Considering that over the last few years I had been walking deeper and deeper into an increasingly dense outgrowth of gloom, the fact that I was noticing inconsequential things like the limpness of the day’s rain wasn’t surprising. But at the same time, one could see in my ability to hold on to the value of earthly details a sign that I was not totally defeated. I had been inoculated against failure thanks to my ability to keep pretending that I was still a success. But for an actor sitting idle for half a decade, away from the props of other pretenders and enthusiasts, the risk of slipping into the cycle of charmless routine was a genuine risk. Forced abstinence can break the strongest. So when the telephone instrument rang with a clang, I was expecting nothing.
I placed the glass, half emptied of its Haig’s Dimple Scotch, on the tabletop next to the phone, and let the clanging continue just a bit longer. All the while, my Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a castaway raft on the Arabian Sea.
Before I describe the telephonic exchange that followed, however, let me be frank about the reason I had come to distrust telephone calls. Since my banishment into the wilderness, there had been calls from people telling me through coughs and splutters that they wanted me to work with them in their bioscopes.
‘Abani-babu, it’s a perfect role for you. I think you should seriously consider the job.’
The voice would go on to tell me the names of the other actors who would be in the bioscope, and how all of them insisted that I be in it.
‘Dhiren-babu will have no one else as Baren, the zamindar’s youngest brother. And let me tell you how critical Baren’s role in the whole story is.’
The character of Baren Banerjee, I would find out within twenty minutes of battery-cranked conversation, was that of a whoring, drinking wastrel who falls victim to a blood-lusting, class-despising ghoul that was ravaging landowners throughout the land. A six-minute bit role in a ninety-minute feature consumed by the middle-aged ham-ster Dhiren Sarkar who was making inroads into the bioscope industry. It would be the same story every time: Abani Chatterjee as the perfect endearing uncle, Abani Chatterjee the perfect level-headed vizier, Abani Chatterjee the perfect meditating sage or, worst of them all, Abani Chatterjee the tragic hero’s perfectly comic friend.
There were a few occasions in the early days when I asked whether my name would at least be on equal billing with the leading man. Extra deference would accompany more coughs and splutters. In other words, there was no role worth considering. All because of the notion that Abani Chatterjee had pounced on a European lady in the sacred confines of a European club.
My calls to Lalji were never returned. The other studio bosses wouldn’t come on the line. As for the public—the same public that had applauded my giant image on the screen, cut out my photos published in the papers and pointed me out with great excitement each time I passed them—had turned me invisible as if by the flicking of a switch. Even the approving murmur that had accompanied my father’s fall from grace was absent. It was one thing, it seemed, to carry out a nationalist action against the English, and quite another to ‘assault’ an Englishwoman at her engagement party. I was deemed the lowest of the low, the hormone-reeking sleazeball who gave the people of this genteel town a bad name.
The Natyamancha had even run the very successful Mr Banik, Master Actor to a pretty decent crowd for a season. I never saw Mr Banik, but I did read the papers, and they had described the play as a ‘powerful re-enactment of a recent scandal that exposes the filth invading our arts and entertainment industry through the medium of bioscopes.’ Shuren Gupta, our old acquaintance from the (Son of/Sort of) Char Murti Gang, played Chandra Banik, the star actor turned universal scoundrel with his special fetish for Englishwomen. More than one paper noted that Banik’s manner of speech was ‘quite extraordinarily like the discredited Mr Chatterjee’s’. Considering that I had been an actor in a medium that allowed me no speech, I marvelled at this bit of public knowledge.
So don’t judge me when I say that I took my time picking up the phone the day it was raining spittle. I let the phone ring a few more times, allowing myself to water my lips with another quick ebb and tide of the Haig’s. The drink would help me maintain my dignity come what may.
‘Could I please speak to Mr Chatterjee?’ said the voice that seemed to echo from under at least two layers of blankets.
‘Who is this calling?’ I answered in my ‘secretary’ voice that I had mastered over the years.
‘Ah, Abani, this is Charu, Charu Ray. We had met at the Corinthians a year ago.’
I answered in my own voice. I was never a mimic-man anyway.
‘Yes, of course, Charu. So how have the pictures been treating you?’
‘Fine, Abani. Good, quite good actually. Haven’t seen you around for a while. Working on something?’
‘Well, actually …’
I would have managed to come up with something. But he cut me off.
‘I must say that there’s been a lot of change in the industry over the last two years or so. I couldn’t call before because I was travelling. Bombay mainly. But things have been moving in a different direction since these Bombay studios started elbowing in after Bolu Sarkar’s disappearance.’
I gave him the quiet uh-huh.
‘Abani, I’ll cut through the chase. I think the best time to be in movies is just round the corner. It won’t be a lead. But it’s an international production. And the director—he’s a top-notch German—is keen on having you for the role. I think you should take it.’
I sensed over the phone line and under the aftertaste of the Haig’s that there was more to his calling me up than a friendly nudge. Just because one sees a plain expanse of green doesn’t mean that there are no rows of artillery behind the trees.
‘So what’s this about, Charu?’
There was the framed photograph of me with Lord Chelmsforth just after the premiere of Ratnakar at Alochhaya. Standing on its cardboard clubfoot, the picture looked quaintly confident in between the telephone instrument and the now-empty glass. I was smiling, unknown to everyone else in the picture, at Chelmsforth’s undulating side curls. Fortunately, my smile came across as joyful pride. I poured another round of Haig’s halfway down the glass and emptied it in one devouring go.
The last time I heard the words ‘international production’, they had sprung from the thick and dark lips of Balendranath Sarkar. I was one of the last people, if not the last, who had seen Balendra Sarkar aka Bolu-babu before he vanished from the face of the Earth. I couldn’t detect anything in Charu’s voice that suggested that he thought I was in any way linked to his disappearance. And why would he, some four years after the man’s disappearance? But one could never tell over telephone lines. Maybe they wanted to completely bury me, see me beyond the pale and available only in the black-and-white form of backlighting on the screen.
Those were funny days. Everything, from witty remarks about that Machiavellian Gandhi to urinating against an Esplanade wall, everything could be construed as a seditious activity—and they probably were. The terrorists had all vanished like bioscopes in sunlight. Or they had found some sort of dodgy spiritual solace and turned inwards and become saints. In their place had appeared the new variety of nationalists, who worked increasingly in the open, chatting and laughing with the authorities inside buildings and cooking up long-winded, metaphor-ridden speeches against it outside.
But Bolu-babu’s sudden disappearance was, in many circles, being interpreted as the handiwork of the last of the bhadralok-loafer criminal class of weekend terrorists holding out against the increasingly more fashionable nationalist movement. Bolubabu had been known to be too close to the authorities. And more importantly, after my tumble, there had been much speculation linking me either with the authorities or with the remnants of the Maniktala Secret Society. The fact that I could be neither was never an option. With the chainmail of fame no longer protecting me, I was well within my right to be paranoid.
Those were also paranoi
d days. Gandhi was making all the noises he was capable of (‘independence by a year’ and other fruity delights); Tagore did the clever thing by going off to Japan, the United States and Argentina; and the authorities had been quivering with nervous activity when the Prince of Wales dropped by to see how the Jewel in the Crown was holding up to the light. All this while, as I rotted outside the frames of the motion pictures, there were reports about community problems, mainly Hindu–Muslim in nature, gathering force. The force with which nearly everyone’s fingers were hard-tapping those days could be gauged by the high-pitched voice with which Lord Birkenhead kept stating everywhere that self-rule was a ‘ghoul’. If one concentrated hard enough, one could even hear his tinny voice washing out this noise-infected town with ‘Ghoul, ghoul, ghoul, ghoul’.
Bolu Sarkar called one day.
‘Abani, we need to meet. It’s something I can’t really tell you over the phone. You’re definitely going to find this very, very interesting.’
‘Bolu-babu, I’m a bit tied up now. What is this about?’
‘What else could it be about, Abani-babu! It’s about the biggest bioscope this country has ever seen. And only you will be able to …’
‘It’s not one of your shorts, is it? I thought you already have that chap mimicking Chaplin …’
‘Ah, Dhiren Ganguli? No, no, nothing of that sort, Abani. This is an international project. I need to talk to you.’
There’s no point denying it. The word ‘international’ did raise my interest by an octave.
‘Who’s doing it?’
Producer extraordinaire that he was, Bolu recognized the distinct sound of a mouth latching on to a bait when he heard one.
‘Ah, Abani-babu. All in good time. Could we meet later today? I’ll be able to tell you everything. Maybe at your place around …’
I had quickly recovered. What was I doing? Had things got that desperate that I was going to have Balendra Sarkar puckering his lips and giving me the kiss of death by landing up in my house? Not if I could help it.
‘I’m a bit tied up today at the studio,’ I lied.
‘At Alochhaya?’
I couldn’t believe his gall. This was Bolu Sarkar, real estate scum turned cloth’n’garment pirate who was now asking me about my engagements, knowing fully well that I hadn’t entered Alochhaya for over four years.
‘I’ll be busy till the day after. Maybe we could meet at the Tea Room on Park Street. I have to meet someone there in the morning. Come over at noon.’
There was a small sparrow-dip of silence on the other end. This was followed by his characteristic heh-heh.
‘Sure. The Tea Room, I know the Tea Room. Wednesday at noon then, Abani-babu. It’ll be …’
‘Goodbye,’ I said. Bolu-babu simply didn’t know when to stop a conversation. It was always someone else who did the hanging up.
It was a hasty call on my part to agree to meet him so easily. For in case there was any doubt over the matter, this was Balendranath Sarkar, and not any old bioscope production man. Rumour, that raspy-voiced bird with flapping wings, had it that Bolu Sarkar had first come into a good deal of money by getting close to the city council authorities. He had apparently provided them with useful information about the activities of some of the youthful members of a few big families in this city. The authorities, fed with information from Bolu-babu and his men, had proceeded to make official ‘entreaties’ to the heads of these families, asking them to rein in their wards before things got out of hand. So if the Jorasanko household and other families hadn’t ended up having a single member on the wrong side of the law, one could thank Balendranath Sarkar for his contributions towards minimizing law and order problems in the city.
Playing model citizen, Bolu-babu had done well for himself. But he had bigger ideas, showing quite a talent in the area of real estate, winning over land in and around the Tiretti Bazaar area. No one found anything suspicious about his acquisition spree as the lottery system in place to make the process of public land sales tamper-proof had been around for some two hundred years. So what if dignified nostrils twitched with indignation as Bolu went on to become the biggest owner of property and land outside the European quarters.
If that was all there was to it, then Bolu-babu wouldn’t have been any different from the half a dozen other heavy-pocketed fellows cotton-elbowing their way into the motion pictures business. But there were more pungent rumours circulating since Gandhi and other such comedians had called for the boycott of English goods. The noise about Bolu Sarkar using political clout to make money started to grow louder. And this time round, it was the nationalist demand for self-rule that was making him money that was as good as—if not better than—the pile he had made earlier with the help of the authorities!
The word out on the street was that Bolu had made quite a lot of money by ‘converting’ Manchester cotton into homespun cloth. Who could have been behind all those tiny production plants remaking dhutis, saris and all other ‘made-from-Indian-cotton’ items? Why hadn’t the authorities shut these plants, or been so quiet about Gandhi’s latest call to boycott English goods? One will never know. There were dhutis at the Bagbazar shops with the name ‘Khudiram Bose’ woven along the border. Those were Manchester cloth turned into value-added dhutis and Bolu Sarkar was somehow stitched to the whole operation. Was he, then, a ‘double agent’? So you see, I had my reasons for not risking his presence in my house. I had had enough of paying for sins I had never intended to commit, and would not have known how to, except perhaps at gunpoint.
But when Bolu-babu called again that evening to confirm our meeting at Park Street, I was desperate to step out of my cupboard and return to the real world that I knew so well. The words ‘international project’ had briefly convinced me that the theory about Balendranath Sarkar being close to the authorities while seeming to be a supporter of the nationalists was just a theory.
I told myself that he was just another businessman, doing things that businessmen do to make their business run like molten ghee. So what if a hopeless actress like Renee Smith had made a smooth transition from nothingness to bioscope big time as Sita Devi thanks to Bolu Sarkar? At a time when half a dozen theatres in the city had been forced to roll down their shutters for ‘exhibiting profane, indecent and obscene representations to the annoyance of inhabitants or personages’—exactly at the same time that four theatre palaces had opened in the north, the biggest one at Tiretti Bazaar itself—bioscope people could do with friends like Bolu-babu.
So Wednesday came and I found myself sitting inside the Tea Room and staring at a cup of swirling black coffee. Twirling my spoon and making white ribbon lines in my cup, I was a man waiting. In the span of some twenty minutes under the slow, slicing rotation of a Tea Room ceiling fan, I kept involuntarily creaking my head to the right every few seconds. In that period of waiting, I wanted to hear that crack of my neck as many times as possible.
I was sitting next to a monstrous tank inhabited by three comatose fish and one ceramic mermaid. The only real activity I could gauge in the fish tank was that of the bubbles coming out of the end of a small plastic pipe, and the twitching brown tendrils from the bottom of a perforated test-tube device. As I looked at this crushed mass of worms that managed to fiercely retain the individuality of its many components, I couldn’t help but think of Durga. She had struggled with me once, cheek-to-cheek, limb-to-limb, inside artificial and close confines too.
‘Abani-babu, waiting long?’
Bolu Sarkar was early. It seemed as if he was addressing me from across the room. He was actually standing right in front of me. Why he had to talk so loudly remains a mystery. I had been turning a newspaper page after wasting precious seconds of my life reading a news report about workers of the Assam Bengal Railway Company joining the ‘Non-Cooperation Movement’ to show their solidarity with mistreated workers of Chandpur’s tea gardens and a long advertisement for gripe water under a picture of a Baby Krishna. That was when Bolu-baba made his en
trance.
‘I hope that’s good news you’re reading. Everybody’s humming on about self-rule these days. Tiring stuff. Fired up by Jibananda in Anandamath you reckon? Ha, ha.’
He had started on a bad note. The high chuckle that rippled down his white clothes settling somewhere down on his black turned-up shoes could have made a large puddle. But I had already looked up at his face and my eyes were now locked to his. I welcomed him the way the family welcomes bad news from a doctor.
‘Well, you know how it is,’ I smiled and said without rising. ‘Everything’s played up these days to a bombastic, ridiculous level to sustain the public.’ I waved aside the newspaper as if to kill the world’s slowest fly.
‘Ha, ha. You never did fancy other actors, the ones who’re slightly—now how do I put it?—dramatic?’
And without breaking into any more pleasantries, Bolu Sarkar settled down in the chair opposite me, placing a moderately thick pile of papers on the table. ‘Have you heard of Joe May?’
‘No. Who is he?’
‘You saw the UFA feature they showed the whole of last month at the Crown?’
‘The German feature about the madman and the murderer?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Hilde Warren and Death it was called. Ran moderately well until they started playing The Immigrant. You know how Chaplin’s getting popular these days. Well, UFA’s boss is Joe May and Joe May wants to make a film in this country. He wants you in it. He’s told me so himself. So, are you game, Abani-babu?’
Without waiting for any response, he swivelled around and clicked his fingers. I saw a waiter in the horizon look laconically at us and shake out of his torpor.
Bioscope Man Page 19