Bioscope Man

by Indrajit Hazra

  ‘Look, that looks like a nail. A chipped nail,’ I pointed to the barely visible dirty-white projection on the stub. As I held it between my four fingers, pressing it ever so slightly to gauge its texture, I knew what it was.

  ‘It’s a toe.’

  ‘A toe?’

  ‘A toe.’

  ‘You mean a toe like on a foot?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  We needed to get out of the temple, one room at a time. Lang was ready to step out when I matter-of-factly reminded him to put the toe back in its box. As he stared back at me, I calmly plucked the object from his fingers, walked towards the box and shut the grill. Pushing myself out, I carried the Monocle with me.

  To not arouse any suspicion in the main room, I turned to face Lang as we walked forward.

  ‘According to Hindu mythology, Sati, the consort of Shiv …’ I started as we joined a passing crowd.

  ‘But I thought Kali was Shiv’s consort,’ I heard Lang say from the region around my left shoulder.

  ‘Oh, she’s another incarnation of Kali. Anyway, according to Hindu mythology, Sati, the consort of Shiv …’

  And I continued to play the guide to Lang’s shaheb.

  ‘Sati had jumped into a raging fire when her father insulted her husband for being a good-for-nothing, ganja-consuming wastrel. Shiv, on hearing of his beloved’s death, rushed to his in-laws, picked up the burning corpse from the fire and in a rage that bends spoons and cracks tumblers, proceeded to dance the cosmic dance of destruction, all the while carrying Sati’s body on his back.’

  As we neared the entrance of the temple, I could see the nightlights outside.

  ‘All the gods were worried at Shiv’s hysteria. If he didn’t stop, the universe would be destroyed. Which is where Lord Vishnu came into the picture. In order to get Shiv to stop dancing, Vishnu employed his fearful, whirring disc-weapon, the Sudarshan Chakra, and cut Sati’s body into fifty-one pieces. With no load left on his back, Shiv stopped dancing.’

  Incredibly both our shoes were there in the flat heap. Still unable to shake off the feeling of being watched, I continued my lecture while we curled up our socks and slipped on our shoes. Lang looked genuinely interested.

  ‘Among the hacked pieces of Sati’s body, her toe fell somewhere in the Bhagirathi river and was discovered by a devotee of Kali. It’s generally believed that the toe had turned into stone and would take on its original form only from time to time, without any warning, without any schedule. The man who found the stone toe placed it in a shrine in the jungles nearby. Centuries later, the jungles were cleared to become part of this city. This temple was erected on the site of the old shrine.’

  Disgorged from the temple, we were finally in the street again. Lang needed to say something. Instead he looked at me with a gaze that said, ‘Take me away from here.’ We walked past the side of the temple, across the pillared pavilion generously packed with people. It was only when we stepped on to the semi-solid quilt of stone, muck and wetness that I regained my composure. More importantly, I remembered what I had been preparing for since I had read the contents of the mysterious envelope. Along with the beggars, dogs and picture stalls, the street was now bordered with scavenging cats and rotund women.

  ‘What, shaheb? Why don’t you come inside for a while? Babu, don’t you and your shaheb want to spend some time inside?’

  She was hanging on to a wooden column of a two-storeyed shed. There were two other women peering from the first floor, one of them already engaged in a half-hearted conversation with a man with the slimmest of moustaches and an umbrella. She kept swaying as if in a breeze that wasn’t there.

  ‘Is she …?’

  ‘I think we’d better move along,’ I said quickly, lighting a cigarette and offering Lang another.

  ‘Herr Chatterjee? Did you see that? I just saw a man being led upstairs by a leash.’

  And then without any warning, an incredibly large, scabby cat crawled past us with what seemed like a staring face in its mouth.

  ‘That son of a bitch! It’s taken the head! That son of a bitch has stolen my fish-head!’

  The walking diphtheria disappeared into the crack of a bylane.

  The cigarette was supposed to clear my head. Instead, as we walked with increasingly brisker steps, there were more figures emerging. Some of them swayed like the upstairs girl; some had only their faces visible, hatched with grilled windows. These were bodies, parts of bodies, parts of parts of bodies that were flashing and floating in the evening Kalighat air.

  ‘Where is the car?’ asked Lang. He seemed to be winded.

  ‘Another two minutes,’ I said, unsure of what I had just said. I told him to watch out for puddles. I don’t think he heard me, which served my purpose of a final preparation that essentially meant choosing the exact moment when I would bring up the subject. I had practised what I would tell Lang-Langford. It had to be short and precise without any sort of vagueness. I walked next to him, turning my face, ready to start procedures. And that’s when I saw Lang quivering. He threw away his cigarette and took out his powder box. He looked like a gangster in Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration as he sniffed up his catarrh.

  ‘Herr Chatterjee, how far?’

  ‘Just round the corner, Mr Langford.’

  The Monocle, without his monocle, looked as if he was about to be stomped into the ground by a giant foot descending from the sky. Everything that was Fritz Lang about him drained away in one gush.

  ‘How …?’

  ‘Never mind. Let me just say that you’ve been fooling a lot of people. I don’t know why you’ve done it. I don’t care. But clearly there is a reason and it must be important, Mr Langford.’

  I was facing him as people squatted, sat and walked on either side of the road.

  ‘Mr Chatterjee, please. Can we talk about this? It’s …’

  He was no longer speaking in the clipped, choppy English that was an endearing quality about the director of The Scholar of Calcutta. Instead, his accent at the Kalighat would have been not a dip out of place at the Carlton or other Anglo haunts.

  ‘Does Thea know?’ I asked, sensing with satisfaction how the earlier discomforts I had been experiencing had vanished completely.

  ‘No. Abani-babu, you must …’

  I cut him short with a short, stabbing ‘Aa’.

  ‘But …’

  Another stab followed. I was going to do the talking.

  As I talked and as he listened, everything started falling into place. I had no intention of exposing Frederick Ernest Langford or his ingenious business of miscegenated art. All I wanted was his help in reaching out to an international audience, or at least to American and European producers who would be free of petty and idiotic complexes. But as he talked and I listened, I realized that this was my chance to reclaim my position as a bioscope star in one swift step.

  We entered the car, and as it coughed into life and trudged on to wider, brighter roads, Langford told me, blinking his eyes too hard and too many times, how he had left the country after being implicated in a ‘misunderstanding over accounts’ at the Government School of Art where he was teaching. He had been in touch with a German gentleman by the name of Oswald Spengler whom he had met during a brief visit to the university city of Halle. It was through Spengler that Langford had managed to go to Kabul after the scandal broke and was then hushed up. He had been recommended by Spengler to the Ameer to open an art college, but a palace intrigue involving Yousufzai raiders put an end to that.

  ‘I boarded a ship to Europe with Spengler taking me in. But I had to change my identity. I didn’t have a choice, Abani-babu. There could have been some people, even in Berlin, who may have met me during my first trip to Europe. Spengler suggested I take up the name Fritz Lang. It sounded Aryan and had a vague trace of me in it, he had said. My part of the deal was to establish contacts with artists here in Calcutta, buy artwork and sell it in Europe as genuine Hindu art. It became so successful that by the end of las
t year, there was a demand for commissioned works and I had to be here myself,’ he said looking out of the rolled down window of the speeding car.

  ‘Because of the war, London had made it impossible to make such enterprises in any way profitable. UFA and the rest of the German bioscope industry found a tiny window in exports of features. So …’

  Spengler, it turned out, had known a real Fritz Lang, who had fought against the Russians and the Romanians in 1914. He was an arty, dreamy solider who had told Spengler in the barracks of his plans to ‘make bioskops’. After the war, Langford explained, everyone in Europe, especially the losing side, wanted to recover their sanity by making ‘bioskops’.

  ‘By the time I reached Berlin, Lang had died of shrapnel wounds in an army hospital in Leipzig. Spengler knew people who could forge documents quickly—most of them going on to become art directors. My father was in the service of Prince Louis Alexander Battenberg before he moved to India after getting married. So I knew German well enough. A bit of training and fact-checking later, I became Fritz Lang, doing theatre work in Vienna until I was hired as a writer for Decla by Eric Pommer.’

  Making this truth public at this point would destroy Langford’s reputation. It would also end his contraband business in ‘genuine fake Indian art’. That meant bad news not only for Langford but also for Spengler and some of his friends in the NSDAP, a rising political party, which had stakes in the whole enterprise.

  As he spoke, I touched the object resting in my pocket. Without looking at Langford, I said, ‘I understand. But you will have to do me a favour.’

  The shrivelled toe in my black jacket tailored by M. Ali & Sons on Sukea Street was being tossed around by my dancing fingers. Did it bother me that the man next to me was drained of all the confidence I had seen in him till a few hours ago?

  As I rolled my window up, instinctively protecting myself from the barking dog that tore its way alongside the moving car like a creditor scampering after a bankrupt, I told Langford that his secret was safe with me—as long as he scrapped the feature he had been making and made a new bioscope with a new storyline from scratch.

  ‘But, but … you must understand Abani-babu! UFA won’t allow me to junk the shoot and start another feature all over again! Berlin won’t allow it! Too much money is at stake!’

  I rolled down the window again. The mouth of the lane where I would be getting off was approaching fast. Before the driver closed the door of the car and stepped inside again, I looked at Langford and simply said, ‘Herr Lang, it’s up to you now whether you still want to remain yourself.’

  My words bounced off the walls of the car before impaling him. Lang listened with a quivering mouth.

  By the next month, three things happened: The Scholar of Calcutta remained unfinished while the shooting of The Pandit & the Englishman started; I was cast as Pandit Ramlochan Sharma, the protagonist of a story about ambition, recognition and longing in eighteenth-century Bengal; and Frederick Ernest Langford was allowed to disappear for the second time in one lifetime.

 

  The words ‘The Pandit & The Englishman’, in white, elongated, appear on a black screen, followed by the squat, flattened words ‘A Schoken Motion-Pictures Presentation’. A few seconds later, with the screen still bouncing off darkness, except for the intermittent white of words, the line ‘A Tale of Desire, History & Longing from India’ appears, then disappears to be replaced by ‘Directed by Fritz Lang’.

  From the illuminated rectangle of blackness a room shapes out. It’s a wall in the room; a plain wall, pockmarked in certain areas, with a framed picture hanging on it. Next to the picture is a rack on which there are a few piles of paper curled up into rolls. The room, the wall, is lit up by a light whose source isn’t visible immediately. A few seconds later, the light is seen to be an ironed-out flicker coming from a nearby oil lamp set on the floor.

  The wall comes closer. The pockmarks reveal a smoothness of their own. The framed picture is no longer an indistinct rectangle. It is a standard picture of Kali, tongue out with a smile and a garland of mini-heads bearing moustaches. She is marching on an oblivious but wide awake Shiv. The picture of Kali remains in view for a few seconds longer. The first title comes on:

  ‘1783, Krishnagar, a town near Calcutta. Pandit Ramlochan Sharma is a physician whose practice has been suffering because of his obsession with teaching the ancient Hindu language of Sanskrit. His dream is to teach the language to the English. For the purpose, he has, over the years, learnt the language of power: English.’

  The text vanishes. A lizard crawls across the wall, stopping only when it reaches the picture of Kali and blocks the goddess’s face with one of its webbed paws. The flame of the oil lamp comes into view.

  The next title:

  ‘To earn a livelihood, Ramlochan teaches local boys Sanskrit. He despises everyone—except for one person …’

  A girl, not more than ten years old, approaches. Her face is lit up by the lamp light. She sits on the floor. After a brief exchange of looks with someone in the room, she starts reading out from a manuscript that had been lying open before her.

  For the first time, Pandit Ramlochan Sharma is visible. He is a gaunt man of fair complexion. His eyes are like those of a bull, liquidy and exuding tenderness and self-pity. The girl sways back and forth, throwing her moving shadow on the wall beyond. The Pandit occasionally looks at her, in between patches of looking at the manuscript she is reading out aloud. He also keeps rubbing his bare back and chest with a wet cloth.

  Ramlochan’s face fills up the screen. His eyes, calm and moist, are surrounded by a face, the central point of which is a thin-lipped mouth that bends and stretches. The whole room comes into view—Ramlochan, the girl, the wall with its picture of Kali and the just about visible Shiv. Ramlochan stands up and gets a hand fan from the rack next to the wall. He fans, gently enough not to create a wind that will disturb the pile of manuscripts in front of the girl. One page, however, does fly away. The girl gets up to rescue it.

  She is wearing a white piece of cloth that is struggling to look like a sari. The girl is too young to have any soft, rounded edges. Her arms, her left shoulder, a considerable part of her legs are visible. Every part of skin on her that is visible gleams like dark rock-edges. While she recovers the page, Ramlochan stops fanning and wiping his body. He gazes at her with great intensity. This gaze turns into a brief second of muted terror when she turns to return to her assigned spot next to him. Ramlochan resumes his calm posture. But his chest is still rising and falling too fast.

  The lizard now fills the screen. It slowly clambers away from the picture of Kali and flatfoots its way towards the rack. It disappears behind a pile of clothes.

  The girl suddenly looks up at Ramlochan with a concerned look. Her face is oval and angelic. The lamp is flickering harder than before. The turbulence of the flame is reflected on the girl’s face, especially on her black hair that is unnaturally long for a child her age.

  Ramlochan stops fanning.

  Another title card:

  ‘Kuli, you didn’t forgot the oil in the lamp again, did you?’

  Ramlochan frowns. It is an exaggerated and therefore false frown. The girl looks ready to break into tears, when the lamp light splutters on their faces. Everything turns black.

  He heard the news of William’s death and leaned forward. It was his way of registering the death of an old ally. Unfortunately, to the bearer of the news, Panchanan Karmakar, Ramlochan’s movement was yet another confirmation of the Krishnagar scholar’s rejection of social graces.

  Six months ago, William had collapsed in his Garden Reach house with a fever. The doctors had detected rheumatism and then a tumour. That news too had come to Ramlochan, as he sat on the porch, courtesy the voluble Panchanan. But it had been winter, the dreary month of Aghran when the days end fast and thoughts slow down, and Ramlochan was beset with his own troubles.

  ‘So you’ve lost your last pupils, eh?’ Panchanan had
asked, taking an elongated puff from Ramlochan’s gargara, the hot bubbles fighting for space deep inside the pipe. The Pandit, wrapped in the safety of his old shawl, hadn’t responded to his monthly friend from the city.

  ‘Well, I can’t really blame the parents,’ Panchanan continued, waving away a diving, drunken mosquito. ‘To be honest, I was surprised that you managed to carry on like this for so long. Your reputation hasn’t been pure as ghee, you know.’

  No, it hadn’t, not in Aghran, and not now in the new year either. In the last six months, his precious reputation had evaporated. Living in Krishnagar was no longer an option. And with the death of William Jones, neither was moving to Calcutta. Being a Baidya teaching Sanskrit in a town bristling with Brahman scholars was bad enough. But somehow he had managed to keep those sanctimonious maggots at bay.

  The sun was going down and the mosquitoes were coming out like an army of ghouls. Panchanan knew that with Jones’s death, any hope that Ramlochan may still have had of being recognized and fêted had died. He had been buckling under frustration, the perpetually gnawing frustration of a talent being squashed.

  Ramlochan had been feeling the burden of being hounded by those brain-dead Nadia Brahmans even before the scandal involving Kuli and himself forced his school to be closed. If there was one thing that had given him hope, it was his friendship with William Jones. But even that had frayed like a never-changed sacred thread.

  It was Ramlochan who had been teaching Jones the finer points of the Sanskrit language for the last ten years. It was he who had made the Englishman learn Bengali after the latter wanted to do away with the translating middle-men in the courtrooms. And it was he who had pointed out to William the striking similarity between the river Hiranyabahu in a passage by Somdev and the river Erranaboas mentioned by Megasthenes, and that Sandrocottus and Samudragupta—and not Chandragupta, as the overexcited Jones had announced at the Society—were one and the same.