Herr Monocle
I had never seen a monocle on a man before. Actually, I had never seen a monocle before. It was the first thing I noticed about Fritz Lang. A concentrated pool of light bouncing off his face, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be the sun perched on his right eye. As he sat in the terrace of the Great Eastern like a bird, his fingers stitched into a bony knit, I noticed his large, rectangular face that was crowned by hair that looked like hot tar. His eyes were dark and large, almost without the white parts. Even as he was speaking to the people milling around him, his eyelids hung heavily in the sunlight, emitting a slight red glow that confirmed their thinness.
Initially, Charu Ray had been assigned as the assistant art director for the project. I learnt only a few minutes before my arrival at the Great Eastern Hotel that he had now been offered the job of assistant director. He was still flush with gratitude and excitement at the unexpected turn of events. It was audible in his voice.
‘Abani, Abani, there you are. I was wondering what had happened to you. Mr Lang is over there. But grab a drink first. Or do you want to get one a bit later?’
He sounded as if he had been running laps around the seated figure in the middle. His sentences were punctuated by quick gasps of breath which exaggerated the smallness of his frame. As I spoke, he gently guided me towards the Monocle.
‘Excuse me, Mr Lang. This is Abani Chatterjee.’
The Monocle clutched the sides of the cane sofa he was caved in, suggesting that he was about to get up and greet me. But there he sat, unclutching his hands, and using one of them to shield his face from the sun. It was the man sitting next to him who spoke and extended his hand.
‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, finally. It’s a pleasure. Robert Palney.’
He was a tall, fleshy man in a beige suit and hat and seemed to have the singular job of being a buffer between Lang and anyone else in the vicinity. I could make out by his strong and stretched out accent that he was American. ‘Fritz, this is Mr Chatterjee.’
The Monocle buckled and unbuckled his hands once again. Had the first round of hand movements not been to his satisfaction? Had he instinctively thought of responding to Charu’s introduction and then corrected himself because of some rule that had been set up by Palney for a smoother interaction with people? Was the Monocle interested in responding at all?
I almost extended my hand, but then realized that it wasn’t necessary.
He spoke with a thick European accent, looking at me as if I was a particularly ornate chandelier hanging from a mansion in the northern part of the city.
‘Abani Chatterjee, hello.’
He didn’t smile or employ any of those facial gestures that usually smoothen the process of introductions. There I stood awkwardly next to Charu Ray, who didn’t quite know how to continue matters while the American and the Monocle fixed their gazes on me.
‘I’ll just get myself a drink.’ That seemed to be an appropriate remark, considering that I got the feeling that the Monocle didn’t talk much.
‘Sure, the bar’s over there,’ Palney said, with his eyes still fixed on my face.
‘Could you please get me a gin? No soda. Thank you, Herr Chatterjee.’
Lang spoke in a single pitch and tone, as if speaking was a more sinewy version of standing. The harsh plainness in his speech, however, was not annoying. There was a dramatic quality to it that suggested that his words were more interesting than they sounded.
‘So Herr Chatterjee,’ he said a while later, not having touched the drink I had got him from the bar. ‘What do you think about acting in a German motion picture? I ask because my friend Herr Ray here finds it difficult, almost impossible, to believe that there can be any worthwhile bioscope outside America. And I think Robert encourages this view.’
Robert sniggered. He had a face that found sniggering comfortable. But instead of anything sinister issuing from his wide mouth after the snigger, I saw the American’s shoulders shudder as he squeezed out a laugh to give me and Charu a signal that Lang was having a bit of fun.
‘You were very competent in The Black Hole of Calcutta. I need competence, not acting. Robert invited me to the special screening of The Black Hole in Berlin. I have not seen any other Indian movie, but your approach appealed to me. You do not act and that is good. That is what is good.’
Both Palney and Charu waited for my reaction, the latter with a frown, the former looking up from his drink with a very slight raising of his eyebrows. Both of them seemed to confirm my belief that the Monocle was testing me in the balcony in lieu of a proper screen test. I sat down, taking a civilized sip of my gin. Then, without even hinting at a change of expression, Lang leaned forward, bridging the space between his chair and mine and spoke into my ear.
‘I have reasons to believe that you will not understand my picture.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Lang?’
I was flustered and probably showed it. But I quickly corrected myself.
‘Then why am I here?’ I said, banishing any trace of irritation that may have reached the surface of my face and the tenor of my voice.
The Monocle had already slithered back, this time reclining into his seat quietly as if a long wait was finally over. There could be no uncomfortable slabs of silence here. There were too many people, some in the highly excitable stage that a production team is in before the business of shooting begins. And the alcohol was also making its own gurgling sound across the terrace.
‘There is not enough gin in this drink. But that is nice. That is how this glass should be. Thank you, Herr Chatterjee. It’s warm here. Robert, you look as deep-fried as a Wiener schnitzel already. Maybe we should move inside.’
Once again, his words didn’t have any effect apart from giving flesh to sound. They seemed to be sophisticated objects strung together and left to hang from a coat hanger.
‘So what brings you here, Mr Lang? Why an India picture?’
He drew a cigarette out of a case and let it dangle like a diver frozen in the act of diving off a board. Palney, after a small fumble, lit it with a lighter that was bigger than his hand.
‘I don’t know really, Herr Chatterjee. But why do you ask? Surely, you really don’t want to know why. Or perhaps,’ a long, feline drag on the cigarette and, ‘you don’t know what else to ask. Don’t mind me saying this, but the story itself is banal and has nothing in it. Oh, forgive me, why should you mind? But see that spray of red over there?’
The Monocle barely turned his head in the direction of a fire escape of an adjoining building. But somehow I knew what he was pointing to. The wall next to the black metal twirl of stairs in the distance was, like the belly-high walls enclosing us at the Great Eastern’s Terrace, neatly whitewashed. A streak of red, however, broke the whiteness with considerable violence. It was the sort of visual rupture usually associated with a force of nature. This one was a paan stain. The splatter’s epicentre and the sparks that grew out of it seemed to be the beginnings of a process that would culminate in the making of a red wall—and ultimately a red hotel.
‘Well, Herr Chatterjee. That is a mere stab of colour, somebody’s unsavoury pugmarks that require to be removed. On the other hand, if that was on a canvas, a large white canvas, not a detail different from the way it is now, there on the wall, we would have something far more interesting, don’t you think? It’s the same thing with the story I will be filming. The story is banal as all stories are. It’s when it is converted into a moving picture, an image for every word and for every gap between the words that it will become worth its existence. By the way, she’s the writer of the story.’
This time, the Monocle actually raised a finger. The lady he pointed towards was busy talking to three men who were listening to her with rapt attention.
‘That’s Thea. She’s the one who thinks that there’s something wonderfully dark but anti-Gothic in the Asiatic way of life. She told me when she first wanted me to make an India feature quite some years ago that India is an animal,
not a country. And that the English try to tame it, largely unsuccessfully—I’m not talking about political domestication, but aesthetically. What do you think, Herr Ray? Will there be shadows we can manufacture and capture in this heat and later let loose in cooler climates?’
Lang stood up, adjusted his shirt cuffs and looked down at the street below. ‘It’s an animal. Have you been to Europe, Herr Ray? Vienna? No? Well, Europe could have been Asiatic. It’s just that we domesticated the animal long ago.’
The Monocle touched his collar as if to see whether his head was still attached to his body.
‘There’s something about this place that makes me sweat.’
‘It’s the heat, Franz,’ Palney said with a broad smile.
‘The heat, yes, that must be it. The heat.’
As he staggered back from the edge of the terrace, he looked at me, smiled while fixing another cigarette to its holder and said loudly for everyone to hear, ‘No more drinks for me. Herr Chatterjee, let me introduce you to the others.’
He was sure-footed again. The clots of people standing all around registered his presence immediately. They faltered between their sentences or quickly destroyed any evidence of their conversations. I was being introduced to people in cinema after ages.
There was the art director Otto Hunte, a man with a bulging forehead and razor-thin lips who couldn’t stop talking about the interiors of the Kali temple he had visited a few years ago with a Bengali stevedore and how they reminded him of a Siennese catacomb he had once visited. Then there was the cinematographer Carl Hoffman, a teetotaller from Tübingen, who had also visited this country some years ago and was keen that his friend, a young poet and novelist called Hermann Hesse, visit this country for ‘a change of inspiration’.
‘Paul, this is Abani Chatterjee, our Pandit. Herr Chatterjee, Paul Richter. Paul will be our William Jones. And this beautiful lady here is Margarete. Fräulein Schoen is delightful despite all the attention she’s denying me.’
Margarete of the whimsical voice and flower-spattered cotton dress suddenly erupted like a mouse on fire, ‘Fritz, Fritz, about my part, you know how I am about …’ My lateral vision guided me to a corner where Mihir Das was listening to the tall lady whom the Monocle had earlier identified as Thea. So that was Thea von Harbou, the writer of the Joe May script that Bolu-babu had dangled above my head. Although I couldn’t yet see her face very clearly, I did notice that the hard edges of it were being smoothened in the sun, transforming her into the embodiment of something pure and exotic and without passion.
‘So you used to be in the theatre before, Mr Chatterjee?’ the chiselled Paul Richter asked me before squashing his cigarette into the nearby ashtray.
‘I’ve been in bioscopes some ten years. I never really had much exposure on the stage as I went straight to the pictures. Your first time in India?’
‘Yes, first time for all of us actually, barring Carl and Otto. Carl’s been interested in Buddhism for a long time. Thea has been to Ceylon. She came with Leni, another film friend of hers, to holiday next to the Indian Ocean. But she’s never been up here to India. Have you met Thea?’
Richter led me to the spot where Mihir and Thea had been joined by another woman. The sari-clad woman and Mihir, who had avoided me for five years the way a dog avoids another dog’s puddle, smiled at me nervously, looking quickly away when Richter nudged Thea and introduced me to her.
Thea did not look like an actress. As I had suspected from the distance, her face was too angular to be able to conduct any emotions barring the basic ones. It was a practised face. I smiled and told her that it was a pleasure to meet the writer and that she had done a wonderful job in capturing the mysterious communication between two civilizations and turning it into a tale of a personal voyage.
She turned around to face me properly, her face now rising more than a few inches above mine. I felt a warm scurry across the landscape of my body as she responded in perfect English. The terrace space suddenly tapered into a cluster of small rafts floating on a horizonless sea. I kept my emptied glass (I had forgotten whether I had stuck to gin or moved to schnapps or whisky) on the ledge, making sure that I did not lose my balance.
Encounters with women are more prevalent in my profession than in any other. Perhaps tailors meet more women. But actors, both in the bioscope and in the theatre, have to bear with this occupational hazard. There are only two kinds of women in this world—the predatory, and those who exist because they have to. The second kind are like air—only a bit more physical than a rumour, and far too absent to make their actual presence felt. The predator, on the other hand, need not always be a Mae West, planting her flag in landscapes and claiming territorial rights over people and the space they inhabit.
With this golden-haired woman who stretched out vertically in front me, I felt perturbed. She spoke in a manner that made her appear capable of tightening and loosening the iron bolts that hold up humans around her. Was she a predator?
‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, Mr Das was just telling me about you. Fritz saw one of your bioscopes at the UFA-Palast am Zoo last year and told me that he simply had to have you in this film. I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of them yet. But Mr Das insists that I simply must.’
Mihir produced a weak smile that crumpled to the floor the moment it left his mouth. I acknowledged Thea’s hand as she shook mine and registered a near firm grip in the touch. Her mouth was moving at a completely different speed from the sound that was coming out of it. I distinctly remember having to lip-read her. Her eyes were blue, not quite large enough to harbour clouds, but as bright as those hand-tinted reels in shorts, bursting with reds and blues and greens that made the reds and blues and greens of the real world look drained and colourless. They also made me think back to Shombhu-mama’s old obsession about Kinemacolor cameras and projectors and his heartbreak over not meeting its prophet, Charles Urban.
(Incidentally, I was later disappointed with Kinemacolor. It turned out to be capable of depicting only wishy-washy colours. Just a few tints—mainly red and blue—would douse the running frames on the screen. One commentator in Jugantar even called the Kinemacolor experience ‘a breakthrough, if depicting a desert in Rajasthan in jaundice yellow can be deemed a breakthrough’. Between Kinemacolor washouts and hand-coloured bioscopes, there never was any contest.)
Our encounter was terminated when, with a flick of her neck, she responded to a man standing next to the rubber plant on the other side. She excused herself with a smile and was gone. So there I stood, mortally afraid that I would now have no choice but to indulge Mihir Das with polite banter.
Five years ago, Mihir had been desperately trying to break out of his standard stage roles as the brother of Ram, the son of Shivaji, the minister of Ashoka, the boot boy of Clive. He wanted to become a proper bioscope actor. I got to know him on the sets of The Black Hole in which he had a minor role as the adviser of Mir Jafar. He was one of the many people who had been there on the night I reportedly ‘jumped’ on Adela Heaslop née Quested. With each rendition of the incident, Mihir added his own colourful, verb-filled details. No wonder the man, one of the many responsible for turning me overnight from public darling to lumpen rapist, ultimately found success in bioscope direction rather than in acting.
Luckily, Paul Richter saved me.
‘Thea is not only Lang’s story-writer, collaborator and wife. She’s also the only person who can control him. The only one,’ he added in all seriousness, ‘he’s afraid of without having to be uncomfortable with.’
It had been the tiniest of introductions. But there I was, back in the whirring, chirping, hyper-emoting world of the bioscope, a toe returning inside its shoe-space. The Great Eastern terrace had already started to tilt in angles that were liberating despite it blocking off the view across the street. As I stood, momentarily by myself, squeezing the glass in my hand and feeling the Abani in me escape in bubbles, Lang rang the glass in his hand with a spoon. Standing next to a Victrola, which till a
few minutes ago had been emitting sonorous music from inside its spacious, wooden bowels, the Monocle spoke.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s attention please. As the director, I demand a moment’s attention.’
A ripple of laughter aligned everyone like iron filings hypnotized by a horseshoe magnet. In clipped, hyperbolic understatements, Lang announced that he was looking forward to making his first ‘movie about the Orient and its dark wonderments’ and working with the cast and crew who were before him. Shooting would start next week and the budget required the feature to be completed in three weeks. There would be a meeting on Monday at nine in the morning in the hotel and he would like everyone to go through the script one more time before work started. I let out a loudish nod when he mentioned something about ‘the new people who have come aboard’. But when I saw Charu and two other gentlemen nodding like horses waiting at the Maidan, I quickly transformed mine into a jerky movement signifying some sort of discomfort.
‘Robert, I know you have to breathe over my shoulder to check whether we’re putting Decla-Bioscop’s money to any good use or not. You can let Herr Pommer sitting in his plush Berlin office know in the telegram you’ll be sending today that Otto, Carl, Herr Ray and I went to the studios yesterday. Shooting begins next Tuesday. So Margarete and Paul, drink slowly, we have work to do the next few days.’
‘Fritz, du diktator du!’ Margarete Schoen shouted out from the front, her voice leaning over flirtily. Even the Monocle allowed himself a smile. Everyone laughed at that exchange. I didn’t. By the time I realized that the moment for me to join in had passed, Lang had wrapped up his little speech and was moving away from the ominous Victrola, now being readied into action once again by a hotel staff.
Bioscope Man Page 21