terrorists’ just provided him with another excuse to speak bitterly about the country’s youth. By the way, it was my father who had coined the term ‘bhadralok loafer criminal class’. He was thrilled when it became a catchphrase in all the English newspapers.
But things quietened down considerably after 1911, partly because the partition decision was reversed, and partly because the hooligans were quite ineffective in their stated goal of bringing about ‘freedom’. Also, papers like Jugantar, Sandhya and Bande Mataram that had, incredibly, kept on writing about the need to target Europeans (despite the fact that it was mostly Bengali businessmen, Bengali policemen and Bengali ‘informers’ who ended up as targets) during the worst years, also finally came under the purview of the authorities after crackdowns and raids on their one-room offices.
This retreat of the ‘bhadralok loafer’ nationalists hadn’t happened overnight, of course. The tide had started to turn three years before 1911, the year the country’s capital was shifted. In 1908, four innocent people were killed during a robbery in Muzaffarpur, two of the victims being women. Only a few weeks earlier, in the same town in Bihar, the terrorists had blundered badly. I’m not sure whether it was because it had been a moonless night or because the two terrorists, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, were simply incompetent. But their assigned task—to blow up the transferred Presidency Magistrate D.H. Kingsford—went all wrong. The bomb didn’t take out Kingsford. Instead it killed the wife and daughter of a pleader at the Muzaffarpur Bar who had nothing to do with the magistrate.
Between the shooting of the missionary Hickenbotham in 1908 and the killing of Shamsul Alam in 1910, the terrorists had killed six Bengalis. We were led to believe that during the same time, there had also been attempts on four Europeans, but all had ended in failure. Naturally, one felt that there were very incompetent, frustrated and armed people roaming about town. Anyone could be the next victim. That everyone wasn’t the terrorists’ target didn’t comfort anyone. Nevertheless, as I said, life, that banal sideshow we all inadvertently buy tickets for, went on.
With the arrest of the ringleaders of the Muzaffarpur incident, and the hanging of Khudiram, the city was waiting to completely recover its easy, languid ways. But there were still assassinations and robberies—and, by default, Bengalis were ending up dead, maimed or extremely ruffled. I was to hear the funniest bit of news about terrorist bungling from our headmaster Jatin-master during the last month of my very-soon-to-be aborted school life.
Jatin-master had suddenly responded to the ‘call for independence and self-rule’. Looking back, there’s nothing surprising in that. He was young, and he was a failure. Why else would he, supposed brilliant scholar from Sanskrit College, end up teaching snotty children of government employees, company clerks and general upstarts? His overnight transition from shirt, coat, trousers and Nesfield English to panjabi, dhuti and rousing Bengali couldn’t be explained at first. But when he told us about Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Fraser and his brushes with the terrorists, we vaguely got the idea that he wanted to let all of us know—in as subtle a manner possible for a headmaster, of course—that he was a nationalist.
Fraser, thought to be one of the chief architects of the partition, had always been a prime target for assassination. Four attempts had been made on his life. In the first three instances, bombs were hurled at the train on which he was supposed to be travelling. In the first and the third attempts, the bombs didn’t go off. On the second occasion, when the train was travelling through Narayanganj, the explosion shattered the rail track along with the engine. Fraser, however, was left completely unhurt. It was in the fourth attempt that Fraser came closest to meeting his maker. At a conference being held at the YMCA hall, a gangly teenager with a gun missed his mark despite shooting from point blank range. As he would explain in court later, the revolver trigger had ‘got stuck’! Jatin-master told us this story with not a hint of humour or irony. He always was a bit of a fool.
So, as I’ve said, the blundering, overheated anti-partitionists were quietening down by 1911. But their tribe didn’t entirely disappear. As a war raged in faraway Europe, a new crop of terrorists began to emerge from the woodwork. From 1916 onwards, there were fresh rumours flying off the walls and bouncing along footpaths and gutters: criminals were once again spreading terror, all in the name of ‘Independence’. Life got a little complicated again, so that even a trip to the market to buy vegetables and meat or attending a travelling jatra would have a shrapnel edge to it. That year, three Bengali zamindar families were forced to ask for police protection after they received threats for conducting business with the British Crown. By 1917, it was wise for a Bengali to avoid Chowringhee, Esplanade, Ballygunj and other European areas at night. Though it wasn’t always safe to stick to their own side of town either. And in any case, you couldn’t sit inside your house and office all the time. But there was definite evidence of a certain fear. The Victoria Memorial, its grounds opened to the public with some fanfare six years before, was now visited by Europeans only. The handful of non-Europeans seen walking about its lawns during the day would vanish before dusk set in.
This time round, it wasn’t the old ‘anarchists’ of the Anushilan Samiti or the Maniktala Secret Society or the Jugantar Party that were creating a ruckus. It was the turn of unnamed groups to conduct ‘action’. The shadowy members of these shadowier organizations had decided to take Direct Action against people who traded in European goods and services. A few outfits went right ahead and announced that they would attack anything and anybody involved in the ‘direct or indirect propagation of European civilization’. But unlike with the old boys with their toys, this time there was no hormonally charged wake-up call, just a blowpipe shower of poisoned darts.
The city was becoming home to an increasing number of gangs and private armies. And if one looked through all the noise and smoke of ‘Bande Mataram’ and the country-as-Goddess nonsense, they were just armies of hooligans going about their jobs the way bioscopewalas and moneylenders and doctors went about theirs.
Around this time, one began to see the figure that is the English ‘eight’ and also the Bengali ‘four’ scrawled in various places all across town, most prominently and scandalously on the corner wall of Dalhousie Square. The authorities erased the giant chalk marks twice, but they cropped up for a third time. After that, the ‘8’s just flourished like weed throughout the city. Only the white marble of Victoria Memorial managed to protect itself from the onslaught thanks to guards put on triple shift.
The Bengali papers remained strangely quiet about the whole thing. But the Amrita Bazar Patrika ran a small report in one of its inside pages about a dance hall in Entally being gutted by arsonists. It was run by a Bengali lady and the clientele were Bengalis and Europeans (probably Anglos). After initially suspecting that the fire had been caused by a faulty electric line, the authorities realized that it was arson when a police sepoy spotted an ‘8’ scratched on a soot-covered wall. It took a few weeks for the authorities to understand that the mark was a gang signature. The words ‘Char Murti’—Gang of Four—had finally been found alongside an ‘8’ written many times over on a showcard outside the Palladium. How someone had managed to scrawl the sign on a poster that lay behind a standard gauze net that could be opened only by the theatre’s management eluded everyone, including the Palladium’s nervous management.
It was with all this m
urky and phantom-like information that I looked at Shombhu-mama’s shirt that bore the mark ‘8’.
‘Get it off, Abani! Get it off. Let’s get home,’ Shombhu said to me, sounding just a little agitated.
I slapped him on the back, hoping that the mark would come off in powder puffs. But it stayed like a burn mark. It didn’t help that Shombhu had already started moving at a furious pace towards the streetlight opposite the garbage pile. The ‘8’, tilted—as if trying to roll over and become the mark of infinity—by the movement of Shombhu’s shirt folds, became even more visible.
‘Where do you think you got the mark?’ I asked, running after him and looking around to see where the men with the halos were. The paan shop was still and quiet, with only the paanwala peering into the rack directly behind him. The stationery shop next to it had its shutters down. The makeshift three-brick temple under the peepul tree across the pavement had the usual bunch having their post-supper smoke and pointless chat. The clinic-cum-residence of Dr Shibnath Ghoshal, MBBS (Edin.), House Surgeon, Medical College, with the wooden blinds on its doors that opened and closed at different hours of the day in snappy, noisy blinks, dozed in the night shadow of the peepul tree.
‘It must have been in the tram. I don’t know,’ Shombhu fumed.
As he stopped under the light, positioning himself to take his shirt off, I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. There were figures at the mouth of our lane. I wish Shombhu-mama hadn’t stopped. I saw three dogs sniffing and scrounging the garbage pile that was a permanent landmark of our lane, and the toothless widow who also scrounged the same pile but was now sleeping some distance away, on the pavement. And it was clear to me that it wasn’t any one of them who had triggered the sudden shift in light and shade near the mouth of the lane.
‘Don’t make a sound. Don’t move a muscle.’
The voice was calm, and collected because of its calmness. The face was covered with a handkerchief but the light bouncing off his hair left me with no doubt as to who he was. It was the boy from the Dilkhusha, the one who had been staring at me. Another figure came up from behind and joined him.
‘You’re Shombhu Lahiri of Alochhaya.’ It could have been a question but it wasn’t.
‘Yes, but … who … what do you want?’
‘Quiet now. I can blow your brains out and just walk away. So listen carefully. And who might this be with you? The famous Abani Chatterjee, I see.’
‘He’s my nephew.’
‘And so our friend of the uncles is a mama himself.’
The second man gave out a small grunt. I now noticed that his face, too, was covered by a handkerchief, but one that was less spotless than his companion’s.
‘I don’t understand …’ Shombhu-mama had started to whimper, his shirt still in that indeterminate state between tucked in and taken off.
‘You, Lahiri-babu, are an informer. And you have been an informer since you were at the Carlton, then at the Elphinstone and now at Alochhaya. I can understand the English. But you’re the worst kind—a traitor to your own kind.’
‘Nooo! You’ve got it all wrong. I’m just a cameraman. I work for Lalji Hemraj at Alochhaya and I don’t know any Englishmen, you fools!’
‘Ah, but perhaps you know an Englishwoman, a mem, eh? Perhaps the name Faith Cooper rings a bell?’
‘I never knew her! She was at the Carlton where I was then working.’
‘And we know that you had planned a meeting with Charles Urban. Are you now going to say that you’ve never heard of Charles Urban, Mr Innocent Bioscope Babu?’
While Shombhu-mama frantically tried to explain that there had been a huge misunderstanding, I noted that the breath of the other man, the one without the gun, was incredibly bad. There must have been a rotting tooth or two lying somewhere inside his mouth. Perhaps he had bad gums.
‘Shuren, I’ve seen him with that Madan chap at the Elphinstone.’
‘Shut up! Shut … up! Haven’t I told you not to call me by my name while we’re working … TAPAN?’
Tapan breathed out from under the piece of cloth covering his face, making the handkerchief flutter and reveal a chin as shiny as his hair. So they were members of the Char Murti.
‘Look, I’m Bengali. He’s Bengal …’ Shombhu-mama flubbered on.
‘Yes, Shombhu-babu, you are Bengali. Which makes it doubly sad, doesn’t it? Which is why it’s also fortunate for you that you didn’t actually get to meet Mr Urban.’
‘But … but he’s American. I was supposed to meet him about the Kinemacolor …’
‘Would you call Charlie Chaplin American?’
‘He lives in America, works there too …’
‘No, no Shombhu-babu. That doesn’t make him American. Does the British Minister of Munitions become an American just because his mother is American? No, Lahiri babu, Churchill is English. I guess you’ll say that the Anglo actress isn’t English either, eh? Now what’s her name, Tapan?’
‘Face Cooper,’ grunted Rotten Breath.
‘It’s Faith Cooper. And then there are your old friends from the Carlton and Elphinstone. When was the last time a Bengali found himself working at the Carlton or working for a Bombay stooge of the English? I’m afraid we’ll have to make an example of you, Lahiri-babu. But we’re not impractical. You will leave the bioscope business immediately. If you’re still at Alochhaya next week, Lahiri-babu, we will be disappointed. Won’t we, Tapan?’
‘Shuren, there’s somebody coming,’ Bad Breath said suddenly.
In the streetlight I could make out two figures coming our way. Shuren quickly tucked his gun away inside his shirt.
‘Don’t be too smart. I won’t hesitate to shoot,’ he added briskly.
But if anyone seemed to be acting too smart, it was Tapan. He seemed to have suddenly developed some sort of breathing problem and had started wheezing furiously. He bent over once and mumbled out something to his partner that none of us could make any sense of. Shuren pulled the handkerchiefs off both their faces and, as Tapan painfully unburdened his lungs, we all stood there, waiting for the passers-by to pass us by, which they didn’t.
‘Oh, look who’s here! Abani, coming from the studio, eh?’ It was Bikash. ‘Not in your fancy motor? Shombhu-mama, hope things are fine? Rona and I are just returning from an evening of divine music. Heard of Manikarnika Tambey? She sings kheyal. Oof, terrific!’
Ever since Rona had settled down into a new, improved life of domesticity, the two brothers had been left to themselves to do what they did best—go to Bagmari and while away their evenings listening to music at a friend’s.
Shombhu suddenly regained his composure. ‘Arre, Bikash, Rona, haven’t seen you two for a while. Returning from the Palits, I see. So you’re into kheyals these days. You don’t care for our local singers any more?’
‘Oh, only last week we heard this young havaldar from Karachi, Nazrul Islam. Bengali chap, actually, from Bardhaman. Used to be part of a leto group before he joined the army. You should have heard him, Abani, this kid is better than …’
‘Nazrul Islam? Boy with glasses? Funny hair? Didn’t we meet him at Nibaran-da’s?’ It was Dragon Breath Tapan.
His partner just stared at him, waiting for him to turn to ashes.
‘We met this chap at Nibaranchandra Ghatak’s place the other day where this Islam fellow had also gone for training,’ Tapan informed all of us.
‘You mean Nibaranchandra Ghatak the seditionist?’ Rona asked looking straight at the still-wheezing man.
‘He’s no seditionist, mister. He’s a revolutionary, isn’t he, Shuren?’
‘Let us go now, Tapan,’ Shuren chewed the words out, staring fixedly at his friend. ‘We’ll see you again, Lahiri-babu. Sleep well. And all the best for your new job.’
‘Sleep well,’ repeated Tapan as he followed Shuren into the night.
Bikash, Rona, Shombhu-mama and I turned to walk towards the lane that ultimately led to the safe confines of the Chatterjee–Moitra household.
Before we entered our respective quarters, Bikash asked my uncle about his new venture to which Shombhu concocted some lie or the other. Rona pointed out that there was a mark on Shombhu-mama’s shirt. My uncle took off his shirt as he walked up the narrow wooden stairs to his room.
Not a week had passed since this night when Shombhu-mama announced that he was leaving for Bombay. This was a pity, since some twenty-five years later I discovered that Shuren and his cousin Tapan were not members of any seditious gang but lumpen elements hired by Star Theatre to scare off bioscopewalas who were affecting the theatre business badly. My uncle never told me what offer he had got, but he did say something about a man by the name of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke offering him a position in the newly formed Hindustan Cinema Films Co. in Bombay. Shombhu mentioned in passing that Phalke was apparently the first Indian to make a feature, having made Raja Harishchandra some four years before Madan’s Satyavadi Raja Harishchandra and Horen Ray’s Prahlad Parameshwar.
Initially, he would send letters once every two months describing the ‘total revolution in bioscopes and bioscope audiences that is taking place here at the Hindustan Cinema Films Co.’. In one letter he wrote five pages of scribble and scrawl about the new Indian Cinematograph Act with such passion that I seriously believed the pressures of being surrounded by non-Bengalis in Bombay had finally got to him.
The letters stopped in another six months. No one heard from or of him again, till years later, when someone brought news about a certain Shombhunath Lahiri, by then ‘late’, who had been legendary in Bombay for complaining about how cameramen, all apparently Chitpavan Brahmans, would change the aperture setting ring from its correct position after every shot and refuse to let him touch the filter lens. In other words, he didn’t achieve fame, didn’t become a bioscope legend—something that I did, in the next few glorious years of my life.
Geometry of Taste
Ever since Lalji Hemraj Haridas appeared on the scene, it had become apparent that this was a man who knew how to make bioscopes work. From the day he took over the Alochhaya Bioscope Company—the ‘Theatre’ in the name was dropped swiftly—not only did many more people start entering the theatre to watch fifteen to forty-five minutes of sheer motion pictures, but the quality of the fare, too, drastically improved.
Bioscope Man Page 13