‘Well, Abani-babu? Interested? Ha, ha,’ he added unthinkingly.
‘What’s it about? What do I play?’
‘Dear, dear Abani. What do you play? This is the script in front of me. These Germans actually have proper, detailed scripts, you know. And still they lost the war. Ha, ha.’ He put the red cardboard-bound script before me. ‘I want you to have a look at it. I’m supposed to pick up a copy for you. But right now, please, do have a quick look at it. It’s all here. Once we get the contract out of the way, I’ll get the copy delivered to you.’ And he snapped his fingers again at the same man who had, it turned out, earlier moved, but not towards us.
The working title of the movie was typed in small, crisp letters. It said The Indian Tomb in English, the German title next to it in brackets with the name of its author, Thea van Harbou. I turned the page and there was a five-line synopsis. A German architect comes to India and falls in love with a temple dancer in the kingdom of Eschnapur. The king of Eschnapur’s brother is scheming against him and plotting a coup. The king is also in love with the temple dancer, but it’s the architect that the woman loves, not the king. This sets the otherwise able king to set his soldiers on the two lovers—thus giving his scheming brother an opportunity to plan a coup. The architect is thrown into prison while the dancer is forced to perform a deadly ritual. But the king—not a bad man at heart—intervenes just in time to save her life. The lovers escape just when the forces of the king’s evil brother storm the palace.
The story sounded workable. There were elements of John Holwell. I could easily slip into my character of a lovestruck foreigner facing native hostility. With the right director and camera work, it could even be something nuanced and complex. I was finally going to act again.
A shadow arrived at our table. ‘Two coffees and … Now what do you have fresh? The pastries looked nice. Abani-babu, any pastry? Ha. Two chocolate pastries, with the chunky bits on the top. And don’t forget the coffees. And extra milk.’
The waiter scribbled down the order as if reporting on a minor event.
‘No milk for me, thank you,’ I said, closing the pile that I was rummaging through. The direction notes seemed extensive, far more detailed than the ten-page handwritten ‘scripts’ that I had earlier worked from.
‘Ah, yes. No milk in one coffee. And please, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
‘So it’s a German film then?’ I asked, trying and succeeding in not sounding excited.
‘It’s a European venture, Abani-babu. With this, the bioscopes will open up to new markets. To Europe, to England, to America!’
Our table had become bigger even as the morose waiter with a Hapsburg jaw left two pastries and two coffees on it. The newspaper and the thick script, fighting for space till a moment ago, now seemed to be cohabiting fine in the presence of food and beverage.
‘Mr May is arriving here next Friday. He wants us to be ready with everything well before the shooting starts. Mr May requested that you be the first person I sound out, Abani-babu. You are in, then? Ha, ha.’ And as he munched on his pastry and sipped on his coffee in the Tea Room, stalagmites and stalactites formed and dissolved in his big mouth as he chewed and breathed, chewed and breathed.
‘Who else will be in it?’
There had to be a silent break between his audible chomping and his reply.
‘Well, Mr May has a German actor in mind for the role of the architect. His name is Hans Marr, apparently a box-office sure-fire in Germany. But there’s no decision yet about who plays the girl. There’s some talk about his wife playing the dancer. She was in Hilde Warren and she seems to be keen. But Mr May is also toying with the idea of casting a genuine Indian for the role. Too bad that she’s gone, but Felicia Miller would have been perfect, don’t you think? Ha.’
Yes, Durga would have been good for the role. She always was that little bit extra successful when playing a proper Indian. As Lakshmibai, the warrior princess in Rani of Jhansi, for instance, it was much more than the light piercing through her armour that lent her near divinity. As Lakshmibai, she was what she wasn’t as the daughter of Sam Miller and as the newest addition to the population of Australia—a woman who held the reins of her destiny tightly in her own hands.
If there was a tone in Bolu-babu’s voice that suggested a faint wink and a nudge, I was too shocked to take note of it. If someone else was playing the lead, what did they want me to play? The effete king? The scheming brother? My enthusiasm had slipped even as Bolu went on to talk about scheduling and other minutiae of the shoot. And would I have to deal with this philistine, this loud man whose understanding of the bioscopes was limited to the people involved in their making and the money that would be generated? I would not allow that. If Joe May wanted me to act in his feature, especially if it was to be a minor role, I would deal only with Joe May.
I was looking at one of the three motionless fish that seemed to be recording the exchange taking place between Bolu-babu and me. Had it noticed the lizard that was levitating some distance away above it? Or did the refraction of light passing from air to water and then from fish eye to fish brain block the lizard from its view?
‘Mr Sarkar, which character does Mr May have in mind for me?’
‘Aah, now you’re talking. Well, there’s this fascinating character who’s part-magician, part-kapalik and part-narrator. In fact, he’s the one who keeps the whole story stitched together.’
An emptiness spread like firework from my innards. Another crummy part being offered to the quarantined.
‘Bolu-babu, I’m interested. But when do I get to go through the script? I want to read it before I make up my mind.’
‘Abani-babu, Abani-babu,’ he said with mock-regret that was intended to camouflage real impatience and irritation. ‘Of course, you need to go through the script. Which is why I’m carrying it now, so that in a few hours I can deliver a copy to you at home. But you don’t know how glad I am that you’ve agreed to come on board …’
I reminded him that I had not made my final decision yet.
‘Ah, of course. But you won’t be disappointed. This is, Mr Chatterjee, your next step: world cinema.’
Saying which he snapped his fingers again. With pleasantries out of the way as quickly as they had been herded in, Bolu-babu paid the bill, squashed his face with a rings-bedecked hand to suggest a busy day ahead and stood up to leave. I also dragged my chair back to rise. As I took one last look, not at the immobile fish in the tank but at the lizard that was stuck a few fish-miles above them, I made out from the corner of my eyes two figures moving towards us. Without snapping my head in their direction, I casually turned my head to see a couple start-stop-starting towards me. They couldn’t have been much older than I was, the man bearing that comfortable look which comes from a practised confidence of knowing that beauty is always close at hand. The two didn’t even try to hide their rather infantile form of excitement and came up to me as I was turning to follow Bolu-babu out of the Tea Room door.
‘Excuse me. Are you, aren’t you … You are …’
She had a narrow forehead that seemed to not expand an inch even though she had her hair severely pulled back into a tight, small bun. Even the broken words that she had just uttered sounded refined, as if she was quoting a line in high Bengali. The kajol outlining her eyes served the same function that strong backlighting does when highlighting a face in a motion picture. And if her eyes hadn’t caught me, I would have surely lingered on her mouth that was ever-so-slightly crooked as she spoke. She waved her hands as if trying to catch my name out of thin air, while the man looked intently around as if to search out the nearest ashtray despite actually also conducting the same activity of placing me.
‘You were absolutely fantastic yesterday,’ she gushed crookedly.
The man next to her nodded in furious agreement. He had suddenly lost all his sophistication and, instead of the dandy who was standing before me, there was now a wide-eyed, gleaming boy attempting to leave an im
pression on me.
I let out my trademark smile. It had worked in the past and there was no reason why it wouldn’t protect me now from popular praise, the smoothest odourless poison that goes to one’s head.
‘Yes, I’ve got it now! Oof, I’m so bad with names. I’m so sorry. It’s so embarrassing, Mr Bhaduri,’ she spluttered. ‘We went to see Alamgir yesterday. He had heard really good things from some of his friends. Oh, it was even better than we had thought it would be. And to think that this is your first stage appearance. It is your first stage production, is it not? We both go to the theatre quite often. But we haven’t seen anything like Alamgir at the Cornwallis. I had no idea that anyone could be such a perfect Aurangzeb. Truly, Shishir-babu …’
The place suddenly seemed to erupt with lizards. The creature above the fish tank had been joined by another, and there had to be others raring to uncork themselves from the cold and take their rightful place in the light. There was no longer haughty numbness I felt. Bolu-babu sensing discomfort coming my way had moved on and disappeared out into the street. Was I in any position to tell the woman and the man that I was not the person they thought me to be? I could have pliered out a smile and cleared the confusion with a joke or a line of undetectable wit. But I didn’t. If bioscope star Abani Chatterjee was being mistaken for theatre upstart Shishir Bhaduri, there must be a reason for it.
I nodded as I smiled, pulling myself out of the Tea Room as I conducted these more sophisticated motor nerve gestures. The door swung open and I managed my own escape. As I heard some agitated sentences swim their way outside, I could sense a whole contingent of heads turn and look at me—Abani in denial.
Outside, the grandest boulevard in the city greeted me half-heartedly. It was a much busier version of the cemetery on South Park Street, except that instead of the tangle of dignified-by-death greenery, there were stone, dust, hundreds of outsize hoardings, and several generations of traffic plying its way up and down this long street. The black automobiles moved like whirring giant ants, with very few drivers inside bothering not to use the horns—all of them sounding like collapsing lungs—lest their caste-importance as automobile drivers be diminished. The few carriages there were had already started to look out of date on this street, and as I stood outside the tea room I saw a traffic policeman, his wide belt strapped at chest level, shout in chaste Hindustani into the bewildered face of a two-horse carriage driver: ‘Can’t you see, fool, that this isn’t a roundabout?’ People had to look left and then right at least thrice before crossing the wide road. Accidents were common on Park Street.
And yet, despite all this stir and busyness, despite the fact that I was now armed with a possibility of clawing my way back to the life I knew best, I could see that the street, along with the city beyond, was preparing for decay.
The people were flowing like spittle from a faulty tubewell. The city was bathed in a purplish hue, strange for that time of the day, almost as if it was waiting to crack and creak. A man walked by briskly next to me, holding his dhuti-end just so that he could get a firm grip on himself. A gaggle of youngsters was haggling with a carriage driver while the nag was flapping his tail in the hopeless effort to drive away the flies feeding off a sore on its neck. An Englishwoman with a tiny umbrella that barely covered her hat-adorned head was raising her voice in consternation and a mangled mix of English, Bengali and Hindustani: ‘Careful, now. Mr Messenji, please tell them to be careful. The table-end’s scraping against the doorway!’ And then there was a boy in bilious shorts who had latched on to the back of a stationary Ford, waiting for the vehicle to take him away to any place but here.
But as I turned the corner, bucketing out the memory of the mishap that had taken place inside the Tea Room, I saw the streets take on a different colour. The purple gave way to a muddier shade, a more liquid form of the yellow-grey that existed when everything was as it should be. In a side street, a small crowd had gathered. It was still gathering in force and numbers and was centring on a spot bang in the middle of the road.
‘You can’t see anything down there,’ a voice from the human thicket said laconically as if replying to a query about directions.
‘I doubt if you’ll be able to hear anything from down there either,’ said a portly man whom I could actually see.
‘Has anyone called the corporation?’ asked an Englishman in a shabby sort of waistcoat with his sleeves pulled up. No one seemed to register his presence even as the knot of humanity opened up just a little, making a path to the centre of whatever mysterious phenomenon was playing itself out. I entered the zone by walking through the remnants of this minutes-long human parting. The scene was, I noted with the smallest of pleasures, not too unlike an outdoor shoot.
As I reached very close to the epicentre, I noticed a young man, not older than a boy, really, generously covered in muck clamber out of a hole. The sinewy figure, with only its eyes and teeth blinking white, could have been one of those underworld demons I would worry about as a boy at the Chatterjee household.
So there I was confronting another Hole. This one was far from being the most private gateway to hell. It was a perfectly circular disk of emptiness and depth in the middle of the road near the centre of a city that only ten years ago had been the capital of the country. The boy had stepped out and was standing with a rope tied around his waist and covered with something dark and noxious that did not drip but clearly wanted to.
‘Nothing,’ he said shaking his head slowly, worried about spraying gunk on to others. ‘There’s no sign of anyone down there.’ With a palm made rigid, he scraped a fearful layer off one arm as if he was sandpapering it at the same time.
In a crowd, there is always the explanator, the slightly unfortunate soul who gains whatever importance he can by explaining the proceedings to those who have just walked in. He looks like any other man, but suffers from the terrible vice of enjoying the self-righteous pleasure of being patient with others. Built into this arrogance is his ridiculous notion that every other man in the crowd is inferior to him, especially in the powers of observation and inference. It was such a man who—for lack of a better word—‘explained’.
‘There he was crossing the road and suddenly—“hoosh!”—he was gone. I was coming down that side of the street. He didn’t even let out a cry. He was there and then not there. There was just a quick sound like a cycle tyre puncture as he fell through the manhole.’
As I stood there, waiting to see what people do when a person disappears as if by the draw of a lottery, I learnt that the unfortunate man had left no traceable signs of his vanishing. There were no belongings left behind—no upturned slipper, or blood from a scrape, or a file, a letter, a book. The explanator, who was also the sole eye-witness, described the man who vanished.
He was a large man with a moustache in white dhuti-panjabi. And he was sweating, something that was apparent even from a distance as ‘he was constantly mopping his forehead with a white handkerchief. He was also carrying a thick red file or book or something in one hand’. I was still not sure that it was Balendranath Sarkar who had fallen through a manhole. But something inside me told me it was. There had been too many disruptions and falls in and around me for me not to know the signs.
The corporation authorities sent a two-member team ‘down there’ to investigate. I didn’t stay till the investigation was done. But a week later, the Basumati carried a small report in one of its inside pages. It wasn’t about a man falling into an uncovered manhole near Park Street never again to be seen, but about Balendranath Sarkar, a garment manufacturer, theatre owner and producer of motion pictures.
The police had conducted a search for Balu Sarkar after his son, Kamal Sarkar, sent a man to check a certain place (not elaborated in the report) two days after he had last seen his father and the man was told by the residents of this place—where Mr Sarkar would occasionally stay overnight—that they hadn’t seen him for a full three days before his disappearance. That had been the last time he had made a
nocturnal visit there. After duly conducting an investigation that involved people who had last met or seen him, the police declared Balendranath Sarkar ‘permanently missing and/or probably demised’.
So. Did I contact the authorities about my midday meeting with Bolu-babu? Did I tell them that I was supposed to have got a call from him after receiving a copy of the script of the bioscope he wanted me to be in? No, I didn’t. But I did keep telling myself for some time that a German by the name of Joe May would get in touch with me. I was so sure about this that I had even worked out my answer to the query, ‘But didn’t Mr Sarkar tell you about the feature?’ I would show surprise with my voice if it was over the telephone, with my eyes if it was in person.
But even if I did know that there was an ‘international’ feature with the working title The Indian Tomb that was being planned, this knowledge was as useful to me as a glass of water is to a fish in the sea. There was no news of Joe May or The Indian Tomb or anything that would remotely suggest the return of Abani Chatterjee to the motion pictures.
So I kept quiet, while everything kept quiet back at me. The script never surfaced and neither did any offer.
In November that year, I saw a film called The Indian Tomb. I must admit that I was more drunk than I normally care to be when going to a picture theatre. My condition could have affected me when the lights went out and the orchestra started to scrape out notes. After the first two bars of the opening reel, I started snoring. Every once in a while, there were nudges from behind and the side accompanied by shush-es and more and more variations of ‘What’s happening, mister?’ I believe the feature was about a German architect coming to an Indian kingdom and falling in love with a dancer whom the king secretly and then not so secretly loved. I knew by the hammer in my head the next day that utter despair is silent and is as brightly white as it is darkly black.
Which is why four years later when Charu Ray told me over the phone about the arrival of a European director keen to cast me in his bioscope, I chuckled into my Haig after nestling the instrument back on to its cradle. There was something fearful in this glass-echoed chuckle, a cheerful noise I generated to make the blood inside me lap around my body faster and with more vigour. I may have recognized the restless ghost of Bolu-babu’s ‘Ha, ha’ in it.
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