Bioscope Man

by Indrajit Hazra

  ‘Come out you worm!’ he heard the roar above the thudding of the battering ram against the door to his mother’s room. In the overpowering silence that followed, he was in the arms of an armless woman. Raising his head a little, even as he clung to her tightly, he noticed that his running snot had formed a pattern on the cloth that covered his mother’s right shoulder. And then he noticed that the shoulder belonged to a human form with the head of a lion. Prahlad awaited his fate in the folds of something that was neither here nor there, neither of this world nor of that; something that was all body, no hands and as quiet as a relic.

  Tumbling Upstairs

  Forgetting is the key. And what can be more satisfying than to forget who one is.

  In 1917, at the ripe age of twenty-one, I fell in love for the first time. With Durga, on the stage, I stopped, even if it was for a couple of hours, being the son of two bathetic figures, the friend of two pointless souls and the nephew of a man with desires that could, by their very nature, never be fulfilled.

  With the real Prahlad, Ronobir Banerjee, recovering miraculously and back on stage after two weeks, Durga and I were together for only that many hours. But we had been joined together in nitrate. True, I was somebody else, she somebody else. But for those cumulative hours, detached from other scenes and other people playing other characters, we were a pair. But that wasn’t the most rapturous part. The best part was that she recognized me not as Abani Chatterjee but as a man who was more present than a dissolve and more visible than backlight.

  Despite our relationship now made permanent, I saw no point in telling Durga what I felt about her. How could I? Durga was Felicia Miller and Abani was Abani Chatterjee. And whatever may have led you to believe that love can be a battering-ram for all doors, it’s not true. Love has its limitations, its garbage-blocked corridors.

  Prahlad Parameshwar, the name given to my first bioscope, was the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co.’s first resounding moving pictures success. In fact, it made more money than Madan Theatre’s Harishchandra and Bilyamangal put together. More features followed, and I was in all of them (barring that dismal failure, The Good Son Shravana, in which the diminishing Ronobir Banerjee played the title role). Shombhu-mama had finally convinced Mahesh Bhowmick that simply rolling the handle and sucking in a stage performance with a quiet counting of frames was not the way.

  ‘It’s so boring for the audience,’ he had told Mahesh, finally talking in a language that the latter would understand.

  But what also changed was the way we performed. I had told Mahesh as well as Horen Roy, both of whom had started to listen to what I had to say since Prahlad, that for the bioscope what mattered was how things, actors included, were shown. Nothing else mattered. If we had a special role to play as actors, it was what we did with our faces, our body and our eyes. If they weren’t visible on the screen, then they would mean nothing. Anyone who had seen those international silent screen idols, John Barrymore, Francis X. Bushman, Rod La Rocque and, of course, Rudolph Valentino, knew that.

  However, acting then, especially in this city, was ludicrous, overstated puppetry. It was just about bearable in the jatra. The ridiculous overstatements, after all, went perfectly with the ridiculously overstated atmosphere. Theatre was awash with that kind of nonsense. And those entering the bioscopes were dragging in their vocal hysterics to the new, silent medium.

  Nabina Devi running her hand across her forehead in The Kidnapping of Sita, for instance, would have meant nothing were it not for the camera taking in the terror in her eyes and then moving on to her hand, in close-up, to show it leaving a black sindoor smudge in its wake.

  So instead of recreating a dumb show, Alochhaya was pioneering something else: the theatre of the spectacle.

  And the crowds, even the raucous lumpen-classes, were beginning to revel in the visible, the details, the impossible images that only the bioscope could bring. And Mahesh Bhowmick could tell the impact it was having on the public. With profits piling up, Alochhaya became the first non-European theatre to be fully electrified. Even Mahesh’s dingy office room now had electric lights and a mechanical fan that initially kept blowing away all the pieces of paper on the tables. (This problem was solved after the arrival of a hook-like device with a long metal spike, curled at one end and fixed to a wooden, circular block at the other. Pieces of paper would be ‘hooked’ and ‘speared’, to be arranged like abacus balls across the length of the metal spike.) We had also become the best paid bioscope people in the country. We had become what in America they called a Studio.

  But all those advantages that the bioscope had over theatre were nothing compared to the real thing that made it a wonder of the world: one didn’t have to wear out one’s mental and physical bones playing the same roles and characters, making and speaking the till-death-do-us-part movements and lines.

  That old rascal of an actor Dhiren Chatterjee had once told me with genuine panic after a production season how his body had taken over all control.

  ‘I was to bang my fist on the edge of the dock and shout, “Objection, m’lord!” in that courtroom scene. This I had done for the last two and a half months at the same juncture in the play, facing the same actors on stage and standing at the same spot. This time I decided to bang my fist on the left-hand corner of the cane-front that was supposed to be the dock. I wanted to change something, even if it was something as tiny as shifting the position of where I brought my hand down, if only to make that evening’s performance a bit less deadening for myself. But there I was on Tuesday playing the same goddamned scene as if it was part of a ten-thousand-year-old custom. At the exact moment when I had to bring my fist down, I pounded it on the same bloody place where I had every evening for the past two and a half months. I had lost all control over my body and my mind!’

  Dhiren promised himself he would shift his fist to the left for the next six days. But on every occasion his hand came down on the same wretched spot. The day he was complaining about his enslavement to the stage habit, he had a weal shaped like Ceylon running down the side of his hand. For the next three months, he found himself shouting, ‘Objection, m’lord’ and crashing his hand down on the same spot. That’s what the stage does to you.

  The bioscope, on the other hand, never numbs you. It simply doesn’t have the time. And once the performance is being projected, no matter how many times one redoes the scene, the images bring the actor to life each time, and each time as if for the first.

  Not only did my appearances before the camera draw out something that I had never guessed existed, but it also extracted something more than my body was capable of showing. It was much more than Abani+nitrate+light+darkness+angles+distances+other actors that came spewing out. Seeing me on the screen wasn’t at all like seeing Shishir Badhuri or Ahin Chaudhuri on the stage ten years later. However competent they may have been in their day, Shishir would remain Shishir and Ahin Ahin. The theatre just couldn’t lie well enough. It still can’t. As for the bioscope, it makes sublime truth of deception—not just for the viewer but also for the actor. I would get transformed each time I faced the whirring camera and the sun-like lights.

  I’ve heard many of today’s actors and actresses go on and on about how the real thrill lies in acting ‘live’ in front of audiences. I’ve never understood that—unless, of course, your pleasures come solely from hearing your own voice and from looking at other people looking at you. For in the end it’s not about the effort, but about the result. And in bioscopes, every gesture makes sense, even when it’s not supposed to. And, and, and, before I forget, I never had to bow in the moving pictures to the vultures after every performance each night.

  My life of love continued after Prahlad Parameshwar. There was Othello, a feature made purely as a bioscope. I had expected my bioscope self to go back to being Abani Chatterjee, after it, and Desdemona to being Durga. But we weren’t back in a snap after the camera handle stopped turning and the lights had all clacked off one by one. As I removed the bl
ack paint from my face, I could still feel the Moor inside me. He remained, perhaps as he had always been inside Abani Chatterjee—in some warm pit miles below my chest.

  ‘It’s funny how anyone, English, Indian, or whatever, has to wear that make-up to play Othello,’ I told Shamaresh Biswas, who was removing Iago from his own face.

  ‘I know. But then Durga doesn’t have to put much colour on, does she?’

  Till Shamaresh pointed this out, I had never thought of Durga as a full-fledged Anglo. Not the way I saw Faith or Alice Kydman. She was Felicia Miller and Durga and Kayadhu and Desdemona, and nobody in between. I knew nothing, then, of Durga outside the lit-up space we shared.

  In the months that I got to know Durga better in front of the cameras and sometimes onstage, I learnt—from others, of course—how she had been a convent schoolteacher in McLeodganj, a hill station somewhere in the north, before moving back here with her family. Her father, Sam Miller, had been a seaman who had sailed from Manchester and had then decided to make this city his home. At the grand age of forty-three he had married the daughter of a Scotsman working at the Soorah Jute Mill, a lady some twenty years his junior, who spoke fluent Hindustani but no Bengali at all.

  Mr Miller’s subsequent job at the British India Steam Navigation Company—which he had obtained through the good offices of his short-lived father-in-law—wasn’t a very senior job. But he never found it odd to have his name on the rolls alongside those of Indians. He was better paid than his brown-skinned colleagues and, quite clearly, life was grander here than in bleak, grey-skinned and steam-filled Manchester. Where else would he have been able to have a bungalow filled with servants, and a social environment in which his wife and children could thrive? Imagine having an ayah for the children, a baburchi capable of fixing Sam’s favourite two dishes, prawn malai curry and black pudding, at an hour’s notice, and a personal servant who would do everything from fixing a hot bath to working the fan during those long summer Sundays. And Sam was a gentleman here, a member of the South Calcutta Billiards Club.

  But for the last few years, things had not been going well for Sam Miller. For some buffalo reason, the government had decided to start a long-pending special programme for the ‘domiciled’. In the mind of the authorities, Europeans in India should be ‘setting into motion the labour of the country’ and should ‘develop its resources’. An increasing emphasis was being placed in the sweaty corridors of power on the fact that English prestige should be maintained to continue to achieve the ‘dominion of the mind’. In other words, Mr Miller’s talent in overseeing the fitting and repairing of valves and pipes and pistons on ships and cruisers was not the right way for a European to go about things in the country. Miller, for one, didn’t like it one bit when two gentlemen visited his house late one Saturday afternoon advising him to move to a more agreeable place.

  ‘For God’s sake, it’s not as if I’m sitting down to drink with the bloody babus, is it?’ he had erupted after being exceptionally gracious to the two sinister gentlemen. ‘I’m a proper gentleman, too, and you can bloody well see it for yourself!’

  ‘We aren’t here to doubt your social position, Mr Miller. It’s just that the government sincerely thinks that you and many other fellow Englishmen in this city have much to gain if you consider working in new, burgeoning northern townships,’ one of the frock-coated men had calmly told him while staring at the slightly chipped rim of the cup in which the tea had been served.

  ‘Burgeoning towns, my arse! And why would I want to move to Dehrabloodydun or Mussoorie or, what’s that other place you mentioned …’

  ‘McLeod—’

  ‘Whatever. I’m a city person, gentlemen, and I do an honest living here. My children were born here, brought up here. The government and the King can’t tell me to up it and leave for the bloody mountains now!’

  That was their first visit and Sam Miller had not been convinced at all by their argument of a better life in the hills of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. But by the end of the following year, four ex-sailing men, all of them out-and-out Europeans—Bob Davis from Oldham, Bill O’Brien from Slough, John Davies from Glasgow and Sam Miller from Manchester—were politely told that their services were no longer required in the British India Steam Navigation Company. Davis, O’Brien, Davies and Miller, all bona fide members of the South Calcutta Billiards Club, never spoke a word about whether their being ‘working class and all’ had anything to do with their sudden retirement. They were going to get a moderate pension all right, but that still left them hanging dry. As they noisily ordered yet another round of quickly warming beer, the option of returning Home was brought up almost as if they were talking about a fatal disease that should never be named.

  ‘I don’t understand, Bob. They should be making our lives here better. Not telling us to bugger off and climb some trees in the mountains. I thought this country belongs to us,’ Sam had said with an extra head of self-pity.

  ‘Sometimes I get the feeling that they’re going to give everything away to the Niggers. I mean, it’s insane. I didn’t make so much of a noise when that Bengali joined our division replacing Ronald Kitson, remember?’ Bob replied.

  ‘It’s the bloody liberal Campbell-Bannerman government,’ spoke out John about his fellow Glaswegian. The clubhouse was quiet, as it always was on weekday afternoons, and if anyone had kept his ears pricked up, he would have heard a mutter of approval from the other three.

  ‘He’s already given the Transvaal and Orange River Colony self-rule. Now he’s getting ready to give it to India.’

  But each time the conversation meandered its way back to any thought of returning Home, they would change the topic, or order another round of beer, or pick up their billiards cues, the tips of which they would chalk away until their hands turned white.

  It was Sam’s eldest daughter, Felicia, who had shown enterprise and the nuns at her school had suggested that she seriously think about a career in teaching. They thought that she would do well in the noble profession if she went on a teachers’ training programme that was held every six months in McLeodganj in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.

  ‘Not to McLeod you don’t!’

  The name rang all the wrong bells in Sam’s ears.

  ‘But Papa, the sisters want me to train there and become a teacher. Then I can come back here and teach in any school, the best schools. Sister Martha has even given me a list of where I should apply when I’m back. All I have to do is go there and complete the course.’

  It was finally Mrs Miller, now fully developed into a feisty woman herself, who convinced her husband that it would be the right thing for their Felicia to do.

  ‘You don’t want her to end up like Patterson’s daughter, do you?’

  Of course, no one in their right minds would want their daughters to end up like Jenny Patterson who, after running away from home following an argument with her father, had ended up marrying a native Christian ‘poet’ and now lived in some filthy bylane on Shukhia Street teaching middle-aged Bengalis the piano. So Felicia Miller was fondly seen off by her family at the station.

  Not much is known of how she got along with the nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. And we shouldn’t make much of the talk that did the rounds in Anglo-Indian circles in the latter half of the second decade of the new century about her mishap while visiting the St John’s Church near Forsythgunj with an English gentleman. But Felicia did return to the city exactly six months and a week to the day that she had left it.

  But instead of joining the well-known girls’ school on Lower Circular Road as a junior teacher, as had been planned by her guardians at McLeodganj, she joined the theatre. For with a woman like Felicia Miller, too, forgetting was the key.

  Felicia was careful not to take up any job in show business that meant her performing in the city’s European hotels and theatres. To her family, she was still Felicia Miller who taught nice little English or Anglo-Indian girls to grow up and become nice English
ladies before they returned Home. Except that she wasn’t a teacher. Instead, she found happiness, solace, call it what you will, along with a modest and steady income in an up-and-coming Bengali theatre production company that was making its forays in the world of bioscopes.

  It was only a year and a half ago that she had signed a full-time contract with the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Company. Three hundred rupees a month was much more than she would have got as a schoolteacher. On top of it, Felicia had started to enjoy being people that she, till the other day, couldn’t even dream of pretending to be. And it was here in the theatre, a couple of years after she had become a full-fledged member of the Alochhaya Theatre (and soon to be Bioscope) Co., that I met Durga Devi, and fell in love.

  Years after my Alochhaya days, I was talking to Dhiraj Bhattacharya at the Mahajati Sadan where both of us had been invited for an especially tiresome show. (It was 1944, the centenary celebrations of that retard, Girish Ghosh.) He was telling me about his early days as an actor.

  ‘Abani, let me tell you a story. My uncle was a clerk in a merchant office who didn’t like it one bit that I had started working in the bioscope. One evening, suddenly out of nowhere he asked me, “So, Khokon, how much are they paying you?” You know how it was. I didn’t want to show that I was bringing in money slower than it took me to spend an anna out of my pocket. So I told him that I was getting one hundred and fifty at the moment, and that the sum would jump to five hundred once the bioscope I was in was released. His eyes popped out of their sockets. “Five hundred!” “Yes, so? That’s not so much by bioscope standards, you know,” I bragged. “The bioscope’s going to be really big in the next few years. I’ve been told a thousand rupees a month will be the going rate for any actor in another five-six years.”