Bioscope Man Page 2

  It was only in the middle of the second instalment of the procedure that Tarini would feel his stomach turning taut like stretched goat skin. What followed was the feeling of his belly being pushed from inside, as if by some vermin that had bloated massively and now wanted to come out in time for sunrise.

  By the time the first signs of day appeared, each sip seemed like climbing up the final few steps of the tallest monument in the world. Tarini would have the distinct urge to be sick.

  ‘Not now,’ Bholanath had warned him throughout the first week of his induction into the regime. ‘Use your mind to hold back the water. You still have space for at least five sips. Don’t be weak.’

  Tarini wanted to break into tears but couldn’t, simply because his four-year-old chest was being constricted by the unnaturally spherical stomach growing under it.

  ‘One more sip, Tari.’

  After which Bholanath commanded, quietly, that Tarini replicate what he was about to do. Father and son stood up slowly. There was a slight lag between their actions. Bholanath parted his legs, which were long, lanky, with a wooden quality about them. Tarini parted his, which were short, smooth and only slightly more developed than a baby’s. Then the two bent down, gently folding their bodies along their oversized stomachs.

  Tarini’s body wanted to break and he could almost feel the serrated rip-line. He felt he would pop, the way empty newspaper packets of muri burst when they were blown into and punched, hard. He wanted to throw up now, but bending down he couldn’t. What he saw his father do, however, broke whatever barrier existed between his stomach and throat.

  The first day, he was standing in a large pool of his own water-vomit while his father next to him, still bent forward, with bloated stomach and glassy eyes, inserted the index, middle and ring fingers of his right hand into his mouth. Tarini would master it only in the months to come, the tricky part being when the triple point gently touched the end of the tongue where it curled in and descended into utter darkness. His eyes, for the next sixteen years, would bulge at this moment of touch, and the water inside him would come out in regular, clear, tubewell gushes.

  Through this final release, the sun would come up, with the crows in the dusty trees outside looking on. When it was over, Tarini lay down staring at the ceiling for some ten minutes. Do not be weak, the sunshine would say.

  Bholanath insisted that the whole process cleaned the body and the soul. Tarini could only think of his body being turned inside out like a jackfruit after it’s been scooped out and the innards left to dry.

  This is what went through Tarini’s head, to the music of Adela’s shriek, aboard the train travelling from the new Haora station to the village of Bagnan and back.

  But while recollections and memories are all very fine—and I find nothing immoral in seeking them out for ready comfort and cheap strength—it was the present that ate through the bones of Tarini’s future after the deed was done. Edward Quested, horrified by the filthy assault on his daughter by one of his own employees, simply had to take some action. Not wanting to come across as an Englishman in a position of power wreaking vengeance on a native subordinate, he, however, held himself back, helped his daughter Adela stop weeping and clean herself, and decided to take a decision about Tarini Chatterjee the next day.

  The only problem with that course of temporary inaction was that such decisions cannot be made in a calm, collected manner, or be made to wait till the next day. The moment someone had pulled the chain to halt the journey, Edward Quested knew what he would do with Tarini Chatterjee, Chief Scheduler of the East Indian Railway. He was going to relocate him to the Misplaced Baggage Department. He didn’t, even as he shook with shame, want to perpetuate any stereotype.

  Besides, with protests against the partition of the province sprouting all over, one had to be careful these days. Why, only yesterday he had read about the president of the Barisal Conference telling a whole lot of agitated Bengalis, ‘What we could not have achieved in fifty or hundred years, the great disaster, the partition of Bengal, has done for us in six months. Its fruit has been the great national movement known as the Swadeshi movement.’ It would be better, thought Quested, to rein in his anger and tame his shame and not do anything rash against this Chatterjee fellow. Being a Bengali Hindu, he was, in all likelihood, dead against the very practical move to give the blighted Muslim Bengali population a province of their own.

  And what was Mr Chatterjee, Mr Quested’s suddenly very flawed colleague, doing? Tarini was wiping his mouth with a crumpled piece of paper. The copy of The Statesman that he was using for the purpose carried a news report on one of its inside pages: ‘The thirty crores of people inhabiting India must raise their sixty crores of hands to stop this curse of oppression. Force must be stopped by force.’ Quested, of course, would never know of this detail in the newspaper. Neither would Chatterjee.

  But all this did signal the end of the rise of the Chatterjee family under the till-then able guidance of Tarinicharan Chatterjee. It also marked the moment in which Tarini, my father, turned into an unhappy man. From Bholanath to Tarini, from Tarini to Abani, it has been a broken chain. But there must have been points, unknown to all three of us, living apart in our own designated bodies and times, where the links locked, briefly, but long enough to pass on a tic, an impairment, a delusion. As I prepare to tell you about myself, it is imperative that I get that fateful afternoon out of the way.

  Unknown to me, that afternoon signalled the moment when the hidden chains and pulleys of my life cranked into place to make me the motion picture actor that I would ultimately become.

  Acting One’s Age

  When you’re sixteen and you’re grabbed by the shoulders after having just slapped a showcard on a wall that you have no proprietorial rights over, there are two things you can do: run like the wind or start sniffling your way towards adolescent tears. Standing outside Alochhaya Theatre, I did neither. Instead, I widened my eyes, raised my brows, put on a small pout and asked, ‘Something wrong?’

  For the last one year, I had been helping my uncle, my mother’s cousin Shombhunath Lahiri, to expand his horizons in the expanding world of metropolitan entertainment. Shombhu-mama had started out at the Carlton Hotel as an attendant of some sort. Eight years before I was held captive outside a theatre, when my father was still happy and working for the East Indian Railway, Shombhu had landed up from nowhere, his particular nowhere being Krishnagar in Nadia, saying that he was tired of small-town life and ready to find work in the city. Tarini had smirked—which, I was told much later, was his way of welcoming his cousin-in-law to the fold.

  Not more than twenty at the time, Shombhu was yet to be rid of the gleam associated with being too close to nature and too far from real people. He had managed to get a job within a week at the Carlton, the regular haunt of the low-heeled Anglo-Indians—still referred to as ‘Eurasians’ by people in England—who were tired of being held back by natural forces in this blighted country that was only technically also theirs. My mother couldn’t hide her pride when Shombhu, Adam’s apple bouncing, announced five days after he had unpacked his battered trunk, ‘Didi, I’ve got a job at the Carlton!’ This was, after all, her Aunt Ronu’s youngest son.

  So despite my father not being too impressed with having a ‘waiter’ in the house, members of the Chatterjee household were all treated to a special meal that weekend, the highlight of which was a fish-head on every plate, each glassy eye celebrating quietly, and some lip-smacking curd that had to be chased with the tongue as it ran down our wrists.

  But Shombhu-mama didn’t remain a ‘waiter’ for long. He became—it wouldn’t be too great an exaggeration to say this—a man of the theatre.

  The Carlton had made a name for itself with its ‘English theatricals’. Apart from evenings that saw billowing skirts and fluttering fans on a raised stage, there was also the theatre, the difference between theatre and theatricals marked only by a subtle raising and lowering of hysterical behaviour on the st
age as well as below it.

  In places like Alochhaya, Trilochan and the Bengal Theatre House, people thronged to see mostly mythologicals—rotund men in gleaming costumes, their make-up runny with sweat, thundering at women with open hair wailing to everybody’s pleasure. The music was loud and when the shahnais broke into their sonorous, dolorous multiple-sound, the heightened emotions were for all to feel inside the hall. The Carlton, on the other hand, was a place strictly for ‘English plays’. There were neat little comedies about families gone to seed and finding salvation in the end. And dramas about couples finding and losing and finding love again with the painted sets of Covent Garden behind them. Mostly innocent stuff, though the theatrical version of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock did create some sort of ruckus, especially after a complaint that there was an overexposure of female bosoms between Acts 4 and 5. Things quickly returned to normal after the offending women were replaced by others who were carefully selected for their ‘slightly Hindustani looks’.

  Vaudeville filled the gaps between the acts and, quite frequently, the performances were peppered with full-fledged dance routines. A few local favourites such as John Bonham and Jiminy Staid and Henrietta Price had, in fact, made their way into ‘proper theatre’ through their very successful side-acts. Henrietta, for instance, had first been a hit as The Incredible Hoop Girl. The actors were all Anglo-Indian and to all of them Drury Lane and not Barretto’s Lane was the place where they would move to once their preparatory work was done. Only occasionally would there be someone visiting from Home, dropping by for a performance before returning to England.

  This was the world, of small deceptions and small glamour, into which Shombhu gained entry. In his capacity as a stagehand and ‘general duty boy’—moving boxes, moving sets, moving costumes, moving about—at the Carlton he contributed, in his little way, to the cultural richness of the city. He also, finally, began contributing to the family kitty, not least by utilizing his innate talent for endearing himself to total strangers.

  ‘It’s all about categorizing the use of your facial muscles and then using them for specific encounters depending on the person and the occasion,’ he would tell me over a cigarette break during his next job, that of running the projector at the Elphinstone Picture Palace. But more on that later.

  One day in the winter of 1907, while taking off his white-and-maroon uniform (with the embossed letter C curling at the top to the point of resembling the letter e) and preparing to help out with the props for that evening’s performance of The Lady of the Loch, Shombhu crashed into Faith Cooper, the powdered apparition who was, among many other things, the very successful Lady of the Loch. Faith was what was yet to be called a starlet. She had the crowds at the Carlton asking for more. Her stagecalls were legendary and her acting skills apocryphal. But what made everybody go quiet was the way she tilted her head and delivered her lines on stage. She seemed to always come into a scene sideways, like an unnatural but thoroughly pleasing mid-afternoon draught.

  One of Shombhu’s friends told me much later how Faith’s ‘alabaster skin’ and ‘charcoal eyes’ would make him gulp and panic as he stood in the wings or behind the stage. They made his eyes turn heavy, for every blink was a sight of Faith Cooper lost. My uncle would tell me how Miss Cooper, in full costume and breathing gin, would smile at him every time they passed each other. No other actress at the Carlton did that. It was very likely that no other performer at the Carlton knew his name. The two owners, Leslie and Duncan Rosario, the senior stagehands and only a handful of others knew of Shombhu’s existence. But it was Faith who made Shombhu start thinking that maybe there was something more to him than met his eyes.

  Years after he had left the Carlton and entered the projection room at the Elphinstone, Shombhu would still hear her voice in his head. Faith’s low voice, granular like flecks of poppy seeds and glazed with honey, would drown out the piano in the front and the racket from the audience that accompanied the early bioscope shows. It was Faith in her many forms and guises appearing on the screen far away from the projection room, and whiter than she had ever been on stage, who seemed to be speaking to him: ‘Shambolics, look into my eyes and say that you love me. Say it.’ There would be no sound from her giant lips on the screen, of course. But to Shombhu that was the gist of what she said, silently, in the ten-minute shorts, a few seconds before she planted her river-stopping lips on the lips of another man—an act conducted a few seconds after she appeared on the screen.

  Faith had moved on to bioscopes some eight months after Shombhu’s first meeting with her at the Carlton. It was she who had inspired him to try and get some work at the Elphinstone. He had overheard her telling a fellow actor after a show that she had just met a certain J.F. Madan, a man who was venturing out into the new business of motion pictures. He had been a big admirer of hers, and with some movie money coming his way, Madan had expansion plans that went beyond just making shorts. He wanted to make bioscope features, sell them to theatres and have motion picture palaces of his own to screen them in. He also wanted Faith to work only for him.

  Faith thought about it for two days. On the third day, after coming off the stage for what would be the last time, she told the Rosario Brothers, who were seated in two different corners of their modest office on the top floor of the Carlton, of her decision. The brothers scoffed at the idea of moving pictures in confident unison, and Faith responded with a smile and thanked them for giving her time and space at the Carlton.

  ‘Well, at least he’s not a bloody Bengali,’ said Arthur Ashton, who seemed to be still in character as Captain Roerich, a foul-tempered and perpetually sinning slave-trader who finds love and salvation after a chance meeting with the unhappy concubine of a Mysore prince.

  ‘I don’t know about that, Art dahling. But it’s decent money and it’s new. Margaret wrote the other day that everyone’s lining up to see the pictures in the continent,’ Faith replied out of Shombhu’s line of vision.

  That was Shombhu’s great epiphany. After coming out of the storage room into which he had just tucked a serrated piece of cardboard meant to simulate a stormy sea, he stood near Faith’s green room with a wig in his hand, a wig that not more than forty minutes ago had adorned the head of Arthur Ashton. Standing there, imagining Faith on the other side and perhaps not oblivious to his presence, Shombhu was shaking with an excitement he had never felt before. He would later confide to a close friend that he had quivered with what seemed to him like the warmth ‘of a hundred klieg lights’.

  ‘Art dahling,’ Faith said smokily, dreamily, ‘the bioscope is the future, and that’s where I belong. Try and see one if you haven’t gone to the pictures already.’

  Half a year later, Shombhu had left the Carlton and become a Second Assistant Projectionist at the Elphinstone Picture Palace. As a pujo gift that year, he gave me an absolutely fabulous miniature magic lantern, complete with wicker in the middle and the story of the death of Kangsha fluttering all around. To see King Kangsha’s decapitated head flying in a calm, straight horizontal line through space was my first real introduction to moving pictures.

  Unfortunately, Shombhu never did meet Faith Cooper at the Elphinstone. In fact, he didn’t meet her anywhere again. He saw Mr Madan himself—twice, once while he, Shombhu, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs holding a can of lime and letting the great man pass, and the other time as the great man climbed into his automobile before it rolled away. He also saw the other actors and actresses at the Elphinstone, most of the time watching short features with themselves projected in giant, silent, monochromatic forms in front of them. But Faith was never to be seen. Except in projections.

  With his elevation to the position of a full-fledged projectionist in two years, Shombhu-mama would encounter Faith Cooper as Damayanti, as Ratnavali, as Noor Jehan and, in one bioscope, as a dreaded bandit queen. And all the Faiths provided him with the fuel to do his job—which was to sit beside a well-maintained Pathé KOK 28 mm ciné projector and turn the handle
while the pictures flowed unfolding a secondhand life in one seamless action.

  By then, my life was being illuminated by Shombhu-mama and his flickering world of the Elphinstone. It was around the same time that life at home had started to simmer like overheated nitrate in a projector being cranked faster than 16 frames per second just before flaring into crinkly flames.

  After my father’s tragic moment inside the train compartment, his star had started to dip lower and lower. Not only was the new job at the Misplaced Baggage Department of the East Indian Railway not Tarini’s idea of how things should have been at that juncture in his career, but the fact that another male member of the household earned more money than he did had also started to bother him.

  And then there was my presence. That I had been around in his life for some years before the train tragedy did not provide me with any protection from his rapidly darkening days, afternoons, evenings and nights. How could it? As I grew out of infancy, I was turning out to be a full-fledged product of his life after The Downfall. And, worse, I had also started taking up too much of my mother’s attention. While many would consider this particular change of focus to be the result of a sensitive woman protecting herself from an increasingly difficult husband, others (including myself) considered it a natural, maternal realignment of priorities. For my father, however, this was a fundamental betrayal: he was being denied his only audience, the only person who could appreciate his role as the misunderstood man struggling against the degenerate and seditious forces of the world.

  It wasn’t long before I started to associate the sweetly-sick smell that permanently hung about my father with life at home. Tarini, the historically quiet man of moderate sophistication, had turned into a loud-mouthed, inebriated oaf, whose position in life as the head of the Chatterjee family was becoming increasingly perilous. He had become warped and hateful.