Bioscope Man

by Indrajit Hazra

  ‘He was … I found him left there, stranded under a tree.’

  The lemon tree that his wife had planted some years ago had grown in the distance. Trees come in handy during awkward moments. He thought he would say something about the tree, but he held back. It would be pointless to talk about the lemon tree at that moment. All he saw now was his widowed sister, teenaged into maturity, taking the bundle from his hands and telling him to sit inside, in the shade. As he drank some water, his throat making the sound of a vessel bobbing out of a tankful of water, Jibananda felt the fear that he had been dreading since he started his journey. It was the fear of feeling at ease, of the awkwardness suddenly lifting. The fear of not going back to finish unfinished business and staying home.

  Mussalman tyranny was far from over. In fact, apart from a few raids that had made the enemy realize that there was one force with one cause behind the attacks, the land was still firmly under the foreign yoke. A famine had led Jibananda and many other young men to recognize what had been staring at them all the while: effortless subjugation.

  Jibananda quenched his thirst and hoped to look adequately changed and man-like before his sister. He would tell her to take care of the baby, not lose hope and expect his return soon. He would also tell Nimi to tell her sister-in-law, his wife, that she should not worry and that he would be back soon. That was his plan. As was the only concession that he was willing to make: giving in to her demand of carrying a knapsack with some muri moa and a small brick of gur in it. All that didn’t happen. Nimi demanded that he have a proper meal at home.

  It was when he was still protesting with some mumbles that Nimi called out, ‘Boudi, look who’s home! Dada’s …’

  Terrified, Jibananda jumped up, almost tripping himself on his dhuti front, and grabbed his suddenly prancing sister who had balanced the baby in her stick-like arms and pushed her against the lemonless lemon tree, covering her mouth with his hand. Without thinking about the consequences of what would happen if the baby slipped out of Nimi’s arms, he clamped down the ‘mmmmm’s seeping out of his sister’s arrested mouth. He kept his hand there for a brief moment, all the time it took for him to realize that his visit could not really be kept a secret from Shanti.

  Even as Jibananda gave up and moved away, Nimi looked at her brother with eyes that had aged all too much all too soon. She looked down at the squalling child and then again at her bestubbled brother-stranger. Pulling the end of her white sari tightly around her while deftly balancing the baby on her hip, and facing the blazing sun, she said, ‘Dada, you must see Shanti. She’s your wife. I’ll tell her that you’re here and get you some lunch. You can then do what you want.’

  Jibananda wanted to look at some more things, discover some changes as his sister walked away. But all there was to see were things that had already become familiar again in the last few minutes. If they had withheld their inherent power of evoking extreme nostalgia when Jibananda walked into the courtyard, they unleashed this power now that Nimi had uttered Shanti’s name.

  The house on his right was standing as neatly as it had done when he left it. The raised threshold space outside the two rooms still bore decoration marks from the last pujo—the second that Jibananda had been away from. The leaves of the mango tree did not move in the heat, which was something totally normal. The last time he had seen it bear a single fruit was when both his parents were still living. The lemon tree in the distance had grown, but a tale of fruitless growth there too. In effect, nothing had changed.

  Nimi returned alone. It was as if the strained encounter between brother and sister had not taken place at all. She chirped on about the neighbours, the village, Shanti. Rakhsit had become a father four months ago, which ‘actually dispelled all those rumours that he had a problem down there’; Padma had got married to this bloke from a nearby village without her father arranging any wedding ceremony; old hag Indubala had once again been driven out of Harihar Pandit’s house by his wife for ‘corrupting’ her grand-niece, and this time she couldn’t be found. Jibananda held back a sigh. His eyes were still darting about in the direction of the lemon tree and the hut next to it.

  As he polished off the meal before him—dal, daalna, rice and jackfruit—he recognized the luxury of leading two lives. For the duration of his meal and Nimi’s train-rattle gossip, he guiltily thanked the preoccupations of his other life—the need to raid, to plan new raids, to work at the belief, the conviction that gives structure to the most smoky and insubstantial of things. Each descent on a group of Mussalman soldiers did not result in success. But it moved his life some distance away each time from the twittering boredom and rural idiocy of Nischindipur. The public life with the Brothers made Jibananda melt into a crowd, giving him a purpose other than just reading out the scriptures, shaking a bell and thrusting out brass-handled lamps for people to stain their palms with the heat and smoke of the flames and rub it on their heads like unani ointment. The life with Shanti, with Nimi and with the never-changing trees also had a meaning. But it was the kind of meaning that the act of snoring has—air passing through a narrow passage, so make what you will of it.

  He was not allowed to forget the unsaid promise he had made Nimi before his meal. Jibananda emitted a sharp, short burp while his sister poured water on to his hands at the base of the trunk of the mangoless mango tree. As he wiped the water off his face first with his hand and then with the wet gamchha tucked between the bars of the nearby window, he had no memory of the last plan sketched out by Bhabananda and the others of driving Alivardi Khan out of the country. Instead, he was completely occupied by the sight of the white-sari-clad woman emerging from the faraway hut. Her sari was not wrapped around her like Nimi’s was. She was wearing it in a manner that suited a proper woman, with the right stretches and folds.

  The house, the two trees, the hut and the courtyard tilted under the sun. Shanti looked older, quieter, but her dark eyes, now at the closest of quarters, gave the game away.

  ‘Bande Mataram,’ Jibananda uttered to cover his rush of breath.

  She kissed him once on the lips, holding his face with both her hands as if aware of the possibility that it could dissolve any moment. And then she released him.

  Starlight Starbright

  By the time Anandamath was running to packed houses, people were not only coming to various theatres specifically to watch Abani Chatterjee bioscope features, but they had also started to recognize me outside the darkened halls. It was all very wonderful. I was young, at the age when one is prepared to be loved, leading a life I could not have imagined even a year before.

  The most tangible symbol of this state of being was the Model-T that I had purchased. It was a gleaming black rectangle on wheels. The driver, whom Alochhaya had hired, had previously driven an automobile owned by either Mr Samuel Bourne or Mr Charles Shepherd—of the photography firm Bourne & Shepherd—with whom Alochhaya and a few other bioscopes had business tie-ups for the purpose of publicity stills and showcard pictures. The driver, Narsingh, was a proud and scruffy Rajput, who talked so much that the motor’s engine could hardly ever be heard. But because he spoke lengthy monologues in Hindustani or sentences in unintelligible Bengali, he never did bother me.

  As I was being driven down Strand Road one Sunday, with the afternoon Hugli breeze taking my mind off the previous day’s shooting, I decided to treat myself to a bioscope in the Chowringhee area.

  I must have been the oldest person in the theatre that was filled with children and their screams and banter. The show hadn’t started yet, but the orchestra in front seemed to have started the proceedings anyway by striking up one tune after another. The piano kept rising above all the din.

  Experiencing silent movies was anything but a silent experience. As the reel unfolded above one’s head from a half-hidden grotto, the sound of the people amassed in a hall was unmistakable. The chattering and talking were rolled into one ball and bounced off the walls. If you were sitting close to a voluble huddle, the comments somet
imes having little to do with the light show going on in front, you could believe that it is possible to never be alone. Over and above the human babble, there was the music. Depending on the scene, the strings and the rhythm section of the orchestra would measure out life inside the picture palace. People may have forgotten this these days, but silent movies were never ever silent.

  It was a special matinee show at the Palladium exclusively for children. The manager seemed only too happy to see me as he led me to the empty box seat next to the upper stalls. In that circus atmosphere, I could see from my perch some of the older boys below sliding down the front of their seats and chugging secretly on half-smoked cigarettes that they’d collected and straightened out.

  An electric bell sounded and there was a cumulative squeal. A second metallic insect sound turned the hall dark and the monkey-noise became a frenzy—just after which the horn section announced the parting of the curtains, at the same time that the third and final bell announced that the show was starting. The screen lit up, first with a perfect house-sized white rectangle of light, which soon dimmed itself clunkily to show a distant figure walking through a park. I sank into my seat and lit a cigarette.

  The Folly of Mr Tuba was a short animated feature in which a rodent-like man keeps trying to kill himself. Each time, though, he is thwarted by various characters that include a spineless tree, whose main branch bends and touches the ground each time Mr Tuba attempts to hang himself; a depressive dynamite stick, whose tears snuff out the charge; a paranoid bottle of poison, whose contents shrivel up along its upturned base the moment Mr Tuba up-ends it for consumption; and an overly friendly footpath that keeps rushing up to Mr Tuba from below before he can walk all the way down. The last scene shows a faceless, hooded figure with a scythe tapping cigarette ash from its skeletal fingers while Mr Tuba, having given up trying to end his life by now, leans over to kiss his finally-at-ease sweetheart in what zooms out to be a giant airship. We are left with an iris-in on the at-last-happy couple, but not before we catch a tatter of flames in one corner of the airship.

  The audience woke up with a shriek of delight and I too couldn’t help but smile. The lights had flicked on as suddenly as they had gone out some twenty minutes ago. Down below, I could see a few Europeans, teachers no doubt, trying to restore order among their hyperactive flock. Three bell rings later, it would be the main show: Sunnyside, starring Charles Chaplin.

  Just a few years before, along with the Ed Porter Westerns, theatres in the city were getting crowds in with an increasing number of bioscopes from America. Even if most of the newsreels and shorts were still predominantly from England, France and Germany, the American comedy shorts and features, with their French-style hyperactive characters, were becoming more and more popular.

  I had enjoyed the sheer pace of these out-of-breath comedies. I liked Mark Sennett and Marie Dressler. But Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle was the best. I sincerely believed Fatty, especially in the Keystone Cops shorts, was destined to become the human face of the bioscope. For, like him, the bioscope was only about what you saw. Instead of Arbuckle, however, it was the hysterical, gag-a-shot Chaplin who went on to become the biggest draw. Talk about public taste.

  Sitting in the box seat after the yellow lights had blinked off and the white light from the screen was smeared across the theatre like fine chalk dust, I recognized Chaplin playing the same character I had first seen him play four years earlier at the Athena. The young audience below me were guffawing and rolling with laughter nearly every second. The air itself was being punctured with laughter, one volley followed by another followed by another like a lunatic boy going crazy with a sharp pencil and a sheet of paper.

  Chaplin in his brush moustache was an over-utilized farmhand and while his actions were hilarious, his expressions, especially with his kajol-tinted eyes exaggerating each one of them, were what made me sit up and take notice. He was almost as good as Mr Tuba, but he deserved extra credit, for he was not an animated character. I watched him, with the rest of the crowd, add milk to his coffee, milk that was taken straight from the cow’s udder, and fry his breakfast eggs by holding a chicken above the frying pan. These were images doing the talking, the talking that no theatre production had ever thought of doing before.

  It was a little while after Chaplin, the farmhand, had dozed off and entered a dream inhabited by nymphs that I saw one of the ushers, his face reflected by the screen light, walk up towards where I was seated.

  ‘Sorry, Abani-babu. But could you please go downstairs to Mr Evans’s office? He says it’s very important.’

  The usher was perhaps a couple of years older than I, if you overlooked the manner in which he addressed me with outlandish respect. I followed him down to where the door swung open for a brief moment and I was out again in the natural light of the foyer.

  Eddie Evans was the manager of the Palladium and we had met for the first time only some eight or nine months ago, during the screening of a German mythological feature.

  ‘Mr Chatterjee. I’m afraid I just got some bad news. Mahesh Bhowmick has been looking for you. The man he sent has been trying to find you for the last two hours. Someone finally recognized your automobile and chauffeur outside and came into my office.’ Eddie Evans, like all the Anglos I had ever met, talked too much. But unlike in any Sennett or Chaplin bioscope, the torrent of talk made sound. There in the corner of Evans’s poster-covered office room, Ram Bahadur was sitting on his haunches under a framed poster bearing two faces—one of a maliciously smiling man wearing a monocle and the other of a woman who seemed to be finding it painful to smile. Just before I looked down into Ram Bahadur’s dour and nervous face, the very opposite of Chaplin’s in the bioscope I had been watching only moments ago, I read the words on the showcard:

  Carl Laemmle offers

  Stronheim’s Wonder Play

  ‘Blind Husbands’

  Universal-Jewel De Luxe Attraction

  Produced by Stronheim himself

  Before I could even consider recalling any scene from the motion picture I had watched wide-eyed and wide-mouthed with Shombhu-mama just last summer in this very theatre, Ram Bahadur, by this time standing up to his full height, spoke in an unrecognizable, gnarled manner: ‘Tarini-babu has passed away.’

  For the last few days, Tarini Chatterjee had complained of pain in his stomach. Frankly, because his words had increasingly started to sound like the fast gallop of police horses chasing off an unfriendly crowd bearing banners, nobody in the house had really understood what he had been saying. Abala, whose sense of understanding what people in the house were saying was the keenest, had found nothing abnormal in his behaviour during his last few days. Like always, she saw to it that Tarini had his meals and changed into a new set of clothes every day, even though he had long stopped even stepping out of the house.

  Within a week of airing his final round of loud and unintelligible complaints, my father died. Dr Talukdar did not explain his final condition as God’s will. But this neither surprised nor disappointed me. All he mentioned to those sitting around my father’s cocooned body was that a poisoned liver had ended Tarini’s life.

  I mourned Tarini Chatterjee in a befitting manner—by polishing off one of his unfinished bottles of liquor, the contents of which had reached, I realized only then, the dangerous point of tasting like something far more corrosive than just alcohol. Seven days later, after having removed a stubble that had grown nearly as long as the one on my dead father’s face, I was back in front of the camera. Under the reflectors in an open field a few miles outside the city, I was playing the role of a desperate son who bargains his soul with a demon to save the life of his father. Both Mahesh and Horen insisted that the script had been ready weeks before and that the decision to produce the short had been made only the previous Sunday. I wasn’t so sure, being aware that the picture was always scheduled to be made two days after what turned out to be the day of my father’s death.

  Even as I played tricks with
my face and eyes and crept from one angle to another, I kept thinking of only one thing: my buffer against death had been removed. After Tarini, it was my turn. This revelation lent a certain extra desperation to my character’s bid to see that his father remained alive. The short, The Son’s Wager, which was immediately added to the Prahlad Parameshwar screening, went on to become very popular indeed.

  One would have thought that Shabitri Lahiri, because of the tender age at which she got married to Tarini Chatterjee, hardly had a childhood. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when she turned into Shabitri Chatterjee and found herself transported from the Ruritania of Krishnagar to the huff and crackle of the city where she would spend the rest of her life, she refused to become the full-fledged woman that girls are meant to become either overnight or over years. This refusal, like her ability to sidestep awkward or untoward moments and incidents, came as naturally as sweat accompanies heat.

  So while my father was only some five years older than her, Shabitri always seemed some twenty years younger than she was. This anomalous, stretched-out girlhood was not only reflected in her deceptively youthful looks but was also evident, as one was to find out a few days after Tarini Chatterjee’s death, in the ease with which she had managed to fake her comatose state for nearly two and a half years.

  Faking immobility is as difficult as faking physical pain. Or perhaps more. And Shabitri managed to pull off her performance without even Dr Talukdar, a registered physician, catching on. I wondered if her body, not always privy to her thoughts, knew of her great pretence. Her bones and muscles, lying there in one position barring for the occasional roll-over, may at some point have atrophied, innocently, by the sheer victory of gravity over her body. But what of her mind? Did she move when no one could see her? Did she move with extra vigour during the night, just to compensate her sedentary performance? One will never know.