Bioscope Man Read online

  INDRAJIT HAZRA

  The Bioscope Man

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Train in Vain

  Acting One’s Age

  My Fair Ladies

 

  Tumbling Upstairs

 

  Starlight Starbright

  Geometry of Taste

 

  From the State of Grace

  Hello, Operators

  Herr Monocle

  The Cabinet of Kalibari

 

  Finally, the Talkies

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE BIOSCOPE MAN

  Indrajit Hazra is the author of the novels The Burnt Forehead of Max Saul and The Garden of Earthly Delights, both of which have also been published in French. He is a journalist with the Hindustan Times, where he also writes the popular weekly column Red Herring.

  To my mother

  the patron saint of good food and white lies

  Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows …

  Without noise, the foliage, grey as cinder, is agitated by the wind and the grey silhouettes—of people condemned to a perpetual silence, cruelly punished by the privation of all the colours of life—these silhouettes glide in silence over the grey ground. Their movements are full of vital energy and so rapid that you scarcely see them, but their smiles have no life in them. You see their facial muscles contract but their laugh cannot be heard. A life is born before you, a life deprived of sound and the spectre of colour—a grey and noiseless life—a wan and cut-rate life.

  —Maxim Gorky, a news report for Nijegorodskilistok, 1896

  There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.

  —Peter Sellers

  Train in Vain

  On an especially humid afternoon in the summer of 1906, Tarini Chatterjee committed an act that would mark a violent turning point in his family’s history.

  The occasion was the inauguration of the spanking new Haora Station building—red brick and iron, very neat and English. Being responsible for both the morning and evening schedules of trains plying the Chord Line via Patna, Tarini was one of the seventy-odd dignitaries and senior employees of the East Indian Railway gathered in an area where, till the other day, there had only been a gaggle of tin sheds, narrow platforms and makeshift households of seventeen nondescript families.

  It had started off fine, which is how these sorts of things always do. The quietly proud clerks and officers of the East Indian Railway looked on as their superiors raised their glasses, toasting a fine piece of architecture that had been under construction for the last five years. They looked on, too, as their superiors’ superiors made tidy, understated speeches that showcased their wit just a little more than the pains they had taken to hammer their syntax into a final, sturdy shape.

  On the platform, a separate stall had been erected away from the main dais. And it was here that Tarini, along with several others—all colleagues, only some of them friends—was taking part in a side-celebration of piping hot tea (no champagne for them), not-too-hard-crusted shingaras and jilipis, the last item bearing a resemblance to miniature French horns fit for an orchestra of midgets. The sub-dignitaries didn’t have the luxury their bosses had of taking time over the titbits, as they had no speeches to make and it would have been silly to make toasts by raising cups of tea. Therefore, not to delay proceedings—which involved making a small symbolic journey from the new Haora Station to the nearest station a few miles away—Tarini and his fellowmen tried to consume as many edibles and sippables as possible in the shortest span of time.

  That, as it would turn out, was a bad idea.

  Tarini first chomped on a few shingaras. The volcanic pieces of potato jumped about on his tongue, leaving it temporarily numb. Then, he carefully transferred some jilipis from hand to mouth as dexterously as possible, without dropping any of their life-giving syrup on his greying white shirt, and deftly sucked his fingers clean. Finally, he bit off the head of another dough-pyramid.

  No one, least of all Tarini, was counting, but it had been his seventh shingara. Looking around, he realized that if he did not want to miss the real ceremony, he would have to eat the few leftover jilipis briskly. The man blowing ripples on his saucerful of tea had finished. The grey-black smoke that, till then, was quietly coming out of the engine’s smokestack had started puffing in a rhythm totally out of beat with the surroundings. Passengers were already boarding. The women, hiding their discomfort under their parasols, were the first, helped on to the carriages not so much by their important husbands as by the liveried train staff. In that blinding flurry of white cloth under a yellow sun, Tarini found a few precious seconds to pour some water on his hands—quickly, for now the important men themselves were boarding.

  ‘Thank you for providing me this honour of being part of an historic occasion,’ he had practiced in front of the bedroom-cupboard mirror in the morning. His wife had tittered to find him speaking to himself, that too in English, and this had irritated Tarini. ‘It would suffice to say that I am grateful also for the opportunity to be an employee of the East Indian Railway, which, if I may be bold enough to add, has no rival in India, and that includes the so-called “Great” Indian Peninsula Railway.’ Even as he ran his little speech in his head, he wasn’t quite clear to whom it would be targeted, considering that his boss, Mr Edward Quested, had already boarded the train.

  The ear-piercing whistle drowned out the band. It scattered a mob of crows, who began cawing their black diabolical heads off at a safe distance. Tarini smoothened his shirt front, flattened the sides of his trousers and entered the train.

  He sat next to a window, its lace curtains neatly parted at the centre, as on a miniature stage. People were still settling down. Where were the others? Any moment now the train would start moving and he couldn’t see Bardhan, Mukherjee or Sanyal in the compartment. Looking out of the window, he couldn’t see them on the platform either. Auld Lang Syne, bloated and blown out of the brass band, was bending in and out of tune as if approaching a tight curve on a narrow line. But it was the chatter from inside the compartment that gave Tarini a faint idea that something was not right.

  He couldn’t unbutton his top shirt-button lest his vest showed. A European with a moustache—a sight getting rarer with Curzon having made the bare lip all the rage—and an air of practised authority walked past Tarini, taking a quick look at him. Tarini didn’t stare back.

  The teak interiors of the compartment had been varnished for the occasion. If Tarini looked carefully, he could see the contours of his face reflected above the red leather seat where the wood was the shiniest. He could just about make out the parts of his face that suddenly curved in to hold his large, slightly protruding eyes. The shine on the dark wood reminded him of the desk in Mr Quested’s office. Tarini had been summoned there five years ago to make copies of some additional paperwork regarding contracts for water tanks in Patna. As he patiently stood before Mr Quested, who was going one last time through the tenders before placing them in a file marked ‘Patna NE’, he had noted the symmetrically arranged paperweights and the carefully scattered paper knives on the table, each object reflected by the polished table.

  He had also noticed other things in Mr Quested’s room. Directly in the line of vision of the King Emperor, whose hand-painted photograph adorned a wall shared by a map of locomotived India and two large clocks that told London and Calcutta time, there was a framed crochet-work that spelt in a loving cursive style, ‘Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.’ He had never been ins
ide Mr Quested’s office since that day.

  A furious, long toot followed by a shudder announced the train pulling away from the station. And now Tarini stopped pretending to be blasé about sitting there among people he did not recognize, without any of his colleagues—Bardhan, Mukherjee, Sanyal—who were to travel with him. The band had moved to another tune, one that he couldn’t quite place. In any case, with the train whistle blowing at tiny intervals and the agitated crows filling up the gaps, no one was really paying attention to the band.

  Where was he? What place was this? Tarini began to feel a little breathless.

  It is difficult for me to speak about somebody’s inability to grasp reality. I too have found myself in situations, on more than one occasion, refusing to doubt and disbelieve until it was too late. But it was exceedingly odd that Tarini took so long to realize that the compartment he was in was occupied only by Europeans.

  ‘Is there anyone sitting here?’

  Tarini tried to reply, but no sound came out. The lady smiled and sat down facing him. She was actually a girl, not more than fifteen, trying her best to carry herself off as a young woman. She was in a white dress and a hat that curved downwards at the edges. Despite her valiant attempts at womanhood, there was something—that tight-lipped smile? those inquisitive green eyes? that voice?—that gave the game away. Tarini tried not to look directly at her; he focused hard on her hat. It was not unlike the sheaf of saffron cloth worn around the head like a stopper by travelling mendicants of a kind inhabiting north Bengal. In her case, of course, it was white and totally in line with the latest fashion.

  ‘Adela, have you found a seat?’

  Tarini recognized Mr Quested’s voice, that mixture of a gurgle and a baritone. In it, now, was also a mix of authority and concern.

  ‘Yes, father. I’ve got a window seat,’ announced the girl as she deftly hopped out of and back into her corner to reassure the invisible Mr Quested. Tarini gulped and felt the pit of his stomach shift its centre of gravity.

  ‘My father thinks that this station will one day be as famous as Paddington,’ the girl said, her voice rising an octave. ‘He’s the head of the train company, you know.’

  By now the train had picked up enough speed for the ground close to the train to turn into a blur. The new Haora building had given way to the old gummy landscape, half-built mud walls with dung cakes plastered on them and clusters of people gaping and cheering.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, noticing a few boys in the distance jumping up and down to catch their notice.

  The girl looked at Tarini, a little confused. But she was brighter than her age would suggest and she quickly realized that the man in front of her had just responded to the comment she had made some minutes ago.

  Should Tarini ask the European girl, Mr Quested’s daughter, whether this was Coach A3? Or would that be too bold? And what if, as it now seemed clear to him, a little late in the day, he was on the wrong coach? Should he get up and proceed to the right one? Or should he just let matters be? But would letting matters be be wise? It was one thing to be in the wrong coach. It was quite another to be in the coach that Mr Edward Quested and his daughter—and dozens of other Europeans—were in. He wasn’t supposed to be sharing carriage space with these people. Fear gripped him. It took a physical form as he realized that this was the compartment in which the Lt. Governor would also be sitting.

  The phantoms of many shingaras jostled below his chin area, the part of the body that plays the role of a table for the face. Tarini started to sweat, despite the train-wind bouncing off his face. The girl in front of him kept talking, but he had stopped listening. Hurtling through his food-pipe was a sticky, syrupy torrent, and the remnants of a deep-fried past. Thankfully, it stopped somewhere between his neck and chest, just as his mouth, which he usually made sure was closed in polite company, flapped open. He had heard—but never given it any thought before this afternoon—that letting more air into your mouth will correct the loss of equilibrium within the rest of you. Later, he would tell people that this was superstitious nonsense.

  The girl had stopped speaking briefly and was looking out of the window. But when she started again—‘My aunt thinks that Papa has done some mighty fine work in this country and it’s not been a week since she’s arrived from Bath’—Tarini stepped in.

  ‘Thank you for providing me this honour of being part of an historic occasion. It would suffice to say that I am grateful also for the opportunity to be an employee of the East Indian Railway, which, if I may be bold enough to add, has no rival in India, and that includes the so-called “Great” Indian Peninsula Railway.’

  And that dip in ‘Great’—so full of irony, so full of cleverness—undid all the good work of his life in one rushing, rising stream that was so strong that, even though he was sitting against the flow of the train, the gush reached its destination in one low, tight parabolic trajectory.

  Miss Adela Quested, of course, had had no inkling of what the man in front of her had been going through. And now, with the greyish-green sludge still descending on her white dress—worn only once six months ago during Christmas in faraway Manchester—and forming an unnatural lake in the depression of her lap, she let out a shriek so loud, so high-pitched, that it pierced the cumulative noise of chuckles and polite banter about India and Home, the combing sound of the train passing through air and the accompanying cardiac cough of escaping smoke, and—why, even the train whistle that went off at that exact moment, drowning the rolling-away world outside with its own shrill articulation of terror.

  It was a marvel that the glass of the windows did not shatter.

  Miss Quested’s scream reverberated inside Coach A1, bouncing manically off those frail lace curtains, tearing up any lingering cheroot smoke and even scraping the polished woodwork above the red leather seats. And everyone inside the carriage turned to the source of the incredible sound which was consequence and proof, clearly, of a terrible event.

  Adela was different from all other girls, or even women, of her age. Even as she screamed and witnessed through her narrowed-to-a-slit eyes the man opposite her throw out the last remnants of all that he had ingested, she remembered what her father had told her about how too many people, Englishmen in England in particular, were under the mistaken impression that the Romans, in all their decadent splendour, constructed giant rooms in which gentlemen of the town would congregate and vomit.

  That was, of course, rubbish. Why would Romans, the builders of an empire that straddled half the world, behave in a manner that defied civilization, not to mention table manners? The Roman vomitorium—from the Latin vomitus, past participle of vomere, to vomit—she would explain painstakingly to as many people as possible if the subject came up in a conversation, was not a room set aside by the ancient Romans to throw up in. That disgusting story was probably cooked up by the Pope to give pagan culture—not to mention the Anglican Church—a scandalous reputation.

  The vomitorium, she had explained even to Mirmai, the ayah, as the latter folded bedclothes, was a passageway in a Roman amphitheatre that opened into a tier of seats from below or behind. There was even a sentence in the Caldridge History of Imperial Rome that she had looked up in her father’s not-too-modest library in her untiring and unladylike pursuit of knowledge:

  The vomitoria of the Colosseum were so well designed that the immense venue, which seated at least 50,000, could be fully occupied in a quarter of an hour. There were eighty entrances at the ground level, seventy-six for ordinary spectators and four for the imperial family. The vomitoria deposited mobs of people into their seats and afterwards disgorged them in equal time onto the streets.

  It’s another matter that Mr Quested kept another book—among a few others—under lock and key and outside his motherless daughter’s reach so that his scientifically inclined and historically inquisitive Adela, whom he was terribly proud of, would not be upset. But years later, when Miss Quested—by then Mrs Adela Heaslop—did find the book and came acros
s the sentence ‘Cum ad cenandum discubuimus alias sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum subditus colligit’, she wasn’t appalled by Seneca’s announcement. Instead, she was puzzled, confused and struck with the feeling that someone, either her father or Seneca, had been lying. For there it was clearly written in that small but heavy-ochred Latin script, the translation of which was eminently simple: ‘When we recline at a banquet, one wipes up the spittle, another, situated beneath, collects the leavings of the drunks.’

  All this crashed through Adela’s head as Tarini ungorged himself onto her lap that late humid afternoon.

  One would have thought that Tarini Chatterjee’s head, while he vomited on an English girl in a carriage that he was not supposed to be on, would be completely blank. But like Adela Quested in front of him, Tarini Chatterjee too was protected by recollections so strong that his appalling act had become, for that short while, secondary to an overpowering, long-standing and completely unexplainable sadness.

  Tarini Chatterjee’s mind had gone back to his father, the long dead Bholanath Chatterjee.

  The very week his father died, prematurely old, after complaining bitterly and loudly about stomach cramps, Tarini had given up a daily habit that had been forced upon him from the time that he was four till he turned twenty. It had meant rising at some horribly early hour, much before the sun came awake, and heating up water. Well, that was just the beginning.

  Bholanath had shown his young son how to fan the glowing pile of coals under the container just enough for the water to reach body temperature—‘not less, not more’—and then how to pour the water into a glass and add a pinch of salt in it. Then, sitting completely still, they would drink from their respective tumblers a litre each of the lukewarm saline liquid that to Tarini tasted like river silt (which he had never tasted). After that litre was consumed, more water was heated, more salt was added and more of that palate-grazing liquid was made to flow down the throat.