Last year he was engaged by the late Ameer of Afghanistan to organize, at Kabul, a School of Art of which he was to be the Principal. But while awaiting the firman to enter Afghanistan, news came announcing the assassination of the Ameer.
And right at the bottom was a charcoalized picture of the man himself. F.E. Langford was a dead ringer for the Monocle, minus the monocle, that is. I took another look at the ghastly picture of the divine lovers on the other side of the table. As I placed the news cutting along with the garish reproduction, I could feel my heart racing like an automobile along the Strand. The rest of the evening and the night that followed were spent trying to understand why I, Abani Chatterjee, was being let into this damaging secret.
‘Shall we, Herr Chatterjee?’ I heard Lang say from the other room.
He was brimming with energy that pushed him into the car and then pulled him out of it when we reached the busy pathway that led to the temple. This was not the fingers-stitched Lang of the studio. His monocle had slipped off from its perch twice inside the car, and not once did he stop mid-sentence. Lang was keen to know about the distinguished resident of Kalighat. I cleared him of one misunderstanding.
‘No, that’s Nataraj you’re talking about. He’s the Destroyer, or Dissolver if you will. Technically, Kali is Nataraj’s consort.’
‘And both have more than one pair of arms?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘both are multi-armed,’ adding the names of a few other deities who had this advantage over mortals. Some names, to be honest, I made up on the spot.
It turned out that Lang was introduced to the multifaceted charms of Kali by the artist Jeanne Mammen in Berlin. Mammen was fascinated by Indian art, especially the ones she thought were erotic in nature. Her favourite was the ‘dancing Nataraja’ or, as she might have informed Lang, the ‘dancing Goddess Kali’.
‘She finally dragged me to what would later become the Tingeltangel Club. And there for the first time I saw a girl, with two others hidden behind her, with only a slither of a garment covering her nether region and her eyes shot with kohl. She twirled her arms, and those borrowed from the girls behind her, like a puppet who was also the puppet-master. I was mesmerized, Herr Chatterjee, completely mesmerized.’
I could actually imagine the yet-to-be Monocle Monocle gazing with a religious fervour at this white Kali/Nataraja, dancing like a snake to some Negro tune.
Kalighat, one hoped, was miles away from Berlin. No fountains of champagne running into specially made gutters. Instead, I was helping Lang to negotiate and dodge the beggars who were approaching the shaheb fast and furious, sounding their clarion call even before they reached his earshot. The lane that we were walking down was low. That is what it was, low—a street cobbled out of various pieces of solidness, lined on both sides by the low roofs of numerous shacks and hovels and thickets of people. However, neither of us, being tall men, could sense our feet traversing at a level below normal ground. This notion, I must admit, may have been aggravated by the fact that nearly every step was really a wade through a very shallow pool of water.
‘Herr Chatterjee,’ Lang suddenly stopped on the wet street, barely missing a peel of some sort of ex-fruit. ‘Hold this for a second.’
He handed me a silver box that he had taken out of his pocket while we had been walking. As I held it, I felt stupidly immobile. Everyone else on the street walked by, barely taking note of our presence in front of them and brushing against us as if we were permeable phantoms. The Monocle took out a crumpled handkerchief from his other pocket and gestured that I hand the box back to him.
‘Nothing like an evening walk to a temple. How far is it?’
‘Oh, we’re nearly there. Barely another minute.’
‘Try some of this.’ He opened the box, took two pinches of a powder that was inside through his nostrils and ran the handkerchief across his nose as if he was polishing it. ‘Go on, try some.’
It looked like chalk, except finer and whiter.
‘Thank you, but I’m afraid I don’t take snuff,’ I replied politely.
‘It’s not snuff, my friend. It’s catarrh powder. And of the finest quality too. Clears the mind, the nasal tract and the bronchial passage. Try it, Herr Chatterjee. It works in Berlin. It should work here.’
I never cared for snuff. I know Shombhu-mama had tried it a few times until he decided to stick to cigarettes. It was from one of his discarded containers that I had tried it and sneezed my nose out. The few other times that I did hold the infernal stuff in between my thumb and forefinger—most of it staying inside my nails for days—and snorted it up my nose, I had derived no pleasure at all.
But then, Lang insisted it was something else and that it would definitely not irritate me. Saying no at that stage was impossible. And if I wanted to carry out my plan, it would have been foolish to antagonize him just then. I took a pinch and sucked the white, dandruffy powder up my nose. There was no sneeze or cough, or any of the ill effects that I had expected nasally delivered substances to have on me. There was just a slight tingle.
We hadn’t taken more than ten steps when the road and everything that lined it started to change. It was neither destroyed nor dissolved, but there was something that seemed to be curling up and down the road from the sides and in front. The bending was not gradual enough to remain unnoticed. Straight lines were bending and bent lines curled.
The shapes of the structures around me—the shacks selling flowers, the barely visible sweetshops on the sides, the moving heaps of people—had started to cut across each other. It seemed that I would have to carefully ply myself through the din, careful not to walk into one of the many objects and bring the whole road and its surroundings crashing down. A dog sitting rather regally next to a pitiful beggar woman appeared only as a silhouette, as if turned into a strange chiaroscuro by the talented Otto Hunte. I stared hard before leaving the dog and the beggar behind. Was the dog drained of colour and features because of sitting too close to the rag-woman? Or was it how it was at all times, wherever it sat?
‘Is that the temple, Herr Chatterjee?’ I heard Lang ask.
He had fallen behind me. Lights had started to pop up from the shacks, mangy orange bits that flickered like the eyes of jackals in a crematorium.
The temple was visible at last. The two-tiered curves that hung on the top made the structure look like a bloated corpse left floating in the Hugli. Cluttered around it were smaller structures, some of which were simple replicas of the temple itself. Wide-eyed, I noted the tiny temples within the miniature temples on the temple’s surface. I hadn’t ever noticed them before.
I had grown quiet for the last ten minutes or so. Nature abhors quietness. If people, out of weakness or otherwise, give silence an inch, this humped creature ends up gobbling whole expanses, leaving wastelands in its wake. I nearly burst out, ‘Why are you here, F.E. Langford?’ But I held my tongue as tightly as I would a slithering, flopping fish in the kitchen.
‘After you.’
Lang was waiting for me to show him the way. Under the shadow of the temple, with its never-ending gush of crowds coming out, coming in, like a healthy blood-jet, I looked at the man next to me. His slick, combed-back hair was glowing in the fast-falling darkness.
One feature common to the interiors of all temples is their wetness. Even the driest of structures hold on to a moisture that makes them glisten in the dark. The frog’s-back appearance adds only mould to the piling congregation—crowds entering the snake’s gullet and coming out with an invisible slick coated all over their bodies and their minds. The ritual bathing of the divine dumbshows; the priestly doling out of charan amrita, that sickly sweet water-goulash that’s hand-cupped and gulped like vodka shots; the constant displays of a hygiene fetish that even the most unclean of visitors show cannot fully explain the temple wetness. In the right frame of mind, one realized that one was in the belly of a beast that was sweating out its special secretions. As we took off our shoes and socks and stepped on to the sto
ne floor of the Kalighat mandir, the temple’s harmless mucus greeted us.
People were noticing Lang, some even panning him with their eyes as they briskly moved away on their own trajectories.
‘How will we find our shoes when we come back?’
Lang was captivated by the shape-shifting nest of shoes, slippers, sandals that formed a brown, muddy glacier at the base of the temple steps. Many pairs found themselves distressingly separated and the distress seemed to be transmitted through Lang’s chaos-attacked face.
‘Oh don’t worry, we’ll find them. And your pair will be standing out in that crowd,’ I said, briefly spotting a partially upturned woman’s sandal that had shamelessly climbed on to an ordinary pair of men’s shoes. Only a second ago I had spotted the sandal, with the same red alta mark on the surface where the foot rests, tidily lying like the gentlest of housewives next to its twin.
Stepping over this violence of leather, we moved up and then inside the temple. As I furrowed through the crowd, careful to create a pathway for my foreign companion, I tried to imagine how our surroundings would appear to the Monocle. An outdoor shot movie into a studio set? My catarrh-whirring brain saw the darkness inside just before it ate both of us whole.
We had to stop in our tracks almost immediately as a gentleman and a lady prostrated right in front of us, both muttering ‘Ma, Ma …’ And then, only a few wet steps later Lang saw it, as if its sole purpose was to surprise. Inside the cage-like cubicle in front was the geometrical figure almost hunchbacked by the weight of garlands and cloth.
‘There she is.’ A hump like a dark hill. A conch shell sounded melodramatically at that very moment.
Lang’s jaw, forever tied mandible-to-maxilla by an invisible metal string, had creaked open. Glistening in a flickering pool of oil lamps, the solid river of gold that was the tongue bisected the figure that was before us. At the core lay the noseless black face pocked with three eyes with three red corneas staring back at us like a partially blinded spider. Three of the four hands were just about visible, one of them clutching the cutter as if it was a broom.
‘She’s like a machine, all metal,’ Lang murmured.
More than just a few people were looking at the Monocle, some staring, some openly breaking into talk about a European Kali devotee. (‘See the power of Kali? Even a shaheb has been seduced by her charms!’) I made feeble attempts at pretending that I was not with him.
‘That cutter in her hand, Herr Chatterjee,’ he said with his eyes still fixed on the tongue with a body. ‘I saw pictures being sold along the road outside. They showed a man holding the same weapon, in some pictures ready to bring it down on a woman, in others, her head already chopped and dangling from her neck like a door on a hinge.’
The Monocle was right. There were clusters of people sitting outside selling watercolours of various sizes, depicting various scenes—a man being thrashed by a woman with a broom, a seated woman having her hair braided by a maid, a seated woman smelling a rose, another one holding a peacock in one hand and a rose in another, a barber cleaning a lady’s ear as she draws on a hookah. There were also religious paintings, not as popular as the other ones but still steady-sellers. But the watercolours that had caught Lang’s eyes, and bore a vague resemblance, if only in tone, to the hunchbacked form of the goddess in front of him, were the ones that I had strenuously avoided to look at throughout my walk.
I had first seen Durga on the stage as Elokeshi in What Is This That the Mahant Has Done! The play itself had been a crowdpuller since the time it was first staged in 1874, a year after the infamous Tarakeshwar affair. By the time I saw it at the pre-bioscope Alochhaya, the story of the young and beautiful wife of Nabinchandra Banerjee being seduced/raped by the head priest of the Tarakeshwar shrine had been infused with all kinds of possibilities, some outrageous, some just patently untrue.
When Alochhaya decided to turn the play into a bioscope, I was still part-prompt-boy, part-bellboy, having only the yet-to-be-released Prahlad under my belt. The actor chosen to play the Mahant got the role because of his curling smile, a corrugated lower lip that made the women in the company uncomfortable. His high-pitched voice wouldn’t have suited a hormonal predator on the stage. But in a bioscope, with only his heavy-lidded eyes, face-bending smile and clump of fake-beard to show, he was menacing even for strangers in the audience. The delicate Ramesh Pal, who would later go on to become moderately successful as Ram in Laub-Kush, played Nabinchandra.
Barring Durga, the acting was terrible. But with Pramanik Bhowmick as director and a master in the cutting room, What Is This That the Mahant Has Done! became a magical display of special effects and drama that the bioscope alone was capable of creating.
In the stage version, Durga, shining through her jewellery, had fallen at the feet of her husband, imploring him to forgive her. The whole stage had disappeared before my eyes as I stared at the sobbing woman who in a different scene, after being knifed by the deranged-by-heartbreak Nabinchandra, cried out: ‘Lord, what I had thought would happen has finally happened; I am completely destroyed. If I die, I won’t be unhappy; it will be the right punishment for me. But because of this lowly sinner, you too will die. I will be the reason for my Lord’s death.’ Two stabs later, the crumpled form of Durga was left abandoned under the spotlights.
In Pramanik’s bioscope, the climactic scene, however, involved not Nabinchandra stabbing his wife Elokeshi repeatedly with a knife, but a full-throated decapitation.
Nabinchandra is ready to leave Tarakeshwar with Elokeshi for good. Bundles of clothes and goods have been packed and before leaving their blight behind, the couple is to have a reassuring paan before their journey. But after a desperate search for a carriage, Nabin finds no one willing to carry the couple away from the town, everyone fearing the chief priest’s wrath. Even as Elokeshi reassures her husband that something will be managed and that he should just hold her instead of worrying, Nabinchandra has already made up his mind. If he can’t take Elokeshi away from Tarakeshwar, he’ll at least ensure that she never stays anywhere near the decrepit Mahant or any other man.
In front of the rolling camera, Ramesh Pal had brandished a bonti, the sort of cutter I had seen my mother and Abala use in the kitchen. Ramesh had brought down the blade in one looping arc passing behind Durga’s head. Durga remained seated, with her paan still folded in her right hand, awaiting consumption.
In Alochhaya and other picture palaces, what audiences saw was less ordinary.
Elokeshi sits there, preserving her calmness and quietly wishing her husband would end his state of panic. Nabin, a few feet away, turns around with a bonti in his hand, moves forward and, before the woman in the frame can look up or utter a word, he raises the blade in a backswing and chops off Elokeshi’s head, with her paan still visible in an unwavering right hand. I saw Elokeshi’s head creak slowly towards the side, swivelling open from the neck like a trunk top being opened. Her face was still visible and one could see, if one turned one’s own head with hers, that it retained its living expression. And then, from the mouth of the neck erupted a dark smoke, coming out in swirls like when a blob of ink expands in curls in a glass of water.
This was only the second time I had seen bioscope blood. And it was Durga Devi’s.
Lang stood still as if breathing wasn’t mandatory.
‘Herr Chatterjee, it’s wunderbar. It’s an object that has a human form. Actually, a human form that is an object. Wunderbar!’ he said in the dank darkness.
I was only half-listening to him. My head was being washed away and a seaweed trail of thoughts left behind. I also seemed to be breathing in fresh, mint-like air that had just been created. All this while, devotees inside the smallish room kept walking in and out, clanging the bell and prostrating before Kali. There was a mechanical feel to everything that was taking place. The goddess, in her machine-like form, seemed to contain the engine while invisible cranks and chains and pulleys made the world and its people go about their specific seemin
gly unconnected ways.
It must have been the catarrh. But I was startled despite the knowledge of white granules playing inside both our heads when Lang asked me, ‘Herr Chatterjee, can you see the light?’
It was a dull glow that had slowly turned bright and was now pouring out from that gigantic metal tongue. However, people around us, in the catacomb-like space we were standing in, didn’t look in the least surprised or startled by the light. Did they, in their right minds, believe that the many flickering flames all around somehow travelled to the Tongue and then, like in a phlegm-thrower’s throat, gush out in one spattering flow? Did they truly think this a normal phenomenon?
‘Let’s go, Mr Lang,’ I said without betraying my growing confidence vis-à-vis the impostor.
I pushed myself against Lang/Langford. But instead of moving outwards towards the entrance that doubled as the exit, we found ourselves in a room, not larger than a large cupboard, practically next to the idol in its cage. There was no one here. The bells and the hum of human passage could be heard from outside. But nothing was visible. The room was empty except for smatterings of wet petals on the floor that resembled body parts too small for anyone to dispose of. But as my eyes adjusted to the dull non-darkness, I saw Lang holding up a brown stub. It looked like a three-fourth-smoked wet cigar.
‘Herr Chatterjee, isn’t this … it is, isn’t it … a penis?’
He wasn’t wrong. It did look like a shrivelled thing, wrinkly, odious and disembodied.
‘Where did you find it?’ I asked incredulously.
Bells were ringing, more conch shells blowing, as Lang pointed to the corner of the room, an armlength away, where an opened small box lay behind a grill. The stub, as far as I could now make out after a careful inspection, was not a penis. It had been resting on the red cloth inside the box when the curious Lang had picked it up.
Bioscope Man Page 24