Bioscope Man Read online

  ‘Bloody waiter-r-r-r!’

  And his tongue, turned flabby from disaffection, demotion and drink, would continue to produce sharp, consonant-tripping words late into the night.

  This was not the Tarini who had been Chief Scheduler of Trains; the man who had quietly smirked at his wife’s cousin for being a ‘jatra-party’ country bumpkin; the man who had maintained a benevolent dictatorship in the land inhabited by his wife, his son and his late mother, and who had taken pride in the fact that he was firmly on the side of civilization and progress.

  This was a different Tarini who sat in a corner-room of the sprawling East Indian Railway building waiting for people to recover their suitcases, bags, trunks, hold-alls and parasols; a man whose personal schedule had changed now to include a tottering walk to bed each night, sending out a volley of insults to his wife, her cousin and her family. This was a broken Tarini Chatterjee. He was now a new man—a tiresome, flaky drunkard who, if you cared for him, made you wonder how nature allowed such change to come over him. There were evenings when I could hear my father ramble on like a train without a destination, rushing through a landscape that none of us would ever care to see.

  With home becoming increasingly inhospitable even for a young boy who didn’t care much for the world outside, I began to appreciate the virtues of being noticed less and less by the adults of the house. Getting the hang of it after a few months, I was leading a life that few people of my age could ever dream of. Nobody seemed to be watching, and I could do anything at all. It was like being a grown-up without any of the side-effects. Besides, over the last few years I had become acquainted with the flickering world of the bioscope, and this, too, was a defence.

  Shombhu, too, with his Pathé KOK and various avatars of Faith Cooper, was left relatively unscathed by the changes at home. The one person who did, however, find herself looking down the wrong side of an unending pipeline of woes was Shabitri Chatterjee, wife of Tarini Chatterjee, my mother.

  Since the day of my father’s public humiliation, she had tried to make things all right by doing what she was best at: pretending that nothing was wrong. (I have never cared to investigate just how much I have inherited from Shabitri; but I will, at least, acknowledge this talent: If one pretends well enough, chances are that everything will be all right.) Her firm belief in the natural rightness of the world had not been shaken even when my father hadn’t spoken for eight days after that fateful day. (This record was broken when I was seventeen and Tarini kept quiet for fifteen days.)

  On that fateful day of 1906, Shabitri had greeted her husband the way she always did. She took his office bag—a leather satchel that contained a spare handkerchief, a lunch box and the day’s newspaper—and spread out his evening clothes on the bed, to be worn after his evening bath. When Tarini kept sitting upright, ignoring the immediate and important matter of personal hygiene, she asked him how his big day had gone. When she received no answer, she asked him whether he would like some tea. Again, this was something she did every day while he chattered on about his colleagues and the way the country was going to seed.

  With no response forthcoming, she brought him his tea anyway. She took it away some minutes later, not showing any unease at the fact that he had not touched the cup. The next morning, Shabitri woke up, told the maid to start chopping vegetables and proceeded to serve Tarini his morning cup. Cups of tea provide the illusion of variety in life when there is none and a sense of comforting routine when things are falling apart. But for Shabitri, tea had no other function but to activate that prime spot of physical and mental wakefulness: the back of the tongue.

  Tarini left the house, still behaving like a man who had committed a crime and was left unhinged by his own complete lack of guilt. And Shabitri proceeded to attack the day as gently as she did any other day of her life.

  To turn away from life when things are going awry is a talent not applauded or encouraged in this world. Facing up to reality, as if it is better to walk on glowing coals than to sidestep them smartly, has been so vigorously propagated as a virtue that it must surely be the biggest scam the world has ever seen. But even I can see that the dice have been already loaded in the very expression ‘facing up to reality’—a short, diminutive, quivering desire cowering under the shadow of a towering, overweight, real world. And the giant does not tolerate being ignored.

  Shabitri Chatterjee tricked reality on a regular basis. She simply did not give it the attention it was accorded among the rumourmongers, and let nothing unsettle her everyday routines: sipping her tea, tying her hair, fanning the oven smoke, folding her saris. It was not a defiant gesture on her part. To be defiant, one must accept and acknowledge the existence of an oppressive force. She simply denied this force any leg space.

  Take the time she was all set to visit her parents, not too many months after my father’s accident. Everything had been planned from months before. There were the obligatory saris bought for my aunts and for my grandmother, who had also asked her daughter to bring along a framed picture of the Kalighat Kali with her.

  ‘Is that the Kali inside the temple?’ I asked my mother. All I could make out in the small rectangular frame was an unnaturally flattened and elongated pair of eyes, thick red garlands, heaps of ornaments and an oblong heap that had to be the lady’s outstretched tongue. Like the picture of the King Emperor on the wall of Edward Quested’s office that I had heard my father talk about, this picture of Kali was also a hand-painted one.

  As I peered into the reproduction of the widening expanse of godliness, I felt a sharp slap landing on my cheek. My mother had caught me once again digging my nose.

  ‘Give me that, you filthy boy!’

  Shabitri snatched the picture from my hand, touched it to her head and for the umpteenth time told me to refrain from digging my nose once I was in Krishnagar.

  ‘Abani, have you wished your father?’ my mother asked me after the luggage had been loaded on to the phaeton and we were climbing down the stairs.

  ‘He isn’t back from office yet.’

  ‘Yes, well, yes, of course. All right then …’ she let her voice trail behind me on the staircase.

  Gopal was there to see us to the station. After passing on instructions to her household deputy, Abala, my mother entered the carriage, after the suitcases and me. Just before the horses started to move, she added an extra ‘Dugga’ to the valedictory ‘Dugga-Dugga’ while knocking a couple of quick pranams on her forehead. That my father had been behaving very unlike himself for the past one month and that we were leaving him behind with Abala and Gopal did not seem strange. What sounded odd was my mother’s very uncharacteristic triple Duggas. Three shaliks brought bad luck. I wondered whether there was also such a rule about uttering three Duggas.

  As we edged closer towards the station, the carriage slushing its way along the waterlogged streets of Cossitola and beyond, it became clear from Gopal’s complaints from behind the carriage that some mysterious forces were at play trying to keep my mother away from her ‘beloved Rani-di and Parama’. Sure enough, my mother had been recognized by a man who emerged from inside the station to meet and escort her and her son to the train. Even before Gopal got down to unload the suitcases and trunks, the man said, ‘Terrible downpour, Mrs Chatterjee. I’m afraid all the trains have been cancelled. The train to Nadia hasn’t even arrived here yet. And it was supposed to come in an hour and a half ago.’

  I noticed that the man’s sympathetic look from under his umbrella went beyond apologizing for the pouring rain and cancelled trains. Were it not for the fact that the rain had already wet his face, I could have sworn he was going to break into tears looking at the two of us still inside.

  So we slushed our way back home, luggage, steaming horses and all.

  In other families, Shabitri Chatterjee would have been considered an exceptionally patient woman, taking the world for what it was and not what it should be. But she was no stoic in a sari. It was again her genius for being in denial th
at made her continue that day as if nothing untoward had happened. After she had unpacked and settled down at home, she simply made herself believe that she hadn’t planned the journey to Krishnagar at all.

  I noted one change, though. My mother stopped noticing my continued efforts to mine my nasal passage. It turned out to be the last day she ever complained about my filthy habit.

  But there are times the real world takes grievous offence when it is not even glanced at. Quite clearly, Shabitri’s approach to handling calamities worked only to a point. Among other things, it did not prevent Tarini coming home from the Misplaced Luggage Department with a much whittled down fund of patience with each passing day. And she bore the brunt of it. Tarini’s impatience was never directed at me. It couldn’t be. For he got to see me less and less, confining himself to his room after returning from work.

  The changes at home also provided me with the happy opportunity of missing school with increasing regularity until, one day, I stopped going altogether. Fantastically, once again, it was a matter of people not noticing my absence: my mother had already been told by the school that my presence in the classroom was causing a problem for other students. The changes at home, however, had some less happy consequences as well—the business, for instance, of relieving two of our three servants. Gopal and Keshto had to go. The rotund-but-reedy-voiced Abala stayed on, despite years of complaints from my mother (and, before her, my grandmother) about the quality of her clothes-washing.

  It was the final descent into a semi-spartan life that would ultimately signal the next cataclysmic event in the House of Chatterjee. It had been two and a half years since my father’s unfortunate metamorphosis, and while my mother tried to maintain some semblance of dignity in the house, the wear and tear had started to show. Physically. It was an old house, and now it had decided to mirror Tarini’s decline.

  Yet, since this is a world in which sons pick up the art of survival not from their fathers but their mothers, I continued to urinate straight into the lane overlooking my bedroom window, didn’t stop digging my nose, kept hanging out with those friends of mine whose only concern seemed to be to wage war against diphtheria-friendly street cats. Nothing needed to change.

  We carried on—Shombhu-mama, my mother and I—making sure that nobody was unduly crumpled by Tarini’s long and rapid degeneration into something that was no longer Tarini Chatterjee. That is, until the Other Downfall. It took place on December 22nd, 1908, three days after my thirteenth birthday.

  To see the most startling landscapes within our house, one had to visit the rooftop where garbage of a generation and a half had gathered in a corner, mixing up the decades as if time wasn’t a clean creature that walked in an impeccable straight line but a messy, slothful beast that shifted according to its growing weight. Pieces of ancient clay ovens mingled with door frames suffering from painful skin diseases; piles of old papers curled in bulk; metallic bits of lamps of various vintage; broken limbs of dolls; and foliage—if you can call carpets of moss foliage. All busy eating each other up in a slow-motion beggar’s banquet.

  The other place one had to see was our bathroom. It was a cavern on the first floor, a massive room that lost any sense of being held together by a ceiling and walls the moment it was illuminated. And it was illuminated, during day as well as night, by a single kerosene lantern that threw shadows across the walls, shadows like live things made of expanding and contracting gas. The door could be shut from the inside by a heavy wooden bar whose real function was to keep natural light and humanity at bay. Closest to this door was an ever-dripping tap that kept the floor permanently wet. The walls that seemed to be lost in the distance had no distinct colour. But in the unflickering light of the lantern, they did take on a hue, and one hue only: the dark, viscous shade that colours the inside walls of old people’s veins.

  Each time I entered the huge wet room that ricocheted darkness, I was no longer in a world inhabited by family, friends, nose gunk, theatre, or the bioscope. This was a dark temple dedicated to the individual, a place where I stopped being anyone else but myself—that is, the chap who orders my thumb to wiggle when I want it to and it complies. I, in that bathroom of ours, had no father, mother or name. It was one stop away from being everyone else but myself.

  Myself, Abani Chatterjee, could give way to any other person—anyone I chose to be. Without a mirror in the room, it was actually easier to become Warren Hastings with a nasal voice, Lord Krishna with supple wrists, Tipu Sultan with a mechanical neck—why, even Tarini Chatterjee—than to remain myself. In that bathroom, I was other people.

  At the far end of the room, attached to the wall, was an open tank where water was stored for the express purpose of bathing. How this water differed from the variety that came out of the tap, I had no idea. But no one in their right mind mixed the two. Across this tank, seemingly miles away, was The Hole.

  With two dirty red bricks as pedestals, this was where one unburdened oneself. Looking into the orifice as one crouched, one would have guessed that it led to the centre of the earth. But more than connecting our surface world to a subterranean lava-spewing landscape, The Hole was a short cut to a dark, noisy underworld. As I hung on my haunches suspended between the state of being Abani and me, I would ponder about how the denizens of that underworld were already acquainted with bits that emanated from my body—forgetting, of course, that other members of the Chatterjee household also visited the bathroom.

  And then there was Rajlakkhi. She came in every day to clean the two bathrooms in the house. (The smaller one was attached to Shombhu-mama’s room. After my grandmother’s death, that one was modernized and equipped with a chain-flush mechanism.) About a year after my father’s accident, Rajlakkhi had huffed and puffed and left. She had been demanding a raise for over a year and my mother had actually agreed. But with my father’s condition and my family’s state, keeping the promise had been impossible. Since her departure, it had been Abala’s job to do the needful. Unfortunately, despite the radical gesture of allowing the person who helped my mother in the household and the kitchen to also clean the bathrooms, Abala had never specialized in the demanding art of bathroom-cleaning. She was not from ‘that kind of family’. And soon, the effects of human negligence and the lack of specialized talent and generational skill began to tell on the larger, darker bathroom.

  A wet surface that sees no sunlight is the ideal place for moss to thrive and grow in. With no virile sweeping of the bathroom floor with the necessary weapons of choice—a crust-destroying coconut stick broom and liberal doses of ash—the floor of the bathroom had become a slippery, treacherous terrain. With Shabitri’s mind and energy occupied elsewhere, no one noticed the danger signs.

  Shabitri Chatterjee had gone into the bathroom early one morning with the same untrained confidence with which sleepwalkers walk in their sleep. She had swung the wooden bar across the door, barely hearing the regular clunk of wood on wood confirming total privacy. She was unfurling her yellow sari with the green border that was remarkably resistant to getting crushed, when she realized that she had left her keys behind in the bedroom. The bunch of keys was tied in a sari-knot, and each time she moved from one sari into another, she transferred the metal bundle. There were the rare moments when they came untied, but such separation happened only in bed, sometime between her going to sleep and waking up the next day.

  Shabitri shouldn’t, therefore, have felt overtly concerned about the whereabouts of her keys, for she would have known where they would be. And yet a stubborn discomfort made her re-furl her sari that morning so that she could fetch the keys and return to her routine. Of course, she needed to be covered decently first. With a tight tug and a sharp tuck-in near her waist, she walked the short distance to the bathroom door ready to unlatch the block of wood from its wooden catch.

  There must have been some form of impatience in her gait that transported her up to the closed door. For, even before she fell, the back of her head rushing forward to meet the groun
d, she felt her body swing and rise like milk left to boil an instant too long on the coal-stove. Interestingly, what she never registered at all was her left foot landing on a grinning patch of moss. This slip, for the lack of a better word, pushed her body weight along the side of one heel and scooped her up in the manner that the air in a corridor is sucked up by a midsummer storm. What took place behind the unclasped door of the bathroom was gravity’s victory over my mother’s body.

  In medieval Rajasthan, women would announce the arrival of the bodies of their battle-slain men with loud ululations, not unlike the tongue-clicking, full-throated sounds made in this city to announce the arrival of a bridegroom before the actual wedding ceremony takes place. The morning that Shabitri fell inside the bathroom and hit her head on the wet-yet-firm floor, there was no noise apart from a loud thud. People could have been forgiven for not paying any attention to this sound, for it was too early in the morning for either curiosity or concern. And after that thud, there was no further sound. Shabitri had passed out, and she had passed on to a dark and dry place.

  It was only hours later, much after Abala had blinked herself to wide wakefulness and had stoked the cooking fire, made her first cup of tea and was taking the cup to the lady of the house, that she noticed something amiss. Shabitri would, by this time, be awake and out of the bathroom. She would have been walking about the courtyard in a new starch-nibbled sari, her hair loose. Except, she wasn’t walking, sitting or standing anywhere.

  Abala peeked through the grills of the half-opened bedroom window. Tarini was still sleeping, his body barely visible through the grey mist of the mosquito net. Placing the cup of tea on the balcony floor, Abala walked towards the bathroom. One small push on the door made it apparent that Shabitri was still inside.