Bioscope Man

by Indrajit Hazra

  ‘Ha, Abani, you should have seen his face. This man, so much older than me, of whom I was secretly scared, was staring out of the window when he told me in a voice that had lost all its force, “What are you saying? People with BA and MA degrees consider themselves lucky if they manage to get a job that’ll pay them a hundred rupees a month. And you’re saying that just by dolling up your faces and rolling your hips with those women you’ll be earning more?” Ho, ho, Abani, I did feel a tinge of sadness for the old man. How things have changed!’

  ‘Things change, Dhir, things change,’ I had told him before proceeding to speak into a bulbous microphone about how great a national treasure Girish was.

  Back in 1918, in the months following Prahlad Parameshwar and then the very successful Othello, it had become clear that things had indeed changed. The Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co. had found that there was a star in its fold. I would be on a tram, travelling from Picture Palace or Variety after an evening of enjoying Eddie Polo in The Broken Coin, and people would recognize me.

  ‘Isn’t that Prahlad?’ or ‘Shubho, look! That’s Ratnakar’ or ‘That’s the ghost of The Ghost Who Walks.’ There would be glances, looks and gawks. Fellow commuters and neighbours would see an Aurangzeb or a murderer or a depraved lover flit past them. But it hadn’t yet reached the point where people would recognize me as Abani Chatterjee, the shape-shifter, the man who could turn into one person one day and into another the next.

  That would happen after the portly Lalji Hemraj Haridas entered our lives, making his first appearance in the whirligig office of the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co. The many-ringed Lalji was everything that everyone in Alochhaya was not. He had no real interest in the world of entertainment and had once walked out of a Chaplin bioscope simply because he was feeling hungry and, in his own words, ‘gassed’. But the biggest difference was that his livelihood depended not on bioscopes or theatre, but on something far removed.

  Lalji had come to this city from Kathiawar in the west as part of his family’s rites of passage. His brother had expanded the family ‘piece good’ business by opening up a branch in the Burabazar area. Over the last twelve years business had been doing so well that the family—or at least part of the very large and extended Haridas family—decided to move here and make this city their home and headquarters.

  For the last few months, Lalji had been trying to become the Bengal agent for Bombay’s Kohinoor Film Company. And the day Mahesh Bhowmick called me over to his office, the Marwari with a perennial supply of betel juice sloshing between his teeth and tongue was explaining why he wanted to enter the bioscope business.

  ‘Bhowmick-babu, I don’t understand anything of bioscopes. And frankly, I’d rather be in the presence of baijees for an evening of entertainment than inside a dark room watching jumping shadows on the wall. But I do understand business and I understand that there is good money to be made in your bioscopes. I have been told that the bioscope is something that everybody wants these days. And if everybody wants to see it, everybody will see it. And they seem to want to see it badly enough to spend good money on it. Bhowmick-babu, I’m a businessman. So let’s make money. Some paan, Mahesh-ji?’

  Very little had changed in Bhowmick’s office over the last few years. There was now an electric bulb hanging behind him and some fans. But the other, bigger electric light that dangled from the ceiling in the middle of the room like a Khudiram noose wasn’t used except for emergencies. And during the many times I had entered this room since Ram Bahadur dragged me in the first day, I had experienced an ‘emergency’ only twice. (Once when a rubber stamp went missing and everyone went on their hands and knees trying to find it, and the second time when a European from France had come seeking a sales partnership.)

  ‘Ah, Abani, come,’ Bhowmick greeted me slightly nervously. ‘Swapan, get another glass of lassi.’

  I think I must have looked put out. You have to understand that I was still very young. Being young is having a special fluid running through the body which, in the right temperature and circumstance, reacts violently to things like quietness, mediocrity, pusillanimity and red-teethed fat men who have much more money than oneself. Lalji Haridas, at that point a complete stranger to me, greeted me more effusively than my employer ever had.

  ‘Arre, Abani-babu. Come in, come in. I was just telling Mahesh-ji about you. My daughters and my wife thought you were a fabulous Prahlad. I have yet to see it, but I trust my family’s judgement in matters related to entertainment and you can be assured that I am also a big admirer of yours. Sit, sit.’

  He seemed to rub the table, his panjabi crinkling up to show a sweaty hand that started with an arrangement of heavy rings and ended midway with a ridge of creases at the elbow. His speech rhymed with his soft chewing. His undulating hair glistened in the roomlight, and a slab of flesh bulged below his hairline. Despite his unfortunate looks and uncouth ways, he had that entirely attractive, absolute confidence that comes with monetary success. As I sat down next to him in front of Bhowmick’s table, I instinctively shuddered myself into attention.

  ‘This is the man I want, Mahesh-ji. I’ll come straight to the point before, as we say, the halwa gets cold. I think Abani-babu here is someone whom the public will take a liking to. Call me a man who takes risks,’ he said fingering one of his rings, ‘but I’d rather think of myself as a worshipper of fate. You know what I think, Bhowmick-ji? I think we should make more bioscope pictures with this young man here. He is also so talented, nah?’

  Bhowmick was stunned, the way an irksome insect is when it receives a tap from human fingers. He hadn’t expected Lalji to launch forth in such a forthright manner. He first looked at me, and then at the man who was sitting in front of him.

  ‘What is it, Bhowmick-babu? It’s very simple. I put money into bioscopes with Abani Chatterjee, and the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Company makes them. What is in it for me? Well, I make a bit for myself from the profits, 40:60, nothing too much, for the first three pictures to be made in a year. A fair deal, I should think.’

  I sank deep into my unsinkable wooden seat, not because of the gravity of the proposition I had just heard, but because I suddenly felt lightheaded and didn’t want to show it. I had not expected business of such nature to be conducted in such a flash, and certainly not in front of me. But as I sat there listening to the man gush on like an open tap, I felt him transform from a fat, red-toothed Marwari, wearing ten kilos of jewellery on his hands, into a visionary who truly understood the value of the bioscope picture.

  Lalji wanted to back my movies and he was putting his money where his paan-stained mouth was. The only other precondition he had was that the three bioscopes—his three bioscopes, with his name in the opening credits—should be longer than the usual two-reelers. He wanted the public to be treated to a longer story for the same ticket price, bioscope features that would run longer than just the curiosity-fulfilling, hallroom-filling fifteen or twenty minutes. Lalji was now a new addition to the set of protagonists in the Alochhaya Theatre and Bioscope Co., and he showed it.

  ‘But he’s a Marwari,’ Bikash squealed when I told him about our meeting a few hours after I had signed a contract of fifteen thousand rupees for eight bioscopes in the next twelve months.

  ‘So?’ I said, sitting in a long room full of people in various stages of riot and nodding. ‘He understands business and that is what is missing in the picture industry in this country today. We need a visionary, an entrepreneur. He’s the person. He’ll make a Star Theatre out of Alochhaya.’

  ‘And a Girish Ghosh out of you, I suppose?’

  ‘No, a Dranem,’ I said plainly, referring to my current favourite screen actor, the neck-kerchiefed Frenchman with a pudding hat whose capers I (and Shombhu-mama) would follow in great detail.

  If Lalji was just investing money in a few bioscopes, I wouldn’t have been convinced about his seriousness about the whole affair. There were quite a few such characters entering and exiting the burg
eoning moving pictures industry every month. But after a week of signing the deal, he brought in his family—his wife, four sons, three daughters, his brother, his brother’s wife and their three sons—to see a special screening of The Slaying of Ravana. It was then that I figured that this was not going to be just a weekend fancy for him. Along with the Haridas family watching the special screening at eleven in the morning was the man himself, seated next to a Mahesh Bhowmick furiously chewing on the calluses on his fingers and spitting them out in the illuminated darkness of the theatre.

  In The Slaying of Ravana, I played the role of Lord Ram, with Durga playing Sita, and Dinesh Baral as the demon king. I wasn’t there at the screening, but Ram Bahadur, who was standing at the exit the whole time, narrated to me what happened.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t seen anyone in the crowd in the last twenty-five years react in such a way to a performance—theatre, jatra or bioscope. They were thrilled. Five minutes into the bioscope, one of the ladies stood up, walked towards the aisle and then in the dark hall went down on her knees, saying, ‘Ram, Sia-Ram, Sia-Ram, jai jai Ram.’ The others followed. I also joined in. Both you and Durga-mem were so moving on the screen that even I forgot that you were both actors and not Ram-ji and Sita-maiya themselves.’

  ‘What was Ram doing,’ I asked, hiding my inquisitive-as-a-maid voice, ‘when the lady first started praying?’

  ‘Er, I wasn’t really looking at the screen, babu. But I think it was the time when Ram-ji announced that he would go into exile … I think …’

  ‘Go on. And then?’ I said knitting my brow and taking a short drag on my cigarette, still unable to conduct the habit like a fully-fledged adult.

  Okay, so it was the scene in which I, Durga and Paral (playing Lakshman) were about to change from our royal finery into our saintly robes and topknots, preparing ourselves mentally for the next fourteen years—twenty-odd bioscope minutes—in the Dandakaranya forest.

  ‘A few minutes later, another lady went up to the front near the screen. Lalji and all the others followed, with Bhowmickbabu the only one still sitting in his seat. Towards the end, as you sat on the throne back in Ayodhya again with the petals being scattered, the whole family started throwing grains of rice at the screen. One of the ladies had already broken open a coconut right there inside the hall and lit up incense sticks. Bhowmick-babu looked quite petrified by the end but even he joined in with the lot.’

  By the time I acted in Parasuram Avatar and Chhatrapati Shivaji, this would become something of a norm at the picture palaces this side of town. People would leave their shoes outside, shower the screen with flowers, rice and loose change at the right moments. And depending on which divinity or hero I was playing, they would cry out my name—not Abani Chatterjee, of course, but that of the character I was playing. It was no longer just a spectacular circus; it was forty-five-odd minutes of epiphany, congregation and a meeting of the faithful as well.

  By the end of the following year, no one could doubt that Lalji Hemraj Haridas had ushered in a new era in entertainment. Also, Lalji Hemraj Haridas had by that time bought over the bioscope division of Alochhaya. Mahesh Bhowmick was happy to get only a portion of the profits and use his rather limited talents to tend to the dwindling Alochhaya Theatre Co.

  Throughout those giddy years, I kept acting in bioscopes. People were starting to know Abani Chatterjee—not in the ‘Oh, now wasn’t he the actor who was Karna in The Sixth Pandav?’ way; it was more ‘That’s Abani Chatterjee! Remember we saw him on Thursday at the Mancha?’ In all the bioscopes I starred in—barring Birbal—Durga was cast opposite me. Even her name, hyphenated with mine, had started to become a familiar proper noun in households. That itself brought us closer.

  Then came the watershed year for the Abani Chatterjee–Durga Devi duo. It was Lalji who brought it to our notice how ‘nationalism’ was becoming the big cultural thing those days. We had reckoned as much when we staged and screened Prahlad, a bioscope whose sub-subtext had been ‘nationalist’. But somehow, after that, we never tried another one of those ‘symbolic’ features. Maybe Bhowmick wasn’t the boat-rocking, hovering-on-the-edge kind. Neither was Lalji, for that matter. But he was a genius with the box office. At a meeting, Lalji had simply announced that there was much to be gained—in terms of reputation and money—if we took a swerve towards a direction where ‘nationalism’ and ‘self-rule’ and all those fashionable ideas could be hinted at without making them too obvious to the authorities.

  ‘Sure, it’s in your face. Sure, it’s banal. And sure, it’s not wonderful art. But we’re not in the business of social service. For that, there are books and there are sadhus. If nationalism is what the crowds want, then nationalism is what we’ll give them. In any case, anyone complaining can easily be told that it’s all just make-believe. It’s not that we don’t pay our taxes and want the English to go away. It’s like reading those Bat-tala books that Dhiren is always reading without actually being unfaithful to your wife. Hah, hah!’ Lalji said and laughed some more.

  That was how Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath was scheduled to be turned into a one-hour-ten-minute bioscope. Horen Ray, the man behind the camera on Prahlad Parameshwar, was given a tell-me-what-you-want-and-I’ll-give-it budget to turn the story into tangible nitrate. I was to play Jibananda, the man equally tempted by a revolutionary life and the domestic life of a husband. Durga would be Shanti, Jibananda’s wife who wanted her husband’s love and found it only by becoming a revolutionary herself.

  The beauty of this ‘nationalist’ bioscope was that it couldn’t possibly get into any trouble with the authorities. Anandamath wasn’t a story about the struggle for freedom against the English. It was a rousing tale of courage and sacrifice in the face of Muslim tyranny. In fact, some lines were introduced to pad up the nice things that Bankim had said about the necessity of English rule for the country. Above all, our Anandamath would also be a love story. Love and fashionable politics—what else could one ask for in a non-mythological bioscope?

  I stood there, inside the makeshift sets and in front of a battery of yet-to-be-kicked-awake spotlights. The dynamos were roaring somewhere in the sprawling factory space where the sign ‘M/S Lalji Hemraj Haridas & Co.’ was still visible at the entrance. Along with some technicians, I was standing there alone with my make-up and costume—just a white dhuti and shawl—waiting for the director, the cameraman and the lightman to arrive. Only a few lights were required for this ‘outdoor’ shoot, for the roofless studio allowed the midday sunlight to generously pour in from the top.

  Which is when I saw Durga, her hair loose and pouring down to her waist, black and glistening as her real hair could never hope to be. She was wearing kajol, and that made her face glow with a spirit that stays suppressed in real life. The white sari she was wearing looked like the sails of a ship wrapped around hastily so as to catch a brief gust. There she was. Shanti, my wife. Somewhere between the moment that she walked in and when the shoot started, Jibananda climbed out of the pit where all my characters—past, present and future—live.

 

  Long shot of a dirt trail with scrub and small trees on either side. A figure is walking briskly with something in his hands. He slows until he stops completely. He looks straight ahead for one moment and then continues to walk briskly again.

  Close-up of the man’s face. He is agitated, even worried.

  Medium-shot of the man moving along the path which turns right to disappear from view. The dirt trail with its scrub and small trees is left behind.

  Jibananda had not had a proper meal for two days and it was his body’s right to feel weak under the blazing summer sun. But he had been trained to keep his body in its rightful place. One thing that he wasn’t trained for, though, was an unscheduled return home. Home was a door that opened to a courtyard with a low-roofed two-room house on one side, next to a mangoless mango tree. Further on, next to a lemonless lemon tree, was a hut that served, depending on the circumstances, as a s
pare room for spillover guests, a goat shed, a place where all the farming tools could be kept. Home was, for all that he had been through in the last year and a half, the place where he could return and pick up from where he had left things hanging. And those things now, in memory, seemed happy and comforting—both qualities associated with habit formation.

  The life he had been leading the past eighteen months was a deliberate digression. A life of action; a ‘revolutionary’ life. Oh, he was stricken with laziness, tiredness and cowardice even now. But he stayed the course despite this because he had realized that driving out the Mussalmans—driving out smallness and banality from his own life—required much more than energy and courage, those twin over-rated qualities. What was needed, in fact, was to keep everyday life at bay for some time, to temporarily suspend it, and this state could be attained only if one created new habits. Over the last several months he had done just that. In a way, Jibananda had been picking up new habits so that he could, one day, happily collapse into the old ones.

  A girl came out of the farthest room of the house and stopped to lean on the trunk of the mango tree. Jibananda’s sister. He had expected her to create a ruckus in her usual loud and unbridled manner. But she kept leaning on the tree instead, staring at the bundle that her brother was carrying.

  ‘Dada, whose child is that?’

  Jibananda had practised the entry he would make, making some rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ remarks about how his sister had shot up since the last time he had seen her. He had imagined that after that initial exchange, he would then quickly hand the baby over to her. But he kept standing there, still outside the shadow of both the house and the mango tree, holding the infant wrapped in a flimsy red cloth and looking at Nimi. He felt awkward, deciding not to look around with pretend-nostalgia as he had earlier planned.