Bioscope Man Read online

‘Ma, will you pour the water please?’

  The breakfast had not lulled Bikash into forgetting the earlier defeat.

  As I wiped my hands dry on the end of Bikash’s mother’s sari, I felt that maybe there was something on my face that suggested a sorrow that I didn’t acknowledge, a secret that was leaking despite what I thought I thought. I touched my mouth to check whether there was some freak tug of nerves pulling my face downwards. It felt normal—cheeks that had not yet lost their puppy fat, lips that were growing thicker because of my excessive whistling and two rows of teeth that fitted each other only when I consciously closed my mouth and thereby forced myself to breath through the nose.

  Which is when I felt that maybe—just maybe—there was something not right in me behaving as if nothing had happened. It didn’t matter what I really felt—or in this case, did not feel. It would be right for me to behave a bit differently. It was time to bring on the sadness. If nothing else, I would just go to see how she looked and come out again like circulating air.

  So after the carrom match (we lost again) and before dropping by Shombhu-mama’s room in the evening, I went into my room and in front of the mirror attached to the almirah practised the look I should have when I visited my vegetable mother. My eyes, bulbous, just short of being goitrous, needed to glisten and look the part. The eyes are, after all, the windows to the soul, the veranda of the heart, the courtyard of the spleen, the attic of the bile, the collapsible gate of dreams. As Valentino knew best, the eyes have it.

  It is actually quite hard to make one’s eyes water. This was something I hadn’t reckoned with until that moment. But how hard could it be? All I had to do was stare long enough without blinking. But that wouldn’t do. I had to look the part when I was inside my mother’s room.

  I approached the room, already feeling a medium-sized wave of sorrow riding upwards. It was that time of the day when the afternoon spills over to the evening—the crows crowing, the sky growing pale, a more accessible version of dawn. It was that time when everyone’s guard is down, whatever one’s guard of choice is.

  There was someone else apart from my mother in the room. It wasn’t Abala. Standing at the door behind the curtain-partition that had seemed pointless till that moment, I could see a short man with round spectacles and a brush moustache. He was facing my mother who was lying there and staring up at the ceiling. His face flashed once before me as he turned to shut his bag in the same manner he would have if asked to snap the mouth of a crocodile shut. Behind his glasses were eyes that appeared to be miles inside his face, the way faraway trees appear to be far away.

  I stood behind the curtain and the door, choosing a vertical pathway of sight to see Dr Talukdar bend over my mother’s face, pull himself up again, quickly look towards the door and then run his healthy pink stub of a tongue across my mother’s cheek and mouth. He did it slowly once. The second time it was faster, a lizard in slow motion. Barring parts of her face subsiding and rising again in the wake of the pressure applied by the doctor, not a muscle or bone moved in Shabitri’s body.

  My heart shrank and was instantly travelling in my blood stream. I didn’t know how to react to my mother being suddenly a part of somebody else’s physical life. I crossed over and went into my room and waited for the man to leave. I heard him call for Abala, and after not more than five minutes, he was seen to the main door—which wasn’t really a door at all but a gate that pretended to keep the outside away from the inside, and the Chatterjee household from spoiling the world outside.

  I then found myself sitting next to my mother, Shabitri Chatterjee, her face uniformly moist from the general but mild heat. This act of sitting beside her strangely provided me relief as I looked at the jumble of cans and bottles of medication that sat there next to the lamp on the bedside table. Looking beyond the twin-framed picture of Ramakrishna-Ma Sharada that had been thoughtfully placed near my mother, I looked at her.

  Then I found it—the look of being stricken with sadness. Gently he came, the negligent son, the uncaring offspring, the only child who was prancing about town kicking a football, flicking carrom pieces while his mother couldn’t even wiggle a mosquito away if it sat on her cheek and drained her of blood.

  My mother kept breathing as she had been breathing since that day in the bathroom—so invisibly that one would mistake her for dead. I sat there for some fifteen minutes and then returned to being the Abani Chatterjee I was more accustomed to being. I spoke not a word about Dr Talukdar to anyone, not even Shombhu-mama, whom I listened to with rapt attention as he earnestly talked about using the motion pictures to show things that could never be shown elsewhere.

  ‘People and things moving, appearing, disappearing, dissolving in ways that can’t be seen anywhere else but just imagined.’

  Listening to Shombhu, it didn’t sound like the bioscope would quickly become a fantastic form of theatrical performance. It sounded like the bioscope was going to be the fantasy.

  My Fair Ladies

  The bioscope caught me by the scruff of my neck long before I even cared for it. Being born in the same year as the motion pictures, I always looked upon it as a kind of sibling with our accompanying rivalry. I was impressed, more by Shombhumama’s bioscope stories (Faith Cooper, cameras, how to count when you’re shooting, apertures, drying rooms, the latest motor-driven Debrie perforators, etc.) than by the actual experience of sitting with a hallful of people watching the phantoms in front and half-hearing the whirring from the back.

  But in a way that I still find hard to explain, the bioscope started to turn into something new, something that was becoming more and more young as it got older. It was so different from everything else that was there. I knew that the public pretended very successfully that theatre and jatra transported them to a heightened world, where people spoke in a ridiculous way and shouted when they had to speak, shrieked when they had to shout. This was considered to be absolutely normal, the abnormality of it all.

  As the years rolled by, the bioscope started becoming something more than just a sophisticated version of picture shows in travelling tents. It went beyond watching the black-and-white moving images of places where one would never go, of occasions that one could never witness. Beyond the goggle of it all was something else that the ‘Living Photographic Wonder’ provided for me: enactments that couldn’t be real were it not for the fact that we were actually seeing these impossible actions. And, above all, as we became more familiar with the bioscope, the bioscope became more and more modern.

  Even a crusty, middle-aged, hydrocele-affected ogre like Nirmal-babu next door couldn’t help but change into something quite un-Nirmal-babu-like when he returned from the bioscope after seeing a decapitation, followed by the severed head floating mid-air, supported simply by the sheer slow gush of a dark gas coming out of the neck. The dark gas was bioscope blood.

  He had gone to the Athena three days in a row, watching the same scene and dropping his jaw each time during the momentous sequence. I was there sitting between his two sons the second time Nirmal-babu watched the climactic scene of The Death of Kangsha. The flying disc that sped across the scene was wobbling. But the levitating head was the most precise, steady movement I had seen in the world. It was far more remarkable than the scene of Kangsha losing his head in the magic lantern that Shombhu-mama had gifted me not long before this.

  The Death of Kangsha is not considered to be the first feature made in this country simply because it was made by a German along with Indians trained in art direction, stage production and the motion picture science in Berlin. The British wouldn’t allow a German to go down in the record books as the man who made the first Indian bioscope. That honour would have to go to some Bombay stooge with whom the authorities did business and would later ask for help in their numerous propaganda exercises. The fact that no print of The Death of Kangsha has survived tells its own story. As does the fact that no biography or book or magazine on cinema has any mention of Shombhunath Lahiri. Even as an adole
scent I could make out that there were many more sinister things taking place in the country than the shifting of a capital.

  If it weren’t for Shombhu Lahiri’s chest-first dive into the world of bioscopes, I would have been, at best, an enthusiastic clapper, hooter, cheerer, ruckus-meister joining in with the rest of them in a dark room bisected by a widening sliver of silver that was constantly being fed by cigarette smoke, freed from the usual constraints of babble from a theatre stage and captured by the spectacle before us. This spectacle was far too real to have come from this world.

  As real as Shombhu-mama was in my life and in the world of bioscopes. And yet, I admit that it is odd, odd to the point of worry, how I don’t have a single picture of his. I do recall seeing his face, gaunt and moustached, in group photographs. But where are those pictures? If I didn’t know better, I would excuse you for thinking he didn’t even exist. But as I said, I do know better, and Shombhu-mama was there at the beginning. It’s the end—and any real signs of his presence—that’s missing. Who knows, maybe you’ll come up with something and let me know.

  But back then at the picture place I was led to stare at the appearance of dancing girls out of the blue over a grey-and-white fire; frantically read the fleeting title cards explaining why a girl was silently shrieking as she was being bricked away from the world outside; follow each phantom frame of raging battle scenes where being impaled didn’t mean gaudy actors sticking spear-ends into the hollows of their armpits and giving out comic death-sighs. I was made to see with wonder a man who, on realizing that he can’t afford the cake he has just consumed, proceeds to bring it out one spoon at a time and place the de-eaten cake back on the plate to be taken back by a dainty, slightly cross waitress.

  As we aged with the bioscope, both Rona and Bikash saw quite a few of those longer features depicting the lives of nationalist criminals, mythological brawlers and the heroes of our time, Khudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki and the rest of them. These bioscopes were, of course, never mentioned in the programme lists lest the censors make an appearance. Instead, they were tucked in between Fatty Arbuckle, Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin shorts; or after a bioscope about a train ride through a tunnel (in which a very proper lady is seen sitting next to a gentleman before the screen goes black for a few seconds, and then is seen all ruffled up and improper when the train and the audience pull out of the darkness again); or right at the end of moving pictures depicting the ‘adventures’ of far-flung lands like Egypt, Russia and Greenland. But after the few times of seeing them, these clandestine features turned out to be thoroughly boring.

  For me were the raucous Babylonian orgies (with tigers lolling about the frame like arrogant servants); the ‘informative movie pictures’ depicting the various stages of drunkenness captured in five fade-ins and five fade-outs; the bioscopes about bandits and demon kings; and, of course, shorts depicting the various ways in which a body can behave outside the realm of the real world (a favourite: a girl looking straight at us and inviting us to follow her on her trek along the walls and ceiling of a room).

  Like the jatra people, the figures inhabiting this flickering, heavy-black-heavier-white world were not of this world. But this was a place that the world should have been, rather than the apologetic version that we inhabited. It was a world that I should have been inhabiting: a physically real dream that didn’t fill itself up with silly day-to-day details like accompanying Abala to the market, or waiting for the bathroom to be free, or spending minutes answering pointless questions asked by Rona and Bikash’s inquisitive mother. Ordinary life killed.

  ‘You think that all this is what really happens when we have bad dreams?’ Bikash had once asked after we returned from an afternoon show. In the feature, a disturbed sleeper in front of a bedroom mirror splits into four women—one, her prone body lying blissfully as if she was dead; two, the reflection of her prone body in the mirror, tossing and turning as if she was possessed; three, a translucent twin above the resting figure floating and swaying like some white seaweed in sea; four, the reflection of this floating phantom looking straight at the audience, leaving my blood frozen in my veins.

  ‘Of course not,’ I had replied. In my head I had added, ‘But that’s why the world is so b-o-r-i-n-g.’

  I have to admit that by ‘the world’ at the time I did mean what was, by default, home.

  Talking of home, I wonder if I have misled you—it is important that we get the setting—the location, the backdrop—just right. If I have given you the impression that the Chatterjee household was an old-world mansion that became increasingly decrepit only after my father’s swift slide into a different kind of other-world than depicted in bioscopes, then I have presented a flawed picture. For one, there was not a single mansion on the lane where the Chatterjee house stood with its many legs spread out. This was no Jorasanko or Marble Palace. Not unless you had the impressive imagination to convert an essentially badly lit and honeycombed construction, with small plants growing out of its brick-corners and inhabited by four sets of families, into a mansion with rooms, sub-rooms, elongated corners, zigzagging stairs and high ceilings.

  The gaslight at the mouth of the lane, not yet changed to new electric lamps like in some other parts of the city, was incapable of keeping the darkness from our main door. But it did throw up its own shadows right on to the weakening wood of the ‘Chatterjee Gate’. It was the kind of streetlight that, if it could speak, would have said, ‘Psst, here’s a bit of light. You won’t get it cheaper anywhere else. Take it or leave it.’ Unlike the bright spillage that shone forth from a burning piece of lime inside Shombhu’s Elphinstone projection box like some formless divinity, this asthmatic spectacle had nothing to show or tell. It was just darkness dolled up.

  There wasn’t anything remotely grand about our house either—despite the moulding courtyard in the middle that I would much later find bearing a strong resemblance to the Great Bath in Mohenjo-Daro as depicted in those speckled pictures in the papers. This was a courtyard where I would occasionally assault a prowling cat in search of after-meal fishbones; where the tireless Abala washed and scraped the piles of dishes, pots and pans with ash and tamarind, all the while muttering about her general bad fortune and the state of her corns; where my mother, during her days of mobility, would check to see that the clothes hung out to dry on the first-floor railing hadn’t wafted downstairs; where we all came down to brush our teeth, rinsing our mouths on a perpetually wet and bleached spot next to a temperamental tap.

  This large rectangle of semi-solid housescape was shared by four other families, one of which was the Moitra family who occupied the two rooms and a half overlooking ours on the first floor. Nirmal Moitra’s two sons, Rona and Bikash, were, apart from being constant companions, my direct link with the outside world.

  ‘So you won’t be coming to school at all?’ Bikash had asked me one day while the three of us were urinating from the window on to the darkening evening lane, too lazy to make the trek to our respective family bathrooms. This was in the days when my mother was still consciously mobile.

  ‘That’s right. Mother said that I’ll be going to another school from next summer.’

  ‘It’s because your father drinks, isn’t it?’ Rona asked after buttoning his shorts front.

  ‘You mad or what? What’s that got to do with me? It’s not that. It’s because parents have complained that they don’t want a boy from a nationalist’s family to go to school with their sons.’

  Bikash chortled, ‘What, Tarini-kaka a nationalist? He with his bound copies of The Statesman and working at the rail company? They should just come and have a look at his Brahma-Vishnu-Maheshwar. He still has those framed pictures of Victoria, Edward and George in his room, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Shut up, Bikash! Ever since that Haora day, some folks do think that he carried out an action.’

  ‘What, by throwing up on his boss’s wife? Quite an Aurobindo Ghose, eh?’ It was now Rona’s turn to chortle.

>   These were the days when crude bombs were being made by sons and nephews in the rooftop rooms of unsuspecting fathers’ and uncles’ houses. Most of these bombs never reached their intended targets. These inactions were called actions.

  ‘It wasn’t his wife, idiot! It was his daughter. Anyway, some people like Jatin-master believe my father—’

  ‘But isn’t Jatin-master a bit of a nationalist himself?’ Bikash interrupted me. ‘I mean, remember how he came into class one day not in his baggy jacket and trousers and with his “Hail to thee blithe spirit!” but in a panjabi and dhuti and a “Bande Mataram”, and then proceeded to tell us how the Muslim League was a pack of jackals in league with the British?’

  Jatin-master aka Jatindranath Mallik was our young school headmaster. In fact, the youngest in the history of the Romesh Dutt Comprehensive. He had apparently taught English, history and logic for a while at Sanskrit College at the ‘remarkable’ age of twenty-eight. After a brief stint at the David Hare School, he turned his attention and talent to imparting quality education to boys from aspiring Bengali households. For seven years, he had sat at the feet of the immortal giants of the European Enlightenment and the terribly clever Romantics, drinking just a bit from the fount of their knowledge and rinsing out the rest into the mouths of Dutt Comprehensive students and teachers alike. All of a sudden, he switched positions and went nationalist. That’s what people said, but I was never sure.

  ‘Jatin-master is no nationalist. And he’s an idiot!’ I snapped at Bikash. ‘He’s the one who came over last week to tell mother about the complaints and how he was left with no choice but to ask that I be taken out of the school.’

  ‘So are you feeling rotten about it? I know I am,’ said Rona sincerely.

  ‘Phaa! No, why should I? My mother’s talked to your mother about me going over to your place thrice a week to catch up on whatever I’ll be missing out on. There’s some talk of me going to that Ahiritolla school two stops away. However it goes, it’s fine. What does it matter to me?’ I let out a fake, crooked smile that was as fake as it was crooked.