Yours sincerely,
Subhas C. Bose
Scottish Church College
‘Hmm,’ Bikash said meaningfully, before looking at me with an expression that denoted manufactured anguish. ‘I’m surprised that The Statesman published it.’
I had started wearing powerless glasses in public by then, if only for the pretence of being a gentleman when I was moving about in the non-nitrate world. The truth was just the opposite. I was no dignified gentleman at all. Instead, I was thrilled to be fêted, to be recognized and to be occasionally stared and pointed fingers at. The more vociferous ones were to be found at the market, which I drove through, sitting in the back seat of my Model-T, hoping to be caught reading from a book that I would never actually read.
‘So when’s the next bioscope then, Abani?’ Bikash asked. His interest in the motion pictures was tangential. What interested him was the people who had now become devotees of this new science that was trying hard to be considered an art. His question in the hall might as well have been, ‘So when’s the next magic show then, Abani?’
‘There’s some talk of a new one next month. But I think they want to start pacing them out a bit from now on. Give us a bit of breathing space. It seems we run the danger of squeezing this lemon dry if we’re not careful.’
And then he suddenly asked the question.
‘This Durga Devi. How close are you to her? Isn’t she an Anglo?’
So that had been what Bikash had wanted to ask all along. We had driven down to the coffee house in my motor and throughout the journey he had had a look on his face that suggested some sort of mental constipation. Unable to ask me what, how, why and other such questions that demand answers, that day in the motor his eyes had been restless, as if a group of very tiny creatures was running about just under the skin of his brow. I remember him having the same look just after my mother died. Till finally one day, after his brother Rona was out of sight and while we were—though no longer boys in shorts—urinating out of the window of my room, he had asked me, ‘Abani, does it feel bad or does it feel good with your mother and father no longer here?’
I had mumbled a reply that was a lie—something couched in sentimentality and probably a line plucked out of context from one of those strings-searing theatre productions. I had then buttoned my pants and that had been it. The matter of my (happy) orphanhood was never raised again.
And now, sitting in a hallful of slurping, chattering people, Bikash had asked another awkward question. And yet, I recognized it for what it was: a question that I myself had never asked, afraid of answering it correctly.
‘Oh, you mean Felicia? Hah, Bikash! She’s nothing but an Anglo airhead who’s ugly to boot! Give me more credit, will you?’ Just to drive the message home, I let out a very believable snigger, shaking my head in bioscope mirth. But a gramophone needle skidded across inside me. Felicia Miller was anything but an Anglo to me. She was, at the time, the only object that could leave me exposed, like a filmed reel left outside its canister, like a target running about on a ground with no cover and no choice but to dive into a dry, deep well, like a liar whose lie had been caught, like a neck whose purpose can only be to be caressed or snapped.
It only made sense, therefore, to defend myself against charges of having any feelings for Felicia Miller.
Acting is not about pretending to be someone else. It’s about peeling the swathes of people wrapped around one’s body and exposing whichever person suits the occasion. Sometimes while walking down a street, careful not to bump into passers-by, I watch my feet. They’ve become slower now, but the basic concept remains the same. Left foot, right foot, siblings who know each other so well that they don’t have to talk to drag my body forward. The body that they transport—whether from this room to that or along longer, far more complicated routes—is a bundle of muscles and bones that have no history, except for time-serving banalities like diseases or injuries. All the actor does in a bioscope is take control of this body, deny it its zombie-life for the duration of the performance.
Effectively, nothing is allowed to be automatic for the actor. And yet, consummate performer that I had become by then, feted for my ability to control every visible part of my body for the camera to record, I lost all control and broke into splinters the day I heard that Durga Devi had quit the Alochhaya Bioscope Co.
Ronny Heaslop had been a tea estate man before he expanded into coal transportation. It was only after he realized that a steady pile of money was being made without him having to even lift, let alone shuffle, a finger did he notice that being a young, successful and rich Anglo-Indian had made very little difference to his social standing among the Europeans in the country. It was wonderfully different when someone was arriving from Home for the first time. He had valuable tips to give and his presence was appreciated with invitations and social meetings. But after a few months, even these green-horns from England would stop short of being too familiar and would restrict their dealings with him to the strictly professional.
Perhaps this was something Heaslop imagined. Or perhaps it was something real. But the Lucknow boy couldn’t shake off the feeling that in any gathering of import there were whispered conversations exchanged whenever he was just out of earshot—and those inaudible sentences were invariably about his balmy pedigree. He tried his best not to show that such rumours, which he may have circulated in the confines of his head, bothered him. But the fact of the matter was that Ronny Heaslop wasn’t happy despite his success and riches. He wanted something more.
It was through his ventures in coal that he had first met Edward Quested, formerly of the East Indian Railway. And it was through Mr Quested that he would get introduced to and then acquainted with his charming daughter, Adela Quested.
Adela had been a resident of this country for more than seventeen years and had picked up, among other habits, more than just a smattering of Hindustani, some local habits and a tropical imagination. But because of her birth and subsequent years in the therapeutic English town of Bath, she was never clubbed in the same league as the other ladies that Heaslop had come to know during his bachelorhood. That, however, could not be the sole reason why he started courting Adela with the determination of an Assam rhino. A subliminal desire to rise through the ranks of society may well have played a small part in his romance, and Ronny was honest enough to admit that to himself.
The association with Quested had started working soon enough. After his application for membership to the Bengal Club had been rejected twice (officially for ‘not providing adequate information about his recommendees’ and unofficially for having been ‘a regular customer at the Carlton Hotel & Theatre in the past’ and ‘having no permanent residency in the English mainland’), it took one glowing recommendation from the general secretary of the Asiatic Society and former head of the East Indian Railway to get him in this time. That Ronny Heaslop was now engaged to the general secretary’s daughter must have quickened things up considerably.
Ronny’s new-found confidence also translated into his desire to put his money into something a bit more glamorous than tea and coal and poker—like in the burgeoning moving pictures business. Through an acquaintance of Edward Quested’s fellow Asiatic man Douglas J. Smith, a man who had as keen an interest in the new technology of bioscope cinema as he had in ancient Pali inscriptions and seals, a dinner party had been arranged at the Bengal Club in which senior members of the Alochhaya Bioscope Co. had also been invited. It was also a chance for Quested to show that he was not the kind of insufferably hidebound Englishman who was uncomfortable with Indians and Anglo-Indians.
Lalji Hemraj Haridas was pleased as rum punch to be invited by the Questeds. Before setting off, he had refrained from munching on a mandatory before-dinner paan, opting instead to douse the high collars of his black jacket with his wife’s perfume. Lalji and the rest of us who were invited were obviously not allowed inside the Bengal Club building. But Quested had thoughtfully arranged a garden party and sham
iana dinner just outside the main premises. This he had managed after reading the club rules and convincing George Godfrey, the club president, that the Europeans-only rule was applicable only within the polygonal walls of the Bengal Club building. The food and drinks ordered would officially be for the consumption of the European guests at the party, of course. The others who would join in would be ‘invisible’—not totally unlike the gnats and mosquitoes that inevitably hover around their human guests.
‘And that’s the thing, Mr Hemraj …’
‘Call me, Lalji, please, Mr Heaslop.’
‘Ah, and that’s the thing, Lalji-ji, the bioscope is universal. You don’t have to learn another language to follow what’s happening in the story. I mean, apart from a few title cards, the pictures are the language—a Bengali, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Marwari, they all understand what’s going on. Like when I saw an Alochhaya picture two days after I had seen a Griffith film. It could have been made by the same man from the same studio and the audience wouldn’t have known the difference.’
Heaslop was visibly excited. He had plans and was all asweat. The news of Indian bioscopes had filtered back Home, but apart from a few public screenings in Europe, Britain was still an untapped market. He was planning to use his proficient coal–tea network to export Indian features. Or was it a plan to import Indian bioscopes?—considering that somewhere not-too-deep inside his head, Home was still the cabbage-smelling place his grandfather Gregory A. Heaslop had come from as a pale young man to this country that fights paleness. He would ultimately bring the bioscope from the East to picture houses across England. Instead of selling the prints outright to European picture houses as Hemraj and every other bioscope man in town had been doing, distributing them and renting out the prints would make more capital sense. And Heaslop would be the distributor. Over a glass of brandy, he told Lalji that he would be going to England the next month and it would make incredible good sense to take stocks of The Black Hole, Prahlad and a few other Alochhaya films with him.
‘England is waiting for your pictures, Lalji-ji.’
‘Not Lalji-ji, Mr Heaslop,’ Lalji reminded him with a smile, ‘just Lalji.’
‘Yes, yes. I have business partners in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Edinburgh who have already shown interest. The Elphinstone people and another Bombay bioscope company are already keen about this. But to tell you honestly, Lalji-ji, it’s the Alochhaya bioscopes that I’m impressed with. They’ve been …’ Heaslop cocked his head back as if he was an army man on night duty creaking his neck all around, waiting for it to snap into place, and emptied his glass in an eye-blink that could have been deemed as dereliction of duty.
It was at this point that I had walked into the Club lawns. Lalji caught me by his eye and gestured me to join him. That, however, was easier gestured than done. As soon as I helped myself to a drink from an exaggeratedly turbaned waiter whose job was to waft by everyone like a ghost with a silver tray, I was approached by a small swarm of people that included ladies in silk saris and gowns and men in bow ties with cigarettes. Minutes passed by with me telling admiring strangers about the ‘gruelling prison scene, where the camera was almost on us’, about the various trick shots in which I was made to stand or sit in carefully selected positions that would later be translated into ‘impossible actions and images’, about my plans and about Durga Devi’s acting prowess.
It was finally Ronny Heaslop and Lalji who crept up to me.
‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, I hope you’re having a good time?’ asked Ronny as he hopped back a few steps to widen the circle that till then had comprised no one I knew. ‘I hope our star actor is not getting bored.’
Lalji introduced me to Ronny. We shook hands. I saw Ronny Heaslop as a large man who used his largeness as an introduction in a gathering. I saw, too, that he was clearly awkward meeting me. Even as he spoke, his booming voice spreading like just-burst pollen, I could see by the regular bobbing of his head that he had rehearsed this moment at least a few times. He was keen on making a good first impression on me as an investment.
‘No, not at all. It’s quite delightful here, thank you, Mr Heaslop. Lalji, I don’t see Durga. Won’t she be coming?’
It was my idea of a conversation-changer. It would, I had figured, give Lalji the necessary time and space to do whatever he had intended to do when he first caught my eye as I walked in. Lalji muttered a hurried ‘excuse me’ and gently guided me towards a giant pedestal fan that looked more like a caged bird forced to flutter for a living.
‘Abani-ji, about Durga Devi, there’s been a slight development. It was all very sudden so I couldn’t announce it to anyone at the office. I would have told you first in any case. It’s just that …’ He had taken out his handkerchief and was dabbing at his bumpy forehead the way he did each opening week as he waited for the ticket receipts to come in. ‘Durga Devi has left the country.’
Half my face was inside the glass of brandy, so if I managed to hide my splutter—and in any case, I had, by then some years of professional and amateur pretending behind me. I looked up and waited for Lalji to continue.
One clear-cut symptom of adulthood is that everything quietens down in a nice, underwater fashion. If it’s bad news, it drops like a spanner in a lake, heavily, but without the ferocity of a fall on the ground. As for experiencing joy, that too is stunted by adulthood, watered down and served as polite grog. Something on the Bengal Club lawn splintered into pieces and the giant rotor fan was simply blowing the pieces away, silently.
Because of who I was in that titterful, chattering garden, I was able to conduct myself during the first half-hour or so of that evening as Abani Chatterjee, a particularly famous bioscope actor in a composite world created a bit from here and a bit from there. Yet, when I heard Lalji say the words ‘Durga Devi has left the country’, the words and pretty much everything else exploded without a sound. In the evening air lit up by lights that were being fed by those old-style generators that lay far enough not to be heard, objects floated about like dust in the sunbeam. ‘Durga’, ‘Devi’, ‘has left’, ‘the’, ‘country’. Splintered words seeped into the people all around me. They were soaked in the drink I was downing.
It was a surprise. I had not expected Durga’s absence to shock me, in so cinematic a fashion, with emotion. How much, after all, had we to do with each other? She was not the first thought I had every morning, nor the last every night. Her presence, next to me, affected me, her touch when we performed for the camera moved me to conscious feeling, and that much I could understand. But the intensity of what rose and spread inside me, like a mushroom cloud, that evening when Lalji spoke those words left me bemused and startled. I hadn’t the means to understand or deal appropriately with it. My instinct was to duck; to smoke a cigarette.
It was necessary to say something entirely natural in a completely natural manner. With Lalji having done his bit, it was my turn to speak. ‘Some more ice, please,’ I told the waiter who was floating by like a giant insect. I had switched to whisky, and after Lalji had convinced himself that I had taken the news of Durga’s departure well enough (I had simply asked, ‘Oh, has she left for another studio?’, to which Lalji had replied, ‘No, she’s left for Australia … family reasons’), I made the same waiter pour me another double.
It was an hour or so since I had joined the party and the gnarling sensation I had felt earlier in the evening had vanished like a scene that never made it alive out of the cutting room. People were talking all the while, some of them talking to me. I could hear snatches of conversation erupt around me. And I entered one conversation and slipped into another like a trapeze artist swinging from one pair of hands to another.
‘Darjeeling, I’m afraid, is getting increasingly crowded by the day,’ I heard a familiar face tell a man whose ruddy cheeks had started getting redder even as I stood staring at them. ‘I honestly think it’s better to go off to one of the hill stations in the Central Provinces for some peace of mind. I went to Dalho
usie last year. I think I’ll go there again. Been there, John? Or to Mussoorie?’
Then there were two Englishmen talking bioscope.
‘Comedy is still an avenue that needs to be explored in the motion pictures here. I saw a splendid American short a few years ago called A Lucky Dog. Oh, it was hilarious! The two actors, Oliver Hardy and Arthur Jefferson, should seriously pair up for more movies. But I don’t know, do people have a sense of humour here?’
I moved about for a bit in the crowd gathered in the garden, the tables of food forming the border of this artificially lit picture in motion. Then I positioned myself, glass in hand, next to a stairwell. Lighting up a cigarette, I heard an important-looking man in a cravat tell Heaslop: ‘If measures for educating these children are not promptly and vigorously encouraged and aided by the government, we shall soon find ourselves embarrassed in the large towns with a large floating population of Indianized English. These people, I must tell you, Ronny, are loosely brought up, and exhibit most of the worst qualities of both the races.’
He seemed completely unaware of Heaslop blanching and blinking uncomfortably, for he continued, ‘This Indianized English population, already so numerous that the means of education offered to it are quite inadequate, will increase more rapidly than ever. Frankly, I can hardly imagine a more profitless, unmanageable community. It might be long before it grows into what one would officially call a “class dangerous to the State”, but it’ll only take a few years, if neglected, to make it a glaring problem for this government. Mark my words, Ronny, mark my words.’
‘I can’t agree more with you, sir,’ Heaslop replied with a sad attempt to replicate gusto.
‘Ah, Mr Quested, so what new findings from the Society will you educate us about tonight?’ asked the tipsy gentleman who had, till now, been busy giving a lecture on social engineering to the now visibly relieved Heaslop. Someone else had joined them, a man with a scholar’s voice.
Bioscope Man Page 17