It was now Jadab’s turn to let go. The hard, flat word that Ramlochan had used, and twice, had clearly scratched on the scab that Chandi Pandit had first allowed to fester in him. Visions of his little girl being ravished by the monster in front of him started to streak past him. Horribly, these recreated images were soon slowing down, giving him less time to escape them. They were a parody of all those pictures that flickered in his head every time he drank and reacted with guffaws to those bawdy songs sung by Pagla Gafoor about women stuck to their pitchers.
Jadab had to be held back by Ishwar and Bhabani, the two youngsters still training to be lathials, straining on each side of the man gone insane in the middle. It was Chandi Pandit who took the lead in turning around and leaving Ramlochan to himself. With the mob gone, he was suddenly a stranger on his own doorstep. He stood there blankly, until he simply sat down on the threshold like a bulging clothful of rice that had just been sickled.
That was half a year ago. With Panchanan on his way back to Calcutta, Ramlochan looked at the spot where he had crumpled. It seemed like years ago, weeks ago, days ago, moments ago, all in jumbling succession.
What had he done with Kuli? Nothing. What had he done to any child in the whole of Krishnagar? Nothing. It was true that along with Panini’s, Katyayana’s and Patanjali’s grammar, the usual texts from Astadhyayi, Vartikas and Mahabhasya, and verses from Kumarasambhava and Meghadutam, he had also taught the basics of the English language to his students. The writings he taught these boys—and Kuli—were those that he had obtained during his trips to Calcutta. Towards the latter part of his tutorship, he had taken up William’s offer of visiting him for three weeks in his residence at Garden Reach every three months. There were a few printed books that he had picked up during these sojourns from a circulating library in the Badamtala area. These were as instructive as they were delightful—Ossian’s Temora, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Augustus Toplady’s Book of Hymns and various collections of poetry, prose and drama.
Kuli was a bright girl and Ramlochan had spotted the spark in her very early on. So it was only natural that he ventured to teach her what he didn’t teach the others—verses of his favourite firingi poet, the Earl of Rochester. He was so proud when Kuli was able to read out faultlessly for the first time one of his favourite verses, Rochester’s Song:
By all love’s soft, yet mighty powers
It is a thing unfit
That men should fuck in time of flowers
Or when the smock’s beshit.
Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind
And all my joys restore
By using paper still behind
And sponges for before.
My spotless flames can ne’er decay
If after every close
My smoking prick escape the fray
Without a bloody nose.
As Kuli would sway back and forth reading the delightful words in the lamplight, he would bathe in the sweet, light voice that would utter those rhyming, rocking words. She did not understand the meaning of the words she read, following only the letters and stringing them into sound. But he had told her meaningfully that he would teach her the meanings of firingi words later, once she had mastered their reading and their utterances. She not only became adept at reading out passages in English but was also able to write out Bengali words and whole passages in the Latin script, managing to even transpose the numbers of one language to the other. Confusion, however, would arise each time the number eight cropped up. She would unthinkingly change it to the English ‘four’.
But had he even touched her once in all these years that she was seven, eight and nine? Never. Not even the time when she had spilled water on to his precious pile of notes on Joydeb. It had taken hours for them to dry on that monsoon day.
Ramlochan had been walking all this while and he found himself in front of William’s bungalow. He had been unaware as he walked through the streets of Krishnagar, passing the shops and the houses, that people were no longer willing to let the eccentric Baidya Pandit go about his business of educating their children. Now inside the deserted growth of what was once a tidy garden under the charge of Anna Maria Jones, he walked through the tangle of green and soft ground right up to the muddy banks of the Jalangi.
Panchanan had told him that Anna Maria had left Calcutta for London weeks before William’s death. It seemed apt that everyone was returning to their rightful places. Was it so long ago that Anna Maria, a broad hat on her head, had stood on this exact spot, looking into the horizon that was broken by boats gliding slowly? Ramlochan remembered being inside the house, facing the wigless William as he struggled with the various shades of ‘ahamkara’. He had looked out, watching the whitest figure in all the green and brown, watching her hold down her hat in the warm river breeze.
How he had wanted to impress Anna Maria by speaking to her in English, perhaps quoting something meaningful from all those words that he had read and loved. But there had been far too few moments alone—two, to be exact: once when William had been caught up in the rain and he had to wait for less than ten minutes for his pupil to arrive, and the second time when she had rushed into the room holding a clay Krishna, and not finding her husband departed with a silent smile.
I’tisam al-Din had told him how he was advised, during his stay in England, to take up an English wife.
‘But they were only thinking of someone from the lower classes. Now, why would I even consider one of those vulgar ladies as a wife, tell me?’ he had said patting his beard down …
There was no point in thinking about all that any more. William Jones had died in Calcutta. He had already been fêted as ‘the unlocker of the secrets of India’ and had omitted any mention of Ramlochan Sharma. Never mind London, even the Asiatic Society in Calcutta had never thought it fit to invite Ramlochan for his discourse on the parallels between Sanskrit nouns and English root nouns, let alone on his study on the use of ‘anustubh’ and ‘tristubh’ in the Bhagvat Gita.
From the corner of his eye he could see a small group of girls playing on the banks of the river. None of them was Kuli. The brown waters of the Jalangi looked up to him and he returned the gaze. He vaguely heard the girls titter loudly to accompanying splashes. How he would have liked to hear right there and right then his dear old Ramprasad. The singer’s voice would have dissolved easily in the waters below.
Tell me, brother, so what’s after death?
The whole world is arguing about it
Some say you become a ghost
Others that you go to heaven
And some that you get close to God.
The Vedas insist that you’re a bit of sky
Reflected in a jar
Fated to shatter.
Ramlochan held himself tightly just to know how real he was. Edging closer to the water, he could see the contours of a face looking at him, but with its form blurring, breaking and rippling into pieces. His grip around himself now hurt. But it was a confirmation that he was still there when Ramprasad’s voice came back to answer a question that he had never bothered to ask.
Prasad says: you end, brother,
Where you began, a reflection
Rising in water, mixing with water
Finally one with water.
But it wasn’t the singer’s words that he last heard standing beside the Jalangi. It was his own voice, carefully, incorruptibly saying,
Greensleeves was all my joy
Greensleeves was my delight
Greensleeves was my heart of gold
And who but my Ladie Greensleeves.
Finally, the Talkies
So why am I here? Why have I been left unsurrounded, unentertained, unnamed all these years? The answer to that is very simple. I have eluded the answer all this while, and the answer, in all its simplicity, has tried to track me down, bump into me as if in an unscripted collision. But some things are meant to be. Like Ramlochan playing my role in a long, stretched-out, twentieth-centu
ry chamber version of his gems-in-the-gutters life. Like my accepting why The Pandit & The Englishman did not push me back into the waters in which I belonged. Because The Pandit & The Englishman didn’t see the light of the bioscope.
Fritz Lang, that is Frederick E. Langford, wrapped up the film here in this city and returned to Europe. The feature was supposed to be ready for release in two months. That’s what Langford had told me in our final meeting in his room at the Great Eastern. But in early 1927, it wasn’t a motion picture about an eighteenth-century Bengali scholar played by Abani Chatterjee that was released to the sound of Nagerbazar’s famous tom-toms. Instead, it was a film about a mechanical woman set in the year 2026.
Needless to say, Lang’s Metropolis, with all its cinematic trickery, got its director noticed around the world, especially in America. But can anyone who was there during the making of The Pandit & The Englishman deny that it had all the ingredients of a fine film, a great bioscope? I did ask some people about what happened. Charu Ray, busy by then making features for none other than the Alochhaya Bioscope Company, didn’t have answers. And Charu is the kind of person who doesn’t mind it a bit if he is clueless. I even wrote letters to Lang, sending them to the UFA office in Berlin, the last one sent just before the war broke out. I didn’t get a single reply. Like Shombhu-mama, he had vanished like a gypsy caravan. But unlike Shombhunath Lahiri—unlike, I daresay, Abani Chatterjee—Fritz Lang is remembered and celebrated everywhere, in your widescreened Los Angeles where you will read all this, in my curtaining Calcutta where I write it.
Lang’s Metropolis discovered a star in Gustav Frölich, who I must admit impressed me. Frölich jumped from being an unknown, an extra in the movie, to becoming its main character—and all because Thea van Harbou reportedly had found him ‘interesting’.
Both the story of Ramlochan Sharma and the duplicity of Langford have remained hidden. Which is why what I have been saying is not one bitter, self-pitying, woeful ramble of a rant. I’m approaching sixty, for god’s sake, and I have finally learnt to live with injustice, intermittent running water, the noise made by loud Congress loafers in the locality whose existence Bidhan Roy pretends not to know about, and humiliation that would fill up the Maidan and still have bits and pieces of it spilling over on to Chowringhee. So for me to demand my rightful place in the history of bioscopes is pointless.
I have not been to a movie theatre for decades. The last time I entered a cinema, I was sick and had to be taken out of that dark hole. All that sound and talk in movies today leave me gasping for air. Perhaps we all become our fathers when we grow old.
As for daily life, Sumitra, Rona’s daughter-in-law, brings me my three meals. Drinking is no longer an option. Bikash is too busy playing politics. But he had his fair share of anguish last month. The man he works for, the minister Harendranath Roy Choudhury, lost to a lanky, thirty-eight-year-old communist at the Baranagar constituency elections. So maybe he’ll be dropping by more often now. Marriage, that easy outpost for companionship, never entered my mind until it was too late. What makes my colic worse is not so much that I could have had things differently, but that Langford, Lang, whatever you call him, is still out there, fêted and unexposed.
But then, when you stop pretending, you don’t stop pretending. You just pretend something else. Is my present condition the result of lapsing into Abani Chatterjee? I don’t think so. No one’s interested in the character I’ve been playing for the last thirty years. I still don’t think it was a bad choice, though. The people just don’t care for it any more. Which is why I have to be careful even now. This city, which has been baring its teeth for far too long, will chew me up if I give in now to vulgar demand. In a way, my only companion in this totally unglamorous, non-nutritious, gnawing-away hole of obscurity is Ramlochan. Two figures in the footnotes. Two feetnote, hah! But I will not clamber out to be eaten by this city.
Which is why last September, after reading two letters that Sumitra had brought with my lunch, I tore up one and decided to act on the other. The first was from someone who introduced himself as an admirer. He was a young commercial artist at D.J. Keymer who had seen some of my old bioscopes, the ones that somehow survived the godowns with their dripping ceilings and lizard droppings. He wrote that he had plans of making a movie based on a story by Bibhuthibhushan Bandopadhyay. I had read a bit of the story, Pather Panchali, when it first came out in instalments in Bichitra during the Twenties. It was a melodramatic story and I hadn’t cared much for it—it basically depicted the idiocy of rural life without actually identifying it as idiocy. He thought that I would be perfect for the role of a village grocer-teacher in the story. But he was also honest enough to tell me that it was a minor role (‘but an important one’). After years of avoiding bit roles, I saw no sense in giving in now. So I never replied to the man.
The second letter was yours. I read it and it got me thinking. If you, sitting there in California, thought it worth the effort to want to know about me, my work and my life, there must be something in what I had done in those happy years in the bioscopes. It also gave me great relief that I hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of whoring myself.
You mentioned in your letter that you are in the process of writing the biography of Sabu ‘The Elephant Boy’. Apart from seeing him on the screen long ago in The Thief of Baghdad and Cobra Woman, I know nothing about him. But I know things about myself. Which is why I send you this.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ravi Singh, without whom this book would have remained the very untossed salad that it was. His editorial and vodka inputs have been at the core of the writing process of this book. I owe Jaishree Ram Mohan big time, not only for her extremely precious feedback but also for pretending to be drunk each time so that I never stood out.
The Charles Wallace Trust provided me the luxury that all writers crave: time. I got plenty of that in the two months I was a Writer-in-Residence at Stirling University, Scotland in 2005. Angela and Grahame Smith were terrific company, and many rounds of Highland Flings for the friends I made at Stirling.
Thanks also to Renuka Chatterjee, who read the manuscript and gave me valuable suggestions. A tip of the hat to my day job at Hindustan Times. Which other company would have put up with such nonsense?
Apologies to my father, who wanted me to go to film school ever since he took me to the cinema to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was two years old.
And everything boils down to Diya. I’m still trying to impress her.
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Copyright © Indrajit Hazra 2008
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