Bioscope Man Page 4

  ‘Didi, your tea is ready. Will you be long?’ she asked.

  There was no answer.

  When Tarini got up, he noticed the tea meant for Shabitri waiting patiently on the floor, wrinkles shivering on its surface.

  ‘Where’s Bou-di?’ he asked, as he pulled off the coir knot around the rolled copy of The Statesman that the newspaper man had, only a few minutes ago, hurled on to the balcony that faced the street. Tarini would leave the house in an hour. And yet, there was no sign of Shabitri.

  ‘Oof, isn’t she out yet? She was in the bathroom when I woke up. She hasn’t even had her tea.’ Abala went to the bathroom door again and this time, with her face pasted on the door, loudly said, ‘Bou-di, your tea has gone cold. And Bor-da is up.’

  No answer.

  By then, I was up and, with gummy eyes, dead-walked towards the bathroom. Only to find it locked. Very soon, Abala was thumping her bangles-jangling wrists against the door. Tarini, despite what liquor and shame had done to him, was still a man whose husbandly concerns had not completely vanished.

  ‘Listen. Open the door. Are you listening? Open the door, Shabitri!’ he spoke loudly. This was the first time in my life I heard my father address my mother by her name. It was also the last.

  I was told to go upstairs and tell Shombhu-mama, a late riser, to come down. This was not going to be an ordinary day. The fact that people were getting worried and increasingly agitated was exciting. If there was concern, it was not shared by me. For all I could think of was, ‘This, Abani, is not an ordinary day.’ By the time I knocked on Shombhu-mama’s door, I was wide awake, bursting with an energy that made me feel as if I was sitting watching a theatre performance being staged just for me.

  I took the opportunity of being inside Shombhu-mama’s room to empty my bladder in his twentieth-century bathroom that, despite being easier to navigate, felt strangely out of place in a house like ours. It was while I was still in this room, the sound of my cascading urine hitting various inclines inside the European-style toilet bowl, that I heard the ululation. It was Abala’s long, high-pitched tongue-scream that I had heard and continued to hear.

  The bathroom door had been forced open. (The screws that held the brackets on which the two ends of the wooden bar had rested from inside had been uprooted by the joint action of the two men of the house.) And immediately afterwards Abala had screamed. Those who have seen that famous scene in Rajat Biswas’s Sita at the Malcha Theatre, in which Lakshman (played ludicrously by Balaram Saha) slices the nose of femme fatale Surpanakha (Champa Rani), would have recognized the scream.

  I buttoned my pant front and rushed downstairs, peering through the railings of the staircase. Even at that moment on the stairs, I was seeing myself as I would appear to a viewer. I was playing the role of a young boy who was about to discover that his mother had slipped in the bathroom and died.

  All the people in the house seemed to be moving in too fast. There was something comic about the whole proceedings, in which no one was behaving like adults at all. It was only after the incoming clanging of the ambulance bells had changed to outgoing rings, long after the two men towing my mother’s inert body had disappeared into the black carriage—with a white cross on either side and pulled by two hyperactive horses—that I came to know what had happened. My mother had fallen down and lost consciousness. She wasn’t, as the script had had it, dead. Like after the mysterious devastation that was reported across vast tracts in Siberia six months before, life continued beyond the Chatterjee household’s second major debacle.

  Although no one said it out loud that day or ever after, it was quite clear that there would be a radical change in lifestyle for my mother. As with all other things, there had been a cause that had led to this effect. If you wanted to look at it in a different way, there had been an effect which, when retraced to its origin, led to a particular cause. No one had been tending to the bathroom properly since the departure of Rajlakkhi, the patron saint of bathrooms. The floor had been, for quite some time now, all set to be the venue of a tragedy. And why had Rajlakkhi left? Because she never got her promised raise. And why hadn’t she been given her raise? Because in the beginning was a demoted Tarini Chatterjee.

  It was odd to find myself in the quietness that had suddenly descended on our house after my mother’s fall. This increasing quietness was dexterously balanced by the growing loudness outside the house in the city. Every second day there was news of some ‘action’ that had occurred in some part of town. The seditionists, it seemed, were becoming fearless to the point of making life for ordinary people hazardous. More than once in the stillness of my room in the evening, I had heard loud reports. Whether they were crackers being burst or gunshots being fired or bombs going off, I could not tell. They do, at a distance, sound the same.

  The city’s loudness and our household’s quietness reached their individual culminations two years after my mother’s accident. We got to hear on December 13—I remember the day as I was telling Bikash that I didn’t want another bloody buttonless jumper from my parents for my birthday which was six days away—that it had been announced by the King Emperor at the durbar the previous day that the country’s capital was upping and leaving our city for Delhi. Everyone was aghast. The city would revert to its original form—a cluster of villages and a lot of brackish river water. My father’s copy of The Statesman had reacted with uncharacteristic rage: ‘The British have gone to the city of graveyards to be buried there.’ Strange, considering the paper was run by Englishmen.

  The people whose presence defined my presence—Jadab, the perpetually sweating sweet-maker at the Narayan Mishtanna Bhandar; Ram Bahadur, the towering gateman at Alochhaya; Bikash and Rona, the two mates of mine with whom I spent most of my waking hours—all of them had become crabby. Already, it had started feeling like village life.

  ‘I still don’t understand what was wrong with this city,’ said Shombhu-mama a few weeks later, shaking out the contents lying at the bottom of an oil-stained paper packet. So even he didn’t know why the city had been given the snub. I asked him whether the move meant that this city would now turn into a mosquito-infested hick town.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ he snapped. ‘All I know is that there was a durbar and the King Emperor had come. But more importantly, Mr Charles Urban was there, in bloody Delhi, and he returned to America without setting foot in this city. Do you think I care two hoots about the King Emperor or where the Government chooses to have its offices? It’s Mr Urban whom I was interested in. And now he’s gone! Gone, gone, gone!’

  I had no idea what he was ranting on about.

  ‘He was supposed to come to this city with his spanking new Kinemacolor camera-projector. I’ve heard about the machine from Mr Madan himself, and if there’s any truth to what’s being talked about in America, the Kinemacolor will be like nothing else that’s around.’

  ‘Like what? Will his bioscope make motion pictures with songs and sound like in gramophones?’ I said, hoping not only that the bioscope would catch up with the theatre on that front (how much of that three-violin, percussion and shahnai orchestra that had nothing to do with what was being played out on the screen could one take?) but also that my show of interest would make Shombhu-mama temporarily forget about his disappointment.

  ‘No, you idiot! What do you need songs in bioscopes for? The Kinemacolor means colour! Mr Madan was excited about Gregory Mantle coming from England with his Warwick Bioscope Model B to photograph the durbar on film. Phaa! But that’s because Mr Madan is more interested in doing biz-niz with a friend of the president of the Durbar Committee than thinking about real motion pictures. The real man to meet is Charles Urban who’s already left the country. And I was supposed to meet him. And did I? No, I didn’t. And what does that leave me with? Cranking the handle at the Elphinstone where we’ll be stuck with Lumiere technology till the end of time. Hell! Maybe it is time for me to move and join Bikash Mukherjee and Bhobothesh Sinha in Bombay.’


  Shombhu went on to deliver a small lecture about how the Kinemacolor, with its red and green filters and 32 frames-a-second speed, would turn picture palaces across the world into spectacles of real colour—‘more colourful than real colour!’ He had started moaning about how he had been all set to make that jump from projectionist to photographist when someone decided that the capital of the country needed shifting. Which, of course, meant important personages like the mysterious Mr Urban not bothering to drop by our city and meet my uncle Shombhunath Lahiri.

  I knew that the capital was being moved because the Europeans were tired of the heat, the wet heat, of this city that drains out the spirit from the body the way the early sun sucks out the darkness from the night sky. Even I knew, courtesy that Bengali classic about Rajputana kings, Raj Kahini, that North India was continuously bathed in a dry heat during summers and a dry chill during winters. But then, for King Emperor George, holding a durbar in the middle of scorched earth that knows no wetness in the air—and then dragging the capital there—must have been the Mughal thing to do.

  But there was another debacle added to the smaller one that involved the transfer of the capital. The doctor had told my father and uncle glumly a week after my mother returned from the hospital that she wouldn’t be able to walk again. In fact, barring involuntary movements inside her body, she was going to be as stationary as the head of a cauliflower lying at the bottom of a pile of cauliflowers in a Saturday wholesale market. She had suffered a severe injury to the base of her spine, and a full-time person would have to take care of her needs night and day. The hapless Abala would be forced to add yet another responsibility to her professional life.

  ‘It’s all God’s will,’ Dr Talukdar had said while shutting his bag and shuffling towards the door. The doctor was a short man with round spectacles and a brush moustache. Behind the glasses were eyes that appeared to be buried miles inside his face, the way faraway trees appear to be far away. My father had seen him to the door, oblivious of the fact that the good doctor had twirled his nose after detecting the odour of something stronger than the wet moss and after-food sediments growing in the untended courtyard.

  So what, you might ask—conditioned to reading those modern European novels that are so popular these days—did I feel seeing my mother now forever confined to her bed? Or, for that matter, finding my father wrap himself in an even thicker haze than before? I could tell you that my life snapped into two. Or that I was thrown into the rough sea of chop-chop misery. Or that it made me suddenly see that I was now horribly alone, left to fend for myself against a walls-collapsing-on-me world.

  But why should I want to con you into believing that? In any case, that would be too arm-flailing, too throat-quaking for me. The truth is that I was liberated. It was as if the very pure relationship that I had with myself, all this while confined to the four melting walls of the cavernous bathroom, was now about to extend itself limitlessly, gobbling up everything in its path. Not only was everyone in the house too busy, too harried, too tied down—or in the case of my father, too far gone—to take notice of me, but there was also the fear of more tragedies coming that made everyone more accommodating towards one another.

  I saw my mother from time to time. She would have her eyes opened and closed by Abala. Not a muscle under her sari (changed every day once in the morning before lunch and once in the evening after shondhi had been conducted with its accompanying wafts of incense) stirred. Only if you squinted your eyes and concentrated hard enough would you have been able to detect the tiniest movements of her chest. But even that was like noting the movement of the hour hand on the clockface at Maniktala crossing.

  I cared for her. But I cared for her in my quiet, no-need-to-cross-her-path way. What I did feel was pity. Children don’t pity their parents, not at that age. I am sure, though, that I did feel sorry for my mother. But my concern—a by-product of my unnatural sense of pity—was buttressed by the fact that life is a solitary action when it comes to the actual business of living it.

  To put it less melodramatically, I suddenly found that I could do anything, anything at all that I wished. All I had to do was hide any visible signs that I was not in any one else’s control any more. People don’t like it when the young are not beholden to the old. That was when I understood (like my mother, you ask? well, perhaps) that pretending—and pretending well—can give one power, a power that by its very nature should not be flaunted.

  Another beneficial feature of my mother’s unhappy condition and my father’s continuing ascent to the world of ether was that I actually got the most believable answer to why our city was no longer the country’s capital. One day, I was slurping water—and listening to the slurp—after a hectic round of ruleless football, when I heard my father singing completely out of tune, ‘My life flows over the riverbed …’, a rendition which made me snort a bit of water up my nose. I moved closer to his room, still feeling the aquatic sting in my nose and eyes, trying to see without being seen whether my new interest in my father was worth it or not. Much later, as a bioscope actor, I learnt to perform in a way that took advantage of no one else being able to see me. Of course, there were fellow actors next to me and crew members milling all around. But there wasn’t any real viewer near me. There wasn’t any ticket-paying public whose presence I would have to endure. That day, though, creeping towards a singing father, I was not yet adept in the art of turning invisible. Tarini saw me.

  ‘Abani, is that you? What are you up to, huh? You better go and tell your mother not to wait up for me. And I’ve quit. No more looking after other people’s bloody luggage! There may be a bloody waiter in this house, but there sure isn’t a coolie! Just as well they’ve shifted the bloody capital. These bloody seditious fools are going to drive this city to the gutters anyway. You think that those bloody no-gooder gutterollas have anything better to do? I’ll bet my last bottle of honey that that Shombhu is also in it! Isn’t he? Tell me, boy, he is, isn’t he? He bloody well is. You also plotting with him, eh, Abani? Eh? You want to change the world, don’t you?’

  I slipped out of the house, to sit on the rock where a few men were sipping tea and talking about—what else?—the transfer of the capital and the Reunification. (‘It was Curzon’s plan to destroy us Bengalis. Minto, and after him this Hardinge, they all knew that even before they set foot in this country.’) Jadab, I could see, was twirling jilipis on to a crackling pan a few metres away, perhaps fearing that a large section of his clientele would now shift to a northern city where the sand and dust get into your teeth and eyes.

  I had always planned that one day I would tell Jadab the bitter truth about the Bengali sandesh and rosogolla. What Jadab and millions of people in this city believed to be the defining creation of Bengaliness—their sweets—was actually an import, handed down to us by the Dutch architects who built the church in Bandel. German pot cheese, a coarse kind of cottage cheese, was the magic ingredient that the Dutch had handed down to Jadab’s ancestors. Without them, he would still have been making sweets out of boiled sugar and we would have been munching them. I would have told him that day at the rock, after fleeing my father’s song, what I had once learnt from Tarini. But I haven’t ever bothered to spread the truth. So forgive me if I refrained from saying it to the owner of our local sweetshop in that gravely passionate year of 1910.

  After weeks of suppressed curiosity and having nothing more exciting to do, I decided to pay my mother a visit. It had been quite a while since I had actually crossed the threshold of Shabitri’s room. I moved quietly, believing that when a person cannot move, her thoughts and faculties become keener, magnified to the point of being able to hear the din of a fly wiping its face with its legs.

  You are perfectly right to ask why, as her only child, I hadn’t visited my mother more often. The only reason I can think of is the one I have mentioned in passing before: I wasn’t unduly upset by her condition. Such behaviour in a boy of sixteen would strike one as unnatural. But like Shabitri, I knew
that unpleasantness doesn’t really go away; it needs to be quietly side-stepped. Perhaps I found it too hard to pretend that my mother was not as she had always been. Maybe I had found only one solution: not to see her. I insulated myself. That’s the only explanation I can think of now to defend myself from any charge of filial unnaturalness. I didn’t come up with this solution by careful, cunning planning. I was too young for such carefully wrought thinking. It came naturally, like the instinct that made me shut my eyes every time Rona playfully conducted the chupki, the classic double entendre, the traditional visual pun which suggested that it could go either way: a head-slap coming your way, or just a person smoothening his hair. But you always close your eyes.

  So what made me keep my eyes open and make that journey to my mother’s room that day?

  ‘Poor, poor boy,’ Rona and Bikash’s mother had said as she was pouring water on my food-stained hands. I had just enjoyed a hearty Sunday breakfast and Rona had already gone upstairs to get the carrom board out from under his bed in preparation for a full-fledged, first-to-twenty-nine-points match.

  ‘Abani, you mustn’t break down now. We’re all here, aren’t we, Bikash?’

  Her elder son was standing behind me and waiting for his turn to wash his hands. He didn’t know what to say. The last match had been close with the final score being 29-23. Rona, the best carrom player among the three of us, had been one team playing both ends of the board, while Bikash and I formed the losing side. Both Bikash and I were itching for payback time. But clearly, not everyone read the stress marks on my face as a keenness for revenge on the matchboard.

  ‘Shabitri was … is a fine woman. Finding a mother like that is so difficult. But what’s happened has already happened. It’s fate …’ she said before she turned away from us.