‘I could tell you about the latest paper by Rakhal Banerjee about Harappan sites, but why don’t you ask him yourself next week, Mr Allen?’
Quested. Quested? Had I heard the blubbering man right? Considering that the chance of too many Questeds walking about town was fairly slim, could this Quested be Tarini’s Quested? As if on cue, Heaslop swung his future father-in-law and the other man towards me just as I was wondering whether the next sip should be a gulp or a sip.
‘Mr Quested, let me introduce you to the man who is the face of Indian cinema and whose talent I intend to showcase in England: Abani Chatterjee. Mr Chatterjee, this is Mr Edward Quested.’
‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Chatterjee,’ said the elderly but not old gentleman, whose kind horse-like eyes immediately made a favourable impression on me. ‘Both Ronny here and my daughter have told me about you and your excellent skills. Unfortunately, I must admit, I haven’t seen enough of you. Just the The Black Hole of Calcutta and Anandamath.’ A friendly laugh emanated all around and, just for a moment, I thought that they were laughing at me. Alcohol does obstruct clear judgement.
‘Yes, I thought you were splendid in Anandamath. “India’s Valentino” is how my daughter describes you. I must introduce you to her. She’ll be thrilled,’ Quested spoke with breakneck speed. But instead of bringing the admiring Adela to my attention, the troika of Heaslop, Quested and Justice Allen—joined intermittently by others who fluttered in and out like pigeons landing on ledges during sundown—continued their peripatetic exchanges. These exchanges included the matter of a particular snail population from Africa wreaking havoc in a few tea plantations in Assam, the British Conservative Party’s shape-shifting (and therefore ‘comic’) imperial policy, Adela Quested’s weakness for the many historical artefacts of this land, the ‘excellently argued and packed with telling facts’ leader in The Statesman about the need for a separate goods-train-only rail network between the major industrial cities …
But regardless of what fleeting subject was being lobbed about in our tight but easily breachable circle, the conversation kept skidding back to motion pictures. It was either part of a sinister plan to get me to talk about something they needed me to talk about. Or it was just one of those English conversational tricks that ensured that there were no uncomfortable spells of blank silence within the conversations. My presence could have been utilized for the purpose of furthering business plans as well as filling awkward silences. I, on my part, was becoming increasingly quiet and drunk.
The next whisky was waiting for me. The fluid turned opaque and Lalji’s distant figure was blocked out as I tilted the glass to my mouth. When I lowered my glass, I saw Lalji transport a few pieces of spiced-up cucumbers into his stain-free mouth near the giant rubber plant. Conducting the bottoms-up routine, I walked up to him before he got stuck to another round of small talk.
‘Lalji, so this Heaslop fellow will be taking our movies abroad?’
‘Ah, Abani, yes, it’s all been worked out. It could mean America, my friend, America! Try some of those shami kebabs, I believe they’re really good.’
‘So why has Durga gone?’
I slipped in the question as if I was asking something about distribution rights or about the next film we were planning on the life of Tipu Sultan.
‘Oh, Durga Devi? Well, I tried to explain things to her father. But he was very upset for some reason.’
Durga’s father, Sam Miller, had stormed into Lalji’s Alochhaya office a week ago. He was terribly agitated, to the point of being flushed and furious. As he shouted his ruddy face off, Lalji could make no sense of what he was saying. And it sometimes was quite impossible to understand what a European was saying, especially if he was blabbering on in white rage.
In between more cucumber and other vegetarian delights, Lalji told me how Sam Miller, ‘all smelling of liquor and tobacco’, had barged into his office and told him that his daughter was not ‘a fooking nautch girl’ and that he was not going to stay quiet while Felicia had any sort of association with ‘the fooking Bengalis of the Alochhaya Bioscope Company’, or for that matter any bioscope company in the country. Before Lalji could explain that not everybody at Alochhaya merited the tag of ‘fooking Bengali’, Sam banged his fist on the table, scattered the betel nuts that were till then resting in a small silver box all over the cheap wooden surface, and announced that he and his family were moving to Australia.
Still calm, Lalji tried to get a word in about ‘Miss Miller’s contractual obligations’, at which Sam stared at him like a Victoria Terminus gargoyle for a few seconds. By this time, Ram Bahadur had appeared behind him, but Lalji’s eyes told the hulk to stay where he was.
‘She’s not coming back here,’ Sam said bristling all over. After looking beyond Lalji at the posters depicting his daughter in various forms, he looked at the man sitting again, let out some more spit and stormed out of the room leaving a few more blasphemies hanging in the Alochhaya air.
It transpired that Sam had gone to the Carlton with his mates Bob Davis from Oldham, Bill O’Brien from Slough and John Davies from Glasgow, for the ostensible purpose of ‘celebrating’ O’Brien’s decision to move to McLeodganj where he had been offered a pretty respectable job as an overseer of something—no one was quite sure exactly what. It transpired that they had proceeded to go and see The Black Hole of Calcutta, or Survival of the Fittest at the Athena. Less than halfway into the film, poor Sam was horrified to see his daughter being held half-naked, and on display for the hundreds of others in the hall. Things only got worse as the bioscope rolled on to a hallful of hoots and applause that kept drowning out the orchestra in the front.
That was how Sam Miller realized that Durga Devi, a name that he was moderately familiar with in the papers and the publicity posters, was none other than his sweet daughter from the convent, Felicia. Till then, he had been resisting the offers made by well-meaning authorities helping him to relocate from this city to somewhere more genteel. The two gentlemen who had come twice to his house, trying to convince him to move to a hill station in the United Provinces, had finally come up with an inviting proposition for the Millers to move to Australia, where a man of Sam’s talent and fortitude could make a more decent living and have more than a decent life.
Sam had planned to turn this offer down as usual. He had given out the usual signs of polite rejection to the two frock-coated-in-June gentlemen. The pursing of the lips, the tilting of the head in fake apologia, the quiet shaking of his head while he smiled—he had done all this when the gents had presented him with the ‘McLeodganj option’. He knew that they knew that he was going to also turn down Australia.
‘Let’s face it,’ he had said to the turbaned bar man at the South Calcutta Billiards Club, ‘Australia is on the fooking edge of the world.’
This edge hurtled to the centre after he saw Felicia cavorting shamelessly on screen. It took him less than two hours to seek out the frock-coated governmenters, thrash Felicia without uttering a word and land up on Lalji Hemraj Haridas’s doorstep. Ten days later, he had boarded The Baltimore with his wife and daughter, looking forward to starting a new life in the windy town of Perth.
The cucumber-consuming Lalji continued, ‘I haven’t seen Durga Devi since. I had sent Ram Bahadur over to her place with some money and to return her things. Technically, she was breaking the contract, so I needn’t have sent Ram Bahadur. But Abani-babu, she has been part of the Alochhaya family for so long. I liked her, I respected her. But Ram Bahadur found a lock hanging on their door. They had already upped and left.’
As Lalji spoke, I felt abandoned and desolate—both emotions that came unnaturally to me. Standing on the lawn, ostensibly celebrating my prowess as an actor, I contemplated the reaction that my leading lady’s abrupt and permanent departure was having on my body.
There were people, strangers really, who were coming up to talk to me, shake my hand or simply say hello while looking into my eyes. They were all sparrows, moving abo
ut friskily, stop-motion fashion.
The effects of alcohol are difficult to put in words. For the man getting progressively drunk, it’s like sitting in a boat which has sprung a leak and the hole is allowed to grow unchecked. As I sloshed back another gulp, not emptying my glass but leaving enough in it for another instalment, I pushed back my coat and shirt sleeve to see my arm. The whisky must have already been well into its looped journey, conducting circuitous turns around the bends of my arteries. And in all its wisdom, the alcohol in me was unaware of what was going on in my head. Everything had become amplified. The words ricocheting around me, the clutter of the forks and plates, the luscious chewing sound that seemed to come from the mouths around me. But exaggerated above everything else was the hammer sound of dejection and disappointment I felt just under my chest, above my belly. As I saw each point of light, each blob of face quiver into many, the fact that Durga had departed without a word became harder, sharper.
The best replication of inebriation I have come across was in a short French feature I had recently seen. In the short, the effects of liquor were shown as if it was a study of the seasons. Instead of a landscape changing its light and foliage, it was the changing man’s face that was being shown in seamless detail on the screen. There were changes that were taking place in his gait, posture and behaviour. But it was the shape-shifting face of the actor that had left an impression on me. He was so good, plotting the incremental change with every bottle, every glass, every sip, that it was like watching the hour hand of a clock move in minutes. I still believe that he wasn’t acting and it was deft work in the cutting room that had expertly kept out the genuinely unsavoury parts of the trajectory of his induced oblivion.
But no one drinks to replicate the visual effects of heavy drinking. Why, then, you could ask. I haven’t bothered to find out and ruin my drink. I leave that to the zealots. I only know that there’s a familiar place I reach after my fifth drink, or the seventh. There is in cinema, in life a landscape that lies outside what can be shown and seen—not a large tract of land, I admit, but a landscape nonetheless. And it was in this territory that I found myself that evening when Mr Edward Quested and his son-in-law-to-be Ronny Heaslop had thoughtfully thrown a dinner party.
‘Could you tell me where the washroom is?’ I asked the turbaned angel flitting by with a tray of ice-box-tongs-and-glasses.
‘Straight down the corridor and right, sir. It’ll be on your left, sir.’ He spoke without emotion.
Ploughing through the gaseous swirl of people, I made my way inside the Club building, its architecture slipping and sliding before me with its flotsam of potted plants, framed watercolours and ominously dignified lights in tow.
A woman was on a ship bound for Australia, that slab of land floating on the Sea of Forgetfulness. If she hadn’t already reached Australia, she was probably holding on to her hat, trying to prevent it from being blown out into the great wide open, and looking at the bald expanse of evening sea. This was Felicia shorn of being Durga, but it was the same woman whose face was known by countless people in its various forms. She was now returning to what she was before she joined the bioscopes, before she became a household name and the more adored half of the silent era’s most famous couple.
As I swam through the cool passageway, careful not to swing too close to the watercolours presenting the city in various phases of its life, I caught a form moving and vanishing in one swift frame. From afar, all I could make out was a figure in a burgundy dress. As I turned left after spelling out the letters C-L-O-A-K-R-O-O-M with considerable difficulty, I imagined a dark pair of eyes, lined with kajol, staring back at me. As I entered the bathroom, I realized that it was a mixture of drink and imagination that made me see those eyes, for in that considerably large and bright room, I was alone.
This bathroom inside the bowels of the European-only Bengal Club was a far cry from the abomination that had, until only a few years ago, existed in my house. There was a green settee next to a glass table with a single, squat vase on it that was pretty because it was so out of place. I thought of sitting on the green velvet-like material, but I wanted to first splash water on my face so as to snap myself out of uncontrol. The white basins sparkled like the water they were supposed to catch and let go of. I smudged my way in front of one of the basins, suddenly catching my face in the mirror above it.
A drunken man looking into the mirror looks at a never-ending stretch of reflections reflecting reflections. My eyes were red, but more than their colour, what struck me about them was how heavy they were. And it wasn’t only the eyes. Looking at my face, I also looked into it. Was that face that was slipping in and out of solidness a confirmation that I inhabited my body?
‘Abani,’ I said slowly, watching my mouth conduct itself in perfect synchronization with the sound that came out. I smiled and noticed myself smile back at me. I uttered my name again, this time in a normal fashion, barely noticing the intricate mechanical workings of my mouth. I turned the tap on. I had turned it on too much and the water gushed out in a violent rush. I had sprayed the first instalment of liquid refreshedness on my face and was cupping my hands to catch the next, when I registered a brief but sharp click, the sort that a projector makes when the film reel jumps from one spool to another. A woman in a burgundy dress with ruffles around the collar and down the front came out of nowhere. She hadn’t finished pressing down her dress when her eyes locked on to mine and, for that brief moment, both of us seemed to have been thrown into a vacuum from where all air had been utterly drained.
It would have helped me if that really had been the case. But there could be no doubt that the room was not only blessed with plentiful of air but also had splendid acoustics. For as soon as the time-stopping moment of us staring at each other passed, the woman in burgundy let out a scream that overpowered the loud sound of gushing tap water and the pleasant silence that had surrounded it. Her body, wrapped as it was in ruffles and fabric, shook for minutes like a single leaf held out of a window in a storm. It was actually a series of screams, long ones punctuated by the smallest of breaks, that left her face quivering in a manner that made me fear it would split along that short, sharp nose of hers.
I panicked. Instead of turning the tap off and proceeding to explain matters, I tried to move away from and towards her at the same time. In the process, one of my legs caught the other and I fell on her like a lizard that had just lost its grip on the ceiling. As I lay on her, my head foaming with smashed-to-smithereens thoughts of self-preservation, her scream continued, this time directly into my ears. I don’t know how long it took for everyone to rush into the Club’s north wing L-A-D-I-E-S Cloakroom, but by the time Ronny Heaslop’s fiancée, that is Edward Quested’s daughter, Adela Quested, was extricated from under my weight, the deed had been done.
If I recall correctly, I was pulled up by my collar and pelted with blows that fell like wide and blunt rain. What abuse was hurled at me, I could not make out then, so I cannot recollect now. But I did register the very odd presence of Lalji, who was standing behind the green settee along with a huddle of others. He stared at me, his mouth ajar the whole while I was being dragged out of the bathroom, out of the Club building, out of the premises of the Bengal Club, out on to Chowringhee overlooking the Maidan, and out of the world in which, only a few hours ago, I had been graciously fêted. Adela Quested lay there on the settee, spreading distressed burgundy on green, being fanned furiously by the shocked but understanding guests.
But what really lay there was my future in tatters. My one single tumble was much more real than the one that my mother had concocted. And what made it more real was that it turned me overnight from bioscope’s top talent and draw into an industry leper, a member of the bhadralok loafer-criminal class. It was as if I had been transported to the edge of the world. It was like being shipped to Australia.
Hello, Operators
It wasn’t the ageing that I minded. Clocks live long, people settle into themselves. What gnawe
d away at my innards during those lost years was the fact that I was doing nothing. By nothing, of course, different people mean different things. I ventured out of the house, I watched bioscopes, I took pointless drives up and down Chowringhee, I mingled with a handful of people. And I drank. But my five-odd years doing nothing meant being away. Acting had once again been confined to private pretending, driving me perilously to the brink of ordinariness.
The fall, in more ways than one, made me Tarini Chatterjee’s son, to the marrow of my bones; the inheritor of Tarini’s blood, fate and boredom. Abani Chatterjee. This was the truly rotten part of being driven out of paradise—that I was now forever stuck being me. As the typical day ended, it would be a horribly short time before the typical day started all over again. Abala’s tea would come; I would unroll the coir from the day’s newspaper like a garter off a leg; I would proceed to open a book and drag my eyes through it as if they were my feet walking through some monsoon-village slush. I would even set out, aimlessly, in my car, stopping to eat somewhere, hoping that the driver, hired for just the day, wouldn’t catch on that I was eating alone. Sometimes Rona dropped by and we talked only about politics, and drank till it was a reasonable enough hour for him to leave, and then I went to sleep while flipping the latest issue of Photoplay in bed. I started hating doing nothing and there was nothing I could do about it.
All this happened quite naturally, of course, and in the end it was even bearable. For, the truth is that like pretty much everything before and pretty much everything after, I was filling in for someone else, the someone else being the Abani-like me. And then, nearly as swiftly as I had driven myself off the rails, my life returned to its original trajectory on a scandalously ordinary morning.
The day was marked by an incessant, droning kind of rain, nothing more than a sprinkle. It was such a sham; if one paid close attention, one would have noticed that a large part of the rain never actually reached the ground. There was no sign, for instance, of the streets or footpaths taking on a darker sheen of grey as they should have under the circumstances. And yet, it was raining, a spittle visible enough to mark the railing outside with speckle-points. I was staring out of the window into the fake outdoorness of the courtyard when the phone rang.
Bioscope Man Page 18