‘I think there will be long speeches,’ said Bikash nudging me with his sharpened elbow. ‘God, another Slaying of Meghnad epic!’
I nodded, but only as an automaton nods its head. I wanted to see the lady. There was a woman sitting between a bespectacled mouse of a man and another gentleman wearing layers of linen wrapped in a short black coat. There was also an Oriental. The woman was an old, slightly corpulent Anglo lady who kept adjusting her light-rimmed glasses. What caught my eye was her white-as-cotton hair that was cut short like a widow’s. But then, all old Anglo women look like widows.
It was the mouse-man who spoke first. He introduced the Oriental, a Japanese art collector whose name was Kakuzo Okakuro. I didn’t like him from the moment he opened his mouth.
‘I came here ten years ago, and during the year I lived here, I was amazed by the vibrant culture of this land. I expected a lot of change this time when I was here again. But nothing has changed. You are such a great and cultured race. Why do you let a handful of Englishmen trample and beat you down? Do everything you can to achieve freedom, openly as well as secretly. The Japanese people are there with you.’
This Okakuro fellow was one patronizing Oriental. All those in the hall, including the three of us, heard him telling us how we should wake up, as if it was time for school. I hoped that his role was restricted to the first act.
‘Political assassinations and secret societies are the chief weapons of a powerless and disarmed people who seek their emancipation from political ills,’ he continued in his cold, tinny monotone.
‘I thought he was a bloody art collector in the play,’ Rona whispered across the seat. Bikash quickly reminded him that this was not theatre but a demand. This sort of theatrical playfulness is de rigueur in demands.
Where was the lady on the showcard? Was she going to provide the entertainment after these crashing bores had done with their monologues?
It was getting bone-crushingly dull, and all that happened in front of us was just talk and more talk about achieving freedom, secret societies and the ignominy of being ruled by ‘others’. It was after the man with a short moustache and a balloon of a body started speaking about the ‘cowardly’ shifting of capital and the failed attempt to split the province that we realized that demands were no substitute for theatrical entertainment.
The man kept talking about India as if it was a country that existed only on an atlas, a carefully plotted patch sitting in a space procured by longitude and latitude merchants—and not a place that we were sitting in right then and there, waiting with diminishing patience for the lady with the curled fingers and the dark ring to make her appearance. The brothers beside me were getting restless. When Rona suggested we go home, I was about to agree and get up.
But just then, the old Anlgo woman with the white hair stood up. Towering over one of the vases stuffed with the white flowers that signify a death in the family, she slowly raised her hand before she started to speak. Her hand hovered around the region of her chest and stayed there as she kept speaking in a sonorous but slightly wobbly voice.
She was wearing a white sari, but she was wearing it strangely. The cloth seemed one long, tied-up, messy affair that was hanging together only because it had been ordered to. But as the hand fluttered, I noticed that another face was forming on the puffy face. There was a faint shimmering, her whole face blurring as if it was travelling inwards at great speed. And then I saw that it was her. She was the woman on the poster.
‘Indian men do not deserve to be free politically until they give freedom socially to Indian women,’ she started. ‘A bird, ladies and gentlemen, cannot fly high with one wing broken before it starts upon its flight.’ There was not a single lady in the theatre, but she addressed all of us without batting an eyelid.
It was her, the silly, old woman with nothing but age in her eyes, hair and outfit. On the poster, she had seemed divine, what we used to call ‘American’. It turned out that the woman in the poster had become the sea-elephant who was now lecturing us about how rotten everything and everyone had become.
There in my seat, which only a second ago I had planned to vacate, I sank deeper and deeper, fighting back waves of anger that come with the raw realization that one has been duped. The words oozing out of the old woman’s mouth were weighing me down like some thick, viscous gas. She, more than anyone else, had cheated me. She had drawn me here with a monumental lie, this shape-shifter, this impostor. All these years later I have not forgotten my great disappointment.
‘The British missionary in India is a snake to be crushed; the British official a fool, playing amidst smoking ruins; the Native Christian a traitor in his own land. What India needs now is the ringing cry, the passion of the multitude, the longing for death in the country’s service.’
That was it. I sprang up, startling the two gentlemen in front of us, the gentleman next to me and my two friends.
‘And who are you, Madam, that so longingly undertakes to set our house in order?’ I shouted with my ears buzzing and the fuzz on my upper lip bristling like static on a dry day. My voice sounded ridiculously squeaky in that hall of elders. In response, there was the sound of fifty-odd seats creaking into attention at the same time. The silence that immediately followed was breathtaking in that it filled up the whole theatre in a matter of seconds. Even the perpetual punctures of clearing throats had stopped.
I hardly heard the waves of murmurs that arrived next. It was one messy ‘gmmmmhhmm’ that flew over my head and on to the stage in front of me. My ears still ringing with a new kind of disappointment, I sensed panic inside me. I ploughed my way through the legs that belonged to fellow members of the audience in my row and as we ran up the aisle—for Rona and Bikash had no choice but to run after me—every eye in that blighted theatre was on us. Most piercing of them all was the pair of eyes that I, till a few moments ago, had thought were incapable of fixing on anything particular. I felt her glare, two pin pricks boring into the back of my neck, on the spot where, after a hair-cut, the skin turns blue.
‘What was all that about, Abani? I thought we were staying?’ Bikash panted as we ran, ran, ran our way down the foyer, outside the gate and down the road well past the cemetery and the pond. The ‘gmmmmhhmm’ behind us had twined and creaked into real words and shouts when we had scampered up the interminable aisle.
At the gate, where the sound of the giant steam-operated machine could still be heard, we had seen a perturbed Ram Bahadur. The last thing we heard was the hulking figure shouting, ‘Oi, you! Stop! You sons of pigs, stop!’, mixing with someone else’s voice in the middle of other voices shouting, ‘Yes, who are you, Madam, to tell us what to do? Who are you all giving us lectures. Why don’t you go back to where you came from!’ Something sounded wrong with the sentences and bits of sentences that came to us from the departing Alochhaya.
By the time Ram Bahadur had stopped running, the three of us were well out of his reach. As we entered our house, excited enough about the turn of events to have become unnaturally quiet, all I wanted to do was forget everything about the lady in the showcard who was the woman on the stage, and who had been introduced by the mousey man to the theatre mob as Annie Besant. She must have been a bloody Anglo after all. How could I have ever thought that she was a mem?
But that was then, and now was now. If my last run-in with Ram Bahadur at Alochhaya was not characterized by heart-stirring friendship, this time it was likely to be less so. I stood in front of Mahesh Bhowmick, the owner of the Alochhaya Theatre who, as far as I could tell, was even less merciful to errant kids.
‘It’s Shombhu who put you up to this, didn’t he? Do you know that what you were doing is wrong? Do you know that defacing a private property can get you in more trouble than you can imagine?’
I locked my eyes on to my toes. I wanted him to know that I was sorry—which, of course, is never the same thing as being sorry. I quietly stood there, shaking my head ever so lightly, curling my lower lip up in the official sign fo
r emitting shame. It had always worked before. The idea was to make the person believe that the pointless action on my part had a point—in this case, a plea to be forgiven.
‘You’re from a respected family, Abani, despite the sad events that have overtaken it. What would your parents think about you running about town putting bioscope posters up on the walls of other people’s properties? A young boy like you getting messed up in pictures. Chhi-chhi.’
The thin line of hair on Bhowmick’s upper lip gave him a look of being sterner than he probably was. One more look at him and it became as clear as very early morning air that I had to act fast. I conjured up the image of my mother, lying there, unable to move a muscle, being told how I had been caught in some seditious act or another—hurling a bomb at a High Court judge or painting lewd words on the Government House wall—before being taken away by the authorities to be hanged. The news would enter the curl of her ears, settle down the two funnels before picking up speed and reaching her brain where it would register the same way fresh, hot dung sticks and stays on a wall facing the sun. She would be unable to even mutter a word of protest like all good mothers do even when their sons are found guilty of something that they know they are guilty of. Then I conjured up the image of my father, shaking his head slowly, looking as if he was being made to sit on a donkey, the wrong way around, with his head shaved and covered with curd, and being made to travel in that state along Chitpur Road in broad daylight. My parents came to my rescue. Forcing my eyelids to remain open also helped. A reserve of a trickle of tears was finally emitted.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ I lied.
Then, before any another question could be hurled at me, I looked into Bhowmick’s eyes and said in a quivering voice, ‘My father’s in no state to take care of us and my mother is confined to bed. I just help my uncle who works at the Elphinstone to get some money for the house. I wish my life was different, sir …’
I let my shoulders shudder as if I was on an especially bumpy tram-ride.
‘Will Shombhu work for me?’
I looked up at him through my teary eyes.
‘But …!’ Ram Bahadur blurted out, ready to take a step forward.
‘Ram Bahadur, wait outside,’ Bhowmick said sternly.
The giant sulked and disappeared.
And then Bhowmick told me that if Shombhunath Lahiri, currently employed by the Elphinstone Bioscope Company, joined Alochhaya, I would be forgiven—and also be provided with some small-time job. I was to tell my uncle when he got back home that night that Alochhaya was thinking about going into the bioscope business. The plan was to first show shorts, and then move into features, making them, showing them and selling them to other theatres. If Shombhu was game, I could work as a helper.
I knew that Bhowmick let me go that day only because of Shombhu-mama and his profession. But I gave him a wide-eyed look of relief and gratitude, a gesture that would have made perfect sense in any reputed jatra performance. He didn’t smile back and simply returned to the pile of tickets that was on his table.
‘May I go now, sir?’
‘Yes,’ was all he said.
And through such a turn of events, I officially entered the world of entertainment and the moving pictures. I was still to be an appendage of my enterprising uncle who, incidentally, left Elphinstone the very next week and joined Alochhaya. But I was to become increasingly aware of myself as someone entering the still new and magical world of the pictures. I was also becoming more and more acquainted with the colourful and entertaining adulterated version of Abani Chatterjee.
Within the next few years, not only did I become the assistant to the projectionist at Alochhaya—my job involved carrying reels, loading and unloading them, lighting the lime, perforating film stock and occasionally even cranking the projector handle—but I also started to understand bioscope as a twentieth-century medium of dreams, messages and power.
Shombhu-mama had started to hang out with some people who went one step further. These people, all of them chain-smokers, made their own bioscopes. It took a talented man to turn into a camera operator. Tagging along with him, I realized that I had started to see the fantastic creature from the inside. The rolling handle of the camera wasn’t too different from that of the projector, despite newer models not performing as both camera and projector. But whether it was the same box or different ones, it was about sucking in the people and things in front of it and then spewing them out again on screens. Pieces of nitrate viewed through bright gaslight were snipped, glued and made to flow like water, like life.
This was the churning-turning-swirling world of camera positions, focused electric arc lamps, distances, faces, set design. Then there were directors like Haren Roy and Partha Mukherjee shouting out orders into their megaphones as if they were waging war; and the actors, shorn of their manic play-acting and trembling voices, ingredients for the visual soups being cooked inside the dream kitchen.
It was thanks to Shombhu-mama and his contacts that Alochhaya started to make bioscopes. Thus began the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co., which by early 1916 was advertising its creations and getting them noticed even by Europeans. The real change came when three theatre stars joined the company on a full-time basis. They were Ronobir Banerjee, Sudhabala Devi and Pobitra Basu. But it was a fourth person’s entry that marked out the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co. from the rest—a lady who featured in bioscopes as Durga Devi. Her name was Felicia Miller.
During all this expansion, one couldn’t help but notice that Mahesh Bhowmick’s theatre business had prospered ever since I had been dragged into his dingy office. All that was now required was for me to act. To be inside the bioscopes, that is.
Unlike pretty much everyone else in bioscopes, I had no experience acting on the stage. Alochhaya, like most theatres in the city at that time, also continued staging plays. But increasingly, the theatre and the bioscopes had separate shows and separate audiences. The pictures were targeted more at families, what one would call these days ‘households’. They would talk and prattle and pass comments over the din made by the orchestra. In other words, they weren’t the ruffian, lumpen-class that formed the bulk of the theatre crowd. On a good night, one could actually see the two tiers of the city’s society brush past each other—one walking out, the other marching in, like two animals once vaguely related but having evolved into different species long ago.
However, within the many-walled theatre-cum-picture palace and beyond the hubbub of the ‘public’, there were occasions when theatre and bioscope would meet and mingle. These occasions were prompted by a theatre production drawing in more spectators than usual and the management—essentially, Mahesh Bhowmick—deciding to capture the whole production on camera. Shombhu-mama was dead against bioscoping theatre productions. ‘Even an idiot can crank a handle! A bioscope is about showing things that can’t be seen. Making a bioscope out of a play is neither a play nor a bioscope. It’s just bloody making a stupid copy!’ He was especially hostile towards the stage directors who insisted that he photograph actors as they appeared on the stage, full length from head right down to the feet, without cutting them off at the knees—or even higher. But in the face of smarter economics, Mahesh Bhowmick and his old faithfuls could do little but grumble about ‘artistic mongrelization’.
One such play drawing crowds by the droves was the Ronobir-Banerjee-starring Prahlad. It was clear from the very first week that this was a production that was getting noticed. No one seemed to recall who had scripted the story, but everyone knew the old tearjerker about the star-crossed father and son well enough. What Horen Ray, the director, wanted to do with this blood and gore, faith and treachery fable was to infuse it with a patriotic subtext. Nationalism had acquired some amount of radical chic, and there were ways of tapping this spirit without falling foul of the authorities. After all, it was a straightforward story from the Purans.
‘Prahlad is someone who, despite his circumstances, will no
t compromise his goodness. He is standing up for good, fighting against oppression and demanding freedom, even from his own father and elders, no matter what the older generation thinks of all this,’ I heard the director tell the actors as they were going through the two-page ‘script’. I never found the connection between the Prahlad story and anything that would have appealed to the Bande Mataram types. But clearly, Horen was on to something. The ticket proceeds suggested that Prahlad was not being received as an ordinary mythological play at all. And so it was decided that this Horen Ray production would be turned into a bioscope feature, Alochhaya’s first.
There was a rerun of Hermann Haefkar’s short, Spectacles of the Earth, playing before that day’s show of Prahlad. Shombhu-mama had positioned the camera at a ninety-degree angle to the stage in disgust and was stubbing out one cigarette after the other, which others mistook as a sign of nervous tension. Bhowmick had even cut corners to show the Alochhaya audience Spectacles of the Earth well after the legal date of its exhibition had lapsed. But a legal loophole had been found. A camera recorded Haefkar’s masterpiece when it had been (legally) projected for three months nearly a year before. All that was required now was to snip a few frames and change the title to Wonders of the World. No one complained. In any case, this was before movies were rented out or distributed. They were simply sold by the feet to bioscope theatres and once sold, the new owner-cum-exhibitor could do anything with the print, including snipping out existing frames and slipping in new ones.
With the last few frames flowing by to show a line of camels moving like office-goers in front of the Pyramids of Giza before the title card proclaimed ‘The End’, I was already in my usual place, getting ready to do my job as part-time prompter. Which was when I was told by Dhananjoy Guha, the resident jack-of-all trades, master of none, that Horen Roy wanted to see me immediately.
Bioscope Man Page 7
