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 adolescent 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.

So that became the routine—not the Ahiritolla school that was two stops away, but the rest. Every Monday, Tuesday and Friday—barring special days that included pujos, birthdays and ceremonies—I would land up at the Moitras’. This amounted to crossing the corridor and peering through the Moitra household’s door curtain and then entering. I was being educated at home, a bit like Rabindranath, really, if you come think of it. But my education was to be a couple of notches more radical than the one doled out at the Jorasanko household. I had one great advantage over young, impressionable Rabi Thakur: for me, Abani Chatterjee, the bioscope was close at hand.

To see moving images—of men and women, of elephants and horses, of cities and landscapes, of breaking waves and creeping fires, of made-up objects and creatures—projected on a flat, white screen or wall (which disappears the moment it’s put to use) is a confusion of the senses. The bioscope pictures arrived as a miracle that took place on a regular basis at some improvised space near us.

Whether it was inside converted playhouses or within the gelatinous walls of those travelling tents whose holes and rips required regular stitching, we knew that this was something different. Something beyond a simple projection of light depicting things we knew we weren’t going to see when we stepped out of those old, rudimentary motion picture theatres. And yet, the phantom people on the screen, drained dry of speech and colour, weren’t complete strangers to us. And it turned out we weren’t complete strangers to those phantom people either.

So on that particular evening when I, a sixteen-year-old, by now moderately appreciative of things cinematographic, was caught wet-handed plastering a showcard that proclaimed an evening’s entertainment at the Elphinstone Picture Palace on the walls of the Alochhaya Theatre, I had my future in the pictures already flickering before my eyes.

And why shouldn’t I? The Great Performing Life of Abani Chatterjee had been running day after day, night after night, in the smoky and raucous picture palace of my head for quite some time. Apart from the fantastic Emile Cohl (I had watched his Nothing Is Impossible for Man six times one year, twice from behind the projector), George Méliès and Roscoe Arbuckle, people like Amritlal Bose were becoming proper proper nouns for me. The last name belonged to a local self-styled ‘player, playwright and actor-manager’ whom Shombhu-mama had seen visiting the Elphinstone, successfully pushing Mr Madan to screen his biopics, The Death of Nelson, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and Gladstone’s Funeral Procession, short features that weren’t quite as bad as their elegiac tone might suggest.

Years later, I heard about how the first bioscope audience in Paris had swerved and screamed and ducked when a cinematographic train rushed towards them during the screening of the Lumieres’ The Arrival of a Train. The crowd here reacted very differently the day the motion pictures came to town. This Shombhu-mama had overheard Amritlal-babu telling Mr Madan in the office room at the Elphinstone, so it couldn’t have been just a rumour.

‘As Nelson’s carriage creaked along the cobbled streets of London … by creaked, of course, I mean that you could see the creaking … everyone started clapping, whistling, shouting. It was all absolutely spontaneous … although I did recommend having one or two members of the staff start the proceedings and letting everyone take it from there. The stalls at the Star went wild.’

Madan heard him out, listening to the details, calculating ticket prices if and when Elphinstone were to show bioscope shorts between two, maximum three ‘live’ acts—as if motion pictures were apparitions that needed to be quarantined from live acts. While the early bioscopes were shown in between a play and a stage performance, it was now becoming increasingly clear that moving pictures were going to be the main attraction and, very soon, the primary draw. If, at the turn of the century, two shorts ran after a brief comic drama about effeminate husbands and before a rousing performance by Miss Nelly Mountcastle who danced for twenty minutes with her pet python, by the time Shombhu-mama was chief projectionist at the Elphinstone, the bioscope provided the longest segment of the evening’s entertainment.

With theatre in this city becoming increasingly unfit for family consumption, more and more entrepreneurs started to look towards the moving pictures as a substitute rather than a supplement to theatre. The initial razzle-dazzle and mindless hurrahs never vanished, of course. But slowly and surely, the bioscope became less of a carnival and more of a gummy mixture of vaudeville and art. Which was around the time I unofficially joined the Elphinstone Picture Palace as a part-time publicist, thanks to Shombhu-mama.

When the burly Ram Bahadur caught me by the scruff of my neck pasting Elphinstone showcards on Alochhaya walls, I had, for some bowel-churning moments, thought that my reel had finally snapped. With no schoolgoer’s halo to provide me some middle-class relief, an alcohol-soaked father who, for many, was in league with the city’s seditionists fighting a low-intensity war against a well-meaning ruling class, and a mother who was being regularly tasted by a physician, I was ready for the worst. As Ram Bahadur held on to my shirt, I started to think of ways I could get out of the mess. I could play up the fact that my father and mother were a drunkard and an invalid respectively. But that would have been facts already known to Ram Bahadur and the Alochhaya management. And the burly gatekeeper was not paid to show pity.

The other ploy was to blame the seditionists. ‘A man had come to our house and told my uncle that if I didn’t put up these posters on the walls of all the theatres in the city, he would make life very difficult for all of us.’ The only problem with that approach was that neither Pundalik nor A Dead Man’s Child that were being advertised on the showcards was remotely seditious and therefore worth any vague sympathy.

Ram Bahadur didn’t speak a word as he lifted me and carried me around the main entrance of Alochhaya and entered a narrow passageway on the side of the theatre that was so dark that I thought that we had entered a bioscope show. Even at this hour, the entrance was as deserted as a midday village. A door creaked open and I was deposited inside a room that was illuminated just enough for the people inside to conduct basic activities like counting ticket sales and talking about such activities.

A clean-shaven man, who seemed to have his eyes propped up by hoods from below, looked up from his desk as the door opened. A few seconds later, as my eyes had adjusted to the light, I noticed a thin line of hair running between his nose and upper lip.

‘Yes, Ram Bahadur. What is it?’

I staggered into the light, opening my eyes wide and at the same time keeping my eyelids taut enough to give the impression that I was an innocent boy who had been mistakenly hauled up for some petty, silly thing by a mindless ex-wrestler.

‘You’re Tarini Chatterjee’s son, aren’t you?’ he said, pointing the nib of a pen straight towards me.

He knew who I was. That immediately put me at a disadvantage.

‘I caught him putting up bioscope posters on our walls. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to do something like that. The last time round, I let him off with a warning. You remember, when the mem had come and people were giving speeches. But this time, you’ve got to deal with him to teach those bioscope people a lesson!’

Ram Bahadur certainly got his facts right, although I thought he was exaggerating the whole affair of ‘the last time’.

‘So, Abani? Is your uncle still cranking the handle at the Elphinstone?’ Mahesh Bhowmick, the owner of Alochhaya, asked me calmly. A remarkably innocuous question, I thought with relief.

My first entry into Alochhaya was prompted neither by theatre nor by bioscope. It was Bikash who had first caught a glimpse of the showcard as we were taking our usual roundabout way back home from school. I was still going to school then. Alochhaya was not on the way home. But if one wished to delay things a little and hang out for a while after school, there was the triple choice of the pond, the Bohra Muslim cemetery and the Alochhaya theatre.

It wasn’t just one showcard. There were scores of the same poster slapped around all over the area, some pointlessly pasted over others on light poles, walls, postboxes and shopfronts. The Demand for Home Rule, it read. But what caught our eye was the darkened-to-toast lithographic picture of a lady who stood there in the centre of the showcard, oblivious to all the letters swirling like a pathetically made noose around her. She wore a black dress with frills running down the front, and her hair was done in such a fashion that it could have been mistaken for the frills on her dress.

Her eyes looked away from the viewer. In fact, it wasn’t as if she was looking at anyone or anything at all. Instead, she seemed to be lost looking at an idea, her eyes taking on that slightly unbalanced look of a Lakkhi Owl, a bored but arrogant look that said nothing about what she was seeing. She looked as if she was overlooking rather than looking. But most peculiarly, her left hand (with a large, dark ring on her finger) was raised up to her right breast, a bit higher actually. And that was what made her look so other-worldly and, dare I say, desirable to a sixteen-year-old boy with no real knowledge of the fluttering, flapping inflammatory world of women.

‘It says “All welcome”,’ Rona pointed out.

I couldn’t say anything. I was transfixed by her pose. She looked like one of those divinities whose picture comes attached to a wall calendar that marks not only the days of the week, but also the special days of the year. The mem, however, was prettier, warmer, more approachable than any calendar goddess, and this despite the fact that each and every calendar woman flashes a coquettish smile.

‘If it says everyone is welcome, then we can go in …’ I trailed off as I noticed her curled fingers.

The show was slated for late afternoon. So we came back, Rona and Bikash fabricating some story about going out to watch an annual procession as it passed through the main crossing. (Their parents always seemed to need an explanation for their actions.) The show was not scheduled for the usual theatre hours. Which meant that this would be more than just the usual theatrical performance that we sneaked into from time to time. Alochhaya didn’t show bioscopes. Which meant that The Demand for Home Rule could be—going by its protagonist—a foreign dance drama.

Dance dramas, at least those I had the misfortune of witnessing, left me mentally shivering like a malaria patient. People sang, writhed and pitter-pattered in and out of the stage with the musicians croaking along on their instruments. How this could entertain anyone but the very, very lonely eluded me. But this show promised to be somewhat different. It had a European lady in it and, anticipating a free show at Alochhaya, we hoped for the best. Usually, European actors played in the European theatres. But if Alochhaya had managed to get one, this was bound to be something special that the papers would write about later that week. The woman, I guessed, couldn’t be less than world famous. After all, she didn’t look Anglo; she looked the mem she was.

When children are moderately old enough, they have more than a vague idea of the kind of person they will fall in love with. This image stays with them until one gives up waiting (the duration of waiting being different for different people). I had the image of such a person lodged inside my head. Unfortunately, I still have it at this doddering age. It was the woman on the showcard.

Walking towards Alochhaya, I grew more and more agitated. I was worried that something so alluring would culminate in something toweringly disappointing—like the disappointment that crushes you when you find yourself seated next to an ugly woman. But the poster-woman seemed to be more flesh, more blood than the women whom I had seen either cooking, swabbing, lying prone like death or performing hysterically on stage. This woman could only be of the bioscopes.

‘Are you sure this is open to everyone?’ asked Bikash as we approached the gate.

‘Well, what do you think “All welcome” means?’ snorted Rona.

But Bikash did have a point. The usual crowd going into Alochhaya was a mix of the raucous and the gentlemanly. There were those who came in a gang, loud and all excited, as if their brains had started to malfunction the closer they got to a theatre. Then there was the dignified lot, who either came alone or in a small collective, looking towards the people they considered louts and philistines with pained shame and practised derision.

Today’s crowd was different. It seemed to be formed of the louts and the gentlemen as well as a third type: men who were walking with reserve as if the future of Man was tucked inside their inner pockets. These people, who formed the bulk of the crowd that was entering, walked as if they were more comfortable marching. This made them appear like gentlemen who were trying to hide the fact that they had soiled their undershorts that lay below their astoundingly white dhutis.

‘Odd crowd for a musical,’ said Rona.

‘It’s a demand, not a musical,’ retorted Bikash.

‘What happens in a demand?’

‘I guess people ask for things and …’

‘You think there’ll be songs?’

Despite the slight confusion about what would be on offer, we walked past the heavy, old curtains in the foyer. There was nothing that suggested that there were people who had come with a purpose different from ours. Everyone else was walking in calmly, and the few ushers, usually all energetic with their torches and I-am-the-authority look, simply stood there.

Be that as it may, we did see the towering figure of Ram Bahadur standing in front of one of the two entrances that led into the hall on the ground floor. With his handle-bar moustache and trademark vest-meets-dhuti waistline, he still looked as if he was guarding the mouth of a treasure cove. In a way, it was reassuring.

‘Let’s wait till his end gets a bit more crowded,’ I said, moving towards the side where a serious dark cloud of mosquitoes was hovering above the heads of every person passing under it.

When the right moment arrived—and it always does—we turned our shoulders sideways and melted inside. Considering that Alochhaya was noted for its ‘mature’ productions, this was the first time any of us had ventured into the bowels of the theatre. But I didn’t let the other two know that I, too, was an Alochhaya virgin. After all, they knew that my uncle worked in the Elphinstone, and by virtue of that advantage, all theatres of entertainment, frolic and art were supposed to be familiar to me.

‘Come on then, let’s go to the front,’ I said with mustered authority.

We quietly sat in the third row from the front, close enough from the stage that rose before us like an altar and far enough for three kids in a crowd of grown-ups to be left unnoticed. The house wasn’t full. Neither was it empty. Despite the shutters on the wooden windows letting the afternoon light stream inside a place that usually favours darkness and artificial light, the scattered audience was energetic. Interspersed with coughs and some vendors making their sales pitch, there was a general hubbub that circulated around the theatre, climbing up to the high ceiling like hot air and descending like unconfirmed gossip. It was nearly half past five and the occasional office-goer was creeping in, pushing the curtain aside and settling down for some free entertainment before making his way home.

Up on the stage, the curtains had been left drawn apart. It was as if we had entered in the middle of a scene. There was a medium-sized table with two vases clogged with rajanigandha, and five chairs all lined up in a row. So at least we knew how a ‘demand’ looked: pitifully boring.

As we waited for the show to begin, I looked around. The gentleman next to me glanced towards us and then looked away. I saw him leisurely stub his cigarette out in the small metal drawer attached to the back of the seat in front of him. There were two men in front, the kind responsible for the future of Man, talking away. Or were they actors practising their lines before going up on stage?

‘Tilak is absolutely right. How long do the Moderates expect people to wait? Last year I heard them saying that they were definitely working something out with London. Well, I’ll be damned if it’s ever happening.’

‘But you know why Chittaranjan had to backtrack and grovel so much? Because of people like Aurobindo Ghose. It’s all very well to talk of direct action and all those things he’s learnt from England. But it doesn’t really help when Tilak is already getting some results with the demand for Home Rule. Now Nivedita’s also talking of Home Rule.’

Why were they sitting in the second row with the audience when they should be on the stage?

‘The question is whether it’s good for us to have Home Rule.’

‘Well, of course, it’s good. We ruling our own country, what else can anyone ask for?’

‘It won’t be people like you and me ruling the country, my friend. Not unless we all become paan-munching businessmen. Think about it. Who are the ones already moving in and doing the sweet talk with the Viceroy? Who are the ones who have their homes and families in the new capital? Who will benefit by Home Rule?’

‘Not us?’

‘No.’

At this point, he looked sideways and lowered his voice.

‘The Lalas! Everything will be taken over by Marwaris! You think they’re not waiting quietly in the wings for Home Rule?’

‘I don’t know. But tell me, how can London take Annie Besant seriously? She’s into theosophy and all those notions about ectoplasm and universal suffrage. How can she seriously convince the Viceroy and the India Office that Home Rule is what is needed when she herself is from London?’

‘Isn’t she Irish?’

‘No, she’s English.’

By this time, some people had walked on to the stage purposefully. The hall, as far as theatre halls go, didn’t have a very high ceiling. But that didn’t in any way hinder the collective murmur around the closed space building up into a collective sound that could have easily been steam-operated. As the stage began to fill up, with one, two, three, four and finally five people, the smoke-flapping sound subsided until all one heard were staccato gunshots that were coughs mortally afraid of silence.

‘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 for 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 not 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.

‘Abani, you familiar with Prahlad’s lines?’

Behind the stout, short man who asked me that question out of the blue, I could see a phalanx of people in costume, their faces caked with make-up, waiting with bated breath for my answer. The moment I told Horen that I knew nearly every line of Prahlad by heart—naturally, given my job as a prompter—I was quickly whisked away by more than a pair of hands into the dressing room, a room in which I had only a few minutes ago left a small bottle of brandy as required by the Prahlad-to-be Ronobir Banerjee.

It turned out that Ronobir had met with an accident. A tram car had knocked him down as he was about to negotiate an open drain. And while he was out of immediate danger, one of the horses had trampled over his right hand and he was certainly not fit to be on stage for at least a few weeks.

There was some talk of getting Barin Saha, who was playing the irascible snitch Narad, to step in as Prahlad. But that was impractical. Narad had the bulk of the songs to sing, and Barin was in the play not because of his thespian skills, but for his incredibly nasal singing voice that was quite the rage in those days. In any case, Barin, a forty-year-old man, playing the role of a boy had already been cause for some debate when the casting had first been discussed. There was no time to go into all that again.

Sitting in Ronobir’s chair and propped up to the right level by a few uncomfortable pillows, I was given emergency tips by Horen and company—rules about always facing the audience and not running into the lines of other characters (a classic prompter’s problem).

‘There’s nothing to really worry about. The main scenes are going to be carried by Palash [Palash Mitra, playing the blustering demon king Hiranyakashipu—interestingly, wearing a blond wig] and Abinash [Abinash Chatterjee, playing both the benevolent Vishnu and his sin-avenging avatar Narasingha]. They will take care of the climax. And there’s Durga to carry you through most of your scenes.’

The truth was that whatever was being said into my ears didn’t really register. I knew that there was indeed little to be afraid of. Today’s show was primarily for the benefit of the camera, which didn’t require me to say my lines anyway. Next to me, but seemingly a whole theatre hall away, was Durga Devi, staring into the mirror and, occasionally, patting her hair down in the thicket of false gold head-jewellery that she was wearing. She looked both competent and kind, and I trusted her to ‘carry me through’.

Suddenly, Durga became the focus of all my attention. The make-up man told me thrice to look straight, but my head kept swivelling to take another look at her through the rest of those present in the room. She seemed transformed; I had seen her like this only once before. Where? I ached to remember where. And then I did. I had seen her playing the unfortunate Elokeshi in Elokeshi & the Mahant during a clandestine outing to the theatre with the boys.

‘Don’t worry too much about the lines. Just make sure you’re performing right.’ That was the last bit of advice Horen passed on to me before disappearing into the wings, signalling rather dramatically for the curtains to be raised.

I was not required to be on the stage for the first twenty minutes. As I kept watching the performance from the side, I could only marvel at how exquisite Durga Devi was as Kayadhu, Prahlad’s mother, Hiranyakashipu’s queen. Yes, there was something different about her tonight. There was less of that wooden movement of previous nights; more life on her face and in her eyes.

As a stage actress, Durga had yet to achieve the dizzying popularity of other ladies like Sushilabala, Basantakumari, Norisundari and Ranisundari. These were women who started their professional careers as prostitutes and courtesans—words that meant little to me then, and I was intrigued by my mother’s hushed-tone condemnations when she told my still-responding father about our neighbour Nirmal-babu’s ‘unhealthy addiction to the theatre and those prostitutes on stage’. From what I could gather by the time I was more familiar with the entertainment world, the entry on stage of women like Ranisundari was greeted with blasts of the shahnai from the orchestra and approving hoots and whistles from the audience. This happy commotion continued through the time these ladies delivered their thunderous lines drenched in tears. Their very appearance in the middle of a play was a small theatrical phenomenon by itself.

‘They’re screechers. Pure and simple screechers,’ Shombhu-mama would say whenever the subject of any of these actresses came up in the form of a newspaper report or part of a general discussion from behind the bioscope machine.

‘But you must admit they ooze theatrical passion, Shombhu,’ one of his hair-combed-back friends had said one evening, leaning against the front wall of our house just as I was about to unbutton my shorts and urinate from the second floor.

‘Rubbish! It’s Girish Ghosh who’s made it impossible to say a word against those banshees. They were better off at Boubajar with their arm-flailing, bangle-shaking caterwauling.’

So Shombhu agreed with his sister Shabitri. These women on the stage were up to no good. I felt relieved that I was no fool to think so on my own. But Durga was different. In the few productions I had seen her from the wings, her entry would bring about a hush. Coughs from the seats could be heard suggesting a need for attention. Her beauty when mixed with her words and gestures demanded the cigarette and cheroot smoke in the whole theatre to settle down. Even the shahnai and violins heard what she had to say.

And I was going to join Durga on the stage.

‘Abani, when you go out there on the stage, imagine you’re underwater, where you can’t see anybody and nobody can see you except the characters on the stage. There is no sound in the water. There is only the light. So all you need to do, all you have to do is be seen, your face and your eyes. Use the light, okay? I need you to use the light, underwater. Okay?’

I knew what Shombhu-mama was saying. In my costume of white cloth wrapped and tucked across my scrawny body, I muttered an okay. When he let go of my shoulder, he seemed to throw me into water. I turned one last time to look at him and then disappeared into the darkness of the wings and beyond.

Twenty-odd minutes later I walked onto the stage. Everything below me—those bobbing heads, those eyes, those faces, those curling smoke ribbons from the bobbing heads, the stagelight bouncing off those faces—disappeared. If I did see anything at all outside the stage it was a partially illuminated figure standing not too far behind the man with the dhol on a raised platform in the orchestra pit, who seemed to be hiding behind a camera. There was a corrugated strip of smoke curling up and breaking, curling up and breaking behind the man with the dhol and behind the inhaling camera. With Durga and I sharing the stage and Shombhu’s sturdy 1913 Éclair-Gillon Grand in front I felt the glare of the shadows and light. I was speaking through the pupils of my eyes, darkened double-fold by the paleness of my face. I was no longer standing on the stageboards. I was being sucked in and faithfully etched on to nitrate to be replayed from the distance. I was underwater and Prahlad. The lines didn’t matter.