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 sometimes 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.

Shabitri may well have succeeded in her pretence, her life’s great game (no, I wouldn’t call it deception). But her own blood betrayed her, as one’s blood usually does. It was I who shattered the night-quietness with one single slingshot of disturbed air: ‘Ma!’

I remember the evening the way one remembers a few-seconds-ago fall by the painful bump on one’s head. I had been unable to sleep, and looking out from the balcony into the courtyard that was bathed in weak moonlight, I struck a match to light my cigarette. Suddenly, in that yellow flash of sulphur that normally travels not farther than a few millimetres, I saw an outline swiftly changing in the line of my vision. I chugged on my cigarette, briefly suspending a sequence with Durga and me in a future bioscope, and walked back into my room.

I made it a point to make my departure from the balcony a little more voluble than I normally would, and then, taking my slippers off, tiptoed back to the door of my room. Going by my instincts, it would have been any time between two-thirty and three-thirty at night. Peering from behind the door curtains of my room, I only saw the balcony railings, complete with two motionless saris hanging from them, illuminated by the aforesaid moonlight. There was no one there.

Watching bioscopes and being in them give people an extra ability to notice lines of light and shade. Light directors and cameramen notice this most keenly, but everybody in the bioscope business has the ability. Standing behind the curtain, noticing nothing but a still-life, I was quite certain I had seen someone in the tiny flare of the matchstick. I don’t know what made me do it, but after some healthy minutes, I slunk out from behind the curtains, careful not to throw any shadows, tiptoed a little distance down the long balcony, and stood outside my mother’s room.

During the day, Shabitri’s door was kept open, with only the curtains blocking a direct view. But ever since electricity entered the Chatterjee household, the curtains would flutter like slothful moths at the wind churned up by the metal fins of the new ceiling fans. At night, the complete blockage of view was disrupted every few seconds by these sighing electric-fan-fuelled curtains. I stood outside my mother’s door, making sure that beyond the tip of my nose nothing could be seen from inside.

The first thing that I thought as I fixed my limited vision on to the darkened interior was that somehow Dr Talukdar had entered my mother’s room. But before I could play out what I would do once I found the doctor inside, I saw a movement. This time it was a clear and crisp movement, a vertical line of blackness cutting through the rest of the darkness and moving ever so slowly.

‘Abani, is that you?’

It was my mother’s voice and I was petrified. A split second later, the fear vanished, as I realized that it was my father who had died and was liable to haunt me, not my immobile but living mother.

‘Abani, quiet now. Come here.’ It had been her raised hand, gently waving, that I had seen earlier.

‘Ma!’ It was one sharp sound that came out of my throat, like a single loud clang from the nearby temple. It’s remarkable how in the deepest end of the night, unless you keep on creating the sound, a loud but second-short racket can go completely unnoticed. During all the months of bombs being flung by coffee-fuelled seditionists across the city in the dead of night, no one actually reported hearing any blast. And yet, the slightest report of crackers, made somehow louder by its duration, had the ability to irritate a whole citizenry.

My quick and frantic burst of words—gibberish, really—that followed were mere hoarse whispers that melted away in the moonlit courtyardscape. Shabitri sprung up from her bed and, in a mock-stern manner that wasn’t at all feeble, whispered, ‘Quiet, Abani! Keep quiet and come in at once!’

In the same firm but familiar voice, she told me to shut the door behind me. As I waited for the darkness of the room to settle before me so that I wouldn’t knock down objects, she was already speaking, more normally now. I even detected a girlish glee in her voice that I had long forgotten.

‘Surprised? Sit here next to me and be very, very quiet.’

Even if I could only see the vaguest contours of her face, I could make out that her eyes were open and that she was smiling.

‘How are you able to open your eyes? How can you move?’ I was, as you would expect, flabbergasted.

In the shortest two hours of my life, I heard Shabitri Chatterjee explain how and why she had decided to stop moving in the presence of other people. And to make it absolutely credible, she had stopped moving even when she was alone. It wasn’t only my father’s downward spiral and the accompanying grief that had made Shabitri pretend to be immobile to perfection. There were many other reasons which, she told me, ‘you’re too young to know about, Abani’.

It was only in these last few days, after news of Tarini’s death had trickled up from his room to hers, that she had started to feel restless. She still didn’t want to give up what she called ‘the luxury of just existing and doing nothing’, however, so she stirred herself out of complete immobility only briefly, and only when everyone had fallen asleep—or—as in my father’s case—died.

Even as she filled me in about her twenty-six months of ‘mind-wandering’, talking in mirthful detail not only about the immense will power that was required to refrain from waving away mosquitoes and scratching mosquito bites, but also the discipline required to become comfortable with the horror of urinating and passing faeces in bed, all I could think of was her not intervening and putting a stop to Dr Talukdar’s activities. But sons cannot ask their mothers to clear up matters such as this. So I listened quietly to her telling me about the supremacy of the mind over the body, and how when one pretends something down to its minutest details, one starts successfully lying to oneself. And that once this happens, it stops being a lie.

‘And you become what you pretend to be,’ she said, gripping my fingers that must have still smelt of freshly burnt tobacco.

She only said it once and that too almost as if in passing, but I figured that if she didn’t want anyone to know her little secret, I wouldn’t be the one to let it out. Which makes it even more awkward for me now, some thirty-five years after that night, to talk about her pretence, considering that it is also thirty-five years after her death, for only a fortnight after we talked in her room, my mother Shabitri passed away in her sleep. It was as sudden as her fall and I still think I did the right thing by not telling anyone, not Shombhu-mama, not Abala, not the pink-tongued Dr Talukdar, about her big secret. I just wish she had cleared the bit about her allowing—for it was an allowance—the doctor to use her body in the fashion that he had over months, and possibly years. She could have explained why in a matter-of-fact tone that may not have left me witless.

But in a way, I’m glad she didn’t. For sons don’t expect their mothers to shed any light on such matters. It’s just not right.

Around this time, there was another departure. None of us at Alochhaya had expected Shombhu-mama to actually leave the city for good. He was, of course, always talking about moving to Bombay to make pictures of his own, motion pictures that wouldn’t be stifled under the ‘Lalji philosophy of always catering rubbish to the rabble’. It would be wrong to think, though, that Shombhu-mama didn’t appreciate the public—what he called the ‘audience’. After all, it was he who kept telling everyone that if there’s one thing that mustn’t be forgotten while producing bioscopes it’s that bioscopes are made for the eyes, not for empty air. But he was deeply suspicious of Lalji clinically discussing what the public wanted—‘what the public are preferring’—before venturing into a new production.

‘He’s racist. He has something against Bengalis, it’s bloody obvious.’

Shombhu-mama was also getting increasingly frustrated stuck behind the camera and not doing some Horen-Ray-style megaphone-shouting of his own. What made him sink deeper into his own comforting puddle of pity was that he knew the craft of light exposures, camera speed, lens sizes and life in the cutting room better than anyone else at Alochhaya and yet he was still not recognized as being ready for directorship.

He had heard that J.F. Madan, his old employer, was besotted by directors from Bombay. This trend would permeate to other studios including Alochhaya and that would be the end of any chance at all of Shombhu from Krishnagar making the grade. Bombay was clearly on his mind when he burst out of an elaborate indoor set one day after the director had said that any superimpositions, double exposures or other camera trickery would ‘ruin the tone of this bioscope’.

This time, in a fit of furrow-munching depression, Shombhu spared the person he believed to be the source of all his problems: Lalji Hemraj Haridas. Instead, he railed on about people I had never heard him gnash his teeth about before.

‘That Tilak is a fool! Gandhi didn’t get elected in the Subjects Committee of the Congress and he’s bent the rules to get him in. And this Gandhi wants to make Hindustani the language of India and turn us all into Marwaris. What next? All of us turning vegetarian?’

But I don’t think creative frustration alone was the reason Shombhunath Lahiri upped and left town one fine day.

One evening, after meeting up with him outside the Elphinstone, we went to the Dilkhusha for some kabiraji and mutton cutlets. Shombhu-mama, for some convoluted reason he had once given me, refused to travel in my automobile. I suspect it had something to do with his theory that ‘luxuries make people soft and destroy civilizations’. So I sent Narsingh and the Model-T back, while we walked our way to the nearby Dilkhusha.

As we ate our kashundi-dipped and onion-cucumber-beet-accompanied morsels of meat, a gaggle of chattering young men sitting at the table next to us suddenly stopped talking. One of them, with thin, generously oiled hair plastered to his skull, looked intensely at me. By now, I was used to people recognizing me in public. But this stare was hostile. They looked like students—not the shirt-trousers sort, but the kind who made a point by wearing their dhutis and panjabis as if they were banners.

‘You know, Abani, there’s a rumour that the city is flush with Australian money. Here, I found this in my pocket after I had bought paan from the shop yesterday,’ Shombhu-mama said, and took out a small quarter-anna coin and placed it on the table.

‘It’s a quarter-anna coin.’

‘Flip it over,’ he said.

The profile of George V looked familiar enough, with the beard and a tiny elephant depicting the Empire of India dangling on a chain from the royal neck. The words hugging the rim of the coin—‘George V King Emperor’—also looked reassuring enough.

‘Flip it,’ Shombhu-mama repeated, as he crushed his cigarette into the battered ashtray that lay between us. Instead of the usual ‘One Quarter Anna’ and ‘India 1916’ below a dividing short line on the other side, the words ‘One Half Penny’ and ‘Commonwealth of Australia 1916’ was inscribed on the metal surface.

I looked up at Shombhu-mama.

‘I have a feeling that the government is planning to merge all the dominions into one country.’

‘But why Australia?’

‘Because it’s one of the biggest countries in the Empire and it’s full of Englishmen. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

Shombhu started explaining how the coin on the table in front of us and many more like it were being made in the City Mint. He had a friend who knew someone who had a tea shack in front of the mint. He had apparently found himself with a whole stash of ‘Australian’ coins. According to Shombhu’s friend—who knew the tea shack person—it was part of a much bigger conspiracy by the authorities to redistribute money.

‘The next step is to redistribute people across the Empire,’ said my uncle before starting to chew on the crumb-fried stub that forms the handle of a mutton cutlet. As he burbled on, I saw the three student-types get up and move towards the door. One of them, the one who had been staring at me, frowned. All of them left.

The Dilkhusha, for all its size, has a single tapering entrance—not a wide, open one like Niranjan or Baishakhi. Shombhu had gone to the restaurant’s corner where a wash basin awaited him. As he was coming towards me, shaking his hands to dry them, and his face showing signs of the pleasure one attains after an oily, carnivorous meal, I cleared the bill. Without sitting down again, Shombhu said that we should be on our way home. It was already twenty past nine.

This was a time when the trams were moderately crowded, less full of bodies than even an hour before, but not as near-empty as they would become an hour later. A tram, unlike a train, with which the Chatterjee family was more familiar, was a benevolent vehicle. It travelled at a luxurious speed and did so without making its passengers feel that they were not part of the immediate surroundings. Its pace was like Shombhu-mama drawling ‘One one thousand, two one thousand’ aloud as he rotated the camera’s handle, cranking things down to 14 or 16 frames a second in an even, exact speed—unless he needed to slow things down for a comic sequence.

Neither of us got a seat. The next coach was practically empty, and inviting, but being ‘Ladies Only’ we couldn’t take up the offer. Hanging on to the wooden handles, looking like a lazy Christ with my wrists wrapped around them, I saw the city clank past me frame by frame. Some fifteen years had passed since the first electric trams had started running. Now, there were no more of those forever collapsing, constantly defecating Waler horses pulling tram cars. Like the bioscope, the tram I was travelling in was a smooth, astounding welding of technology and aesthetics.

It was time for us to get down. By the time I saw Shombhu-mama extricate himself from the tram-mouth tangle, I was already facing a familiar street.

Adjusting his shirt, Shombhu said, ‘Crowded for a weekday, isn’t it?’

Walking towards the mouth of the lane to our house, I was about to say something innocuous, when I saw two men with halos on their heads walking briskly towards us. A more careful glance revealed that there were no halos; their hair was simply bathed in oil and the otherwise unilluminating streetlight was bouncing off it.

That was also when I noticed the chalk mark on the back of Shombhu-mama’s shirt. In the straggling hurricane lamplight from the paan shop we had just walked past, the white mark on the white shirt looked yellow. Even in the receding light, the chalk mark stood out like an ink blot.

‘Shombhu-mama, there’s a mark on your shirt.’

I was about to brush it off, when he walked back towards the paan shop, and turned to look at what I was talking about in the small mirror hanging in the shop. His face changed in shape as well as in quality as he did this. The blood inside its well-defined contours seemed to stop flowing. His face turned taut and pale. The barely visible scrawl on his shirt was in the shape of the figure ‘8’. It was only after I looked at Shombhumama’s terror-stricken face that I recognized the sign.

Here I must digress. For a little history that will better explain Shombhu-mama’s terror and his subsequent departure from the late Tarini’s and Shabitri’s household, from the city, and from my bioscope life. Sometime in 1904 when the government announced its plan to divide the province into a neat half, an anti-Partition movement began. I vaguely recall my father, then still a trusted employee of the East Indian Railway, lecturing visitors like Nirmal-babu from next door with considerable passion about how ‘criminals’ were on the loose, and how these lumpen Bengali youngsters were just ‘pretending to do something noble and heroic, when all they are are scheming murderers and pilfering thieves’. It became apparent only much later that my father was not alone in holding such an opinion.

Pankaj Pal Chaudhuri, the head of the Pal Chaudhuri family—at whose mansion I saw one of my first bioscopes—and the driving force behind the very successful United Jute Company, received a letter in January 1910, which summed up what these ‘swadeshi nationalists’ were really up to:

Respected Pal Chaudhuri-babu,

On the occasion of the 1^st of Baishakh, we wish you a happy and prosperous year ahead. As you must be already aware, six honorary officers of our Finance Department have taken a loan of Rs 9,658-1-5 from you and have deposited the amount in the office noted above on your account to fulfil our great aim. The sum has been entered in our cash book in your name at 5 per cent per annum.

As we thank you for your generous gesture, we also think it wise to remind you that the Government of the United Republic of Bengal will not permit anyone in your family to enjoy your enormous wealth if you were at any time forced to co-operate with the Government of India authorities. For it is our understanding that it would be better if the rich men of the country, like your honourable self, subscribe monthly, quarterly and half-yearly amounts to the GURB Finance Secretariat.

Once again, we wish you a joyous and profitable new year. Thank you for your continued support.

Yours sincerely,

Finance Secretary,

Government of the United Republic of Bengal (GURB)

While this was all very dramatic, it was also baffling. Things became clear a whole six months after the letter landed on Pankaj-babu’s desk, when six men forced their way into the accounts department of the United Jute Company. Between them, they had one pipe gun that hadn’t looked very menacing, but no one wanted to take a chance. Badal Biswas, the chief accountant, was there at the United Jute Company office when the robbers appeared. He later told Pal Chaudhuri with a wan look, ‘They were young. And they were very polite.’ That was all he could say about them.

The six had walked out with more than nine and a half thousand rupees, threatening Biswas and others at the site of the crime not to call the police or else … Pal Chaudhuri had to go to some length to see to it that news of the robbery was not published in the newspapers. His business depended a lot on reputation. If anyone started to think that the United Jute Company had become a terrorist-funding operation, it could mean the end of his business. So he did what he was told to do in the letter—he kept quiet.

Such blatant criminal activities were gradually linked to violent terror actions. There were stray bombings (the handmade bombs mostly landing in ponds or puddles without going off), shootings (in which no one was shot, only ricochets ricocheted) and a general sense of foreboding in the city. This fear was not overbearing. Life went on, but unclear unrest hung in the air like the moon during daylight—present and nearly invisible. Only after an ‘action’ would this be turned temporarily into minor, private panic. Then it would subside again and return to being the background migraine it was. In the case of Tarini Chatterjee, the ‘terrorists’ just provided him with another excuse to speak bitterly about the country’s youth. By the way, it was my father who had coined the term ‘bhadralok loafer criminal class’. He was thrilled when it became a catchphrase in all the English newspapers.

But things quietened down considerably after 1911, partly because the partition decision was reversed, and partly because the hooligans were quite ineffective in their stated goal of bringing about ‘freedom’. Also, papers like Jugantar, Sandhya and Bande Mataram that had, incredibly, kept on writing about the need to target Europeans (despite the fact that it was mostly Bengali businessmen, Bengali policemen and Bengali ‘informers’ who ended up as targets) during the worst years, also finally came under the purview of the authorities after crackdowns and raids on their one-room offices.

This retreat of the ‘bhadralok loafer’ nationalists hadn’t happened overnight, of course. The tide had started to turn three years before 1911, the year the country’s capital was shifted. In 1908, four innocent people were killed during a robbery in Muzaffarpur, two of the victims being women. Only a few weeks earlier, in the same town in Bihar, the terrorists had blundered badly. I’m not sure whether it was because it had been a moonless night or because the two terrorists, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki, were simply incompetent. But their assigned task—to blow up the transferred Presidency Magistrate D.H. Kingsford—went all wrong. The bomb didn’t take out Kingsford. Instead it killed the wife and daughter of a pleader at the Muzaffarpur Bar who had nothing to do with the magistrate.

Between the shooting of the missionary Hickenbotham in 1908 and the killing of Shamsul Alam in 1910, the terrorists had killed six Bengalis. We were led to believe that during the same time, there had also been attempts on four Europeans, but all had ended in failure. Naturally, one felt that there were very incompetent, frustrated and armed people roaming about town. Anyone could be the next victim. That everyone wasn’t the terrorists’ target didn’t comfort anyone. Nevertheless, as I said, life, that banal sideshow we all inadvertently buy tickets for, went on.

With the arrest of the ringleaders of the Muzaffarpur incident, and the hanging of Khudiram, the city was waiting to completely recover its easy, languid ways. But there were still assassinations and robberies—and, by default, Bengalis were ending up dead, maimed or extremely ruffled. I was to hear the funniest bit of news about terrorist bungling from our headmaster Jatin-master during the last month of my very-soon-to-be aborted school life.

Jatin-master had suddenly responded to the ‘call for independence and self-rule’. Looking back, there’s nothing surprising in that. He was young, and he was a failure. Why else would he, supposed brilliant scholar from Sanskrit College, end up teaching snotty children of government employees, company clerks and general upstarts? His overnight transition from shirt, coat, trousers and Nesfield English to panjabi, dhuti and rousing Bengali couldn’t be explained at first. But when he told us about Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Fraser and his brushes with the terrorists, we vaguely got the idea that he wanted to let all of us know—in as subtle a manner possible for a headmaster, of course—that he was a nationalist.

Fraser, thought to be one of the chief architects of the partition, had always been a prime target for assassination. Four attempts had been made on his life. In the first three instances, bombs were hurled at the train on which he was supposed to be travelling. In the first and the third attempts, the bombs didn’t go off. On the second occasion, when the train was travelling through Narayanganj, the explosion shattered the rail track along with the engine. Fraser, however, was left completely unhurt. It was in the fourth attempt that Fraser came closest to meeting his maker. At a conference being held at the YMCA hall, a gangly teenager with a gun missed his mark despite shooting from point blank range. As he would explain in court later, the revolver trigger had ‘got stuck’! Jatin-master told us this story with not a hint of humour or irony. He always was a bit of a fool.

So, as I’ve said, the blundering, overheated anti-partitionists were quietening down by 1911. But their tribe didn’t entirely disappear. As a war raged in faraway Europe, a new crop of terrorists began to emerge from the woodwork. From 1916 onwards, there were fresh rumours flying off the walls and bouncing along footpaths and gutters: criminals were once again spreading terror, all in the name of ‘Independence’. Life got a little complicated again, so that even a trip to the market to buy vegetables and meat or attending a travelling jatra would have a shrapnel edge to it. That year, three Bengali zamindar families were forced to ask for police protection after they received threats for conducting business with the British Crown. By 1917, it was wise for a Bengali to avoid Chowringhee, Esplanade, Ballygunj and other European areas at night. Though it wasn’t always safe to stick to their own side of town either. And in any case, you couldn’t sit inside your house and office all the time. But there was definite evidence of a certain fear. The Victoria Memorial, its grounds opened to the public with some fanfare six years before, was now visited by Europeans only. The handful of non-Europeans seen walking about its lawns during the day would vanish before dusk set in.

This time round, it wasn’t the old ‘anarchists’ of the Anushilan Samiti or the Maniktala Secret Society or the Jugantar Party that were creating a ruckus. It was the turn of unnamed groups to conduct ‘action’. The shadowy members of these shadowier organizations had decided to take Direct Action against people who traded in European goods and services. A few outfits went right ahead and announced that they would attack anything and anybody involved in the ‘direct or indirect propagation of European civilization’. But unlike with the old boys with their toys, this time there was no hormonally charged wake-up call, just a blowpipe shower of poisoned darts.

The city was becoming home to an increasing number of gangs and private armies. And if one looked through all the noise and smoke of ‘Bande Mataram’ and the country-as-Goddess nonsense, they were just armies of hooligans going about their jobs the way bioscopewalas and moneylenders and doctors went about theirs.

Around this time, one began to see the figure that is the English ‘eight’ and also the Bengali ‘four’ scrawled in various places all across town, most prominently and scandalously on the corner wall of Dalhousie Square. The authorities erased the giant chalk marks twice, but they cropped up for a third time. After that, the ‘8’s just flourished like weed throughout the city. Only the white marble of Victoria Memorial managed to protect itself from the onslaught thanks to guards put on triple shift.

The Bengali papers remained strangely quiet about the whole thing. But the Amrita Bazar Patrika ran a small report in one of its inside pages about a dance hall in Entally being gutted by arsonists. It was run by a Bengali lady and the clientele were Bengalis and Europeans (probably Anglos). After initially suspecting that the fire had been caused by a faulty electric line, the authorities realized that it was arson when a police sepoy spotted an ‘8’ scratched on a soot-covered wall. It took a few weeks for the authorities to understand that the mark was a gang signature. The words ‘Char Murti’—Gang of Four—had finally been found alongside an ‘8’ written many times over on a showcard outside the Palladium. How someone had managed to scrawl the sign on a poster that lay behind a standard gauze net that could be opened only by the theatre’s management eluded everyone, including the Palladium’s nervous management.

It was with all this murky and phantom-like information that I looked at Shombhu-mama’s shirt that bore the mark ‘8’.

‘Get it off, Abani! Get it off. Let’s get home,’ Shombhu said to me, sounding just a little agitated.

I slapped him on the back, hoping that the mark would come off in powder puffs. But it stayed like a burn mark. It didn’t help that Shombhu had already started moving at a furious pace towards the streetlight opposite the garbage pile. The ‘8’, tilted—as if trying to roll over and become the mark of infinity—by the movement of Shombhu’s shirt folds, became even more visible.

‘Where do you think you got the mark?’ I asked, running after him and looking around to see where the men with the halos were. The paan shop was still and quiet, with only the paanwala peering into the rack directly behind him. The stationery shop next to it had its shutters down. The makeshift three-brick temple under the peepul tree across the pavement had the usual bunch having their post-supper smoke and pointless chat. The clinic-cum-residence of Dr Shibnath Ghoshal, MBBS (Edin.), House Surgeon, Medical College, with the wooden blinds on its doors that opened and closed at different hours of the day in snappy, noisy blinks, dozed in the night shadow of the peepul tree.

‘It must have been in the tram. I don’t know,’ Shombhu fumed.

As he stopped under the light, positioning himself to take his shirt off, I saw a movement from the corner of my eye. There were figures at the mouth of our lane. I wish Shombhu-mama hadn’t stopped. I saw three dogs sniffing and scrounging the garbage pile that was a permanent landmark of our lane, and the toothless widow who also scrounged the same pile but was now sleeping some distance away, on the pavement. And it was clear to me that it wasn’t any one of them who had triggered the sudden shift in light and shade near the mouth of the lane.

‘Don’t make a sound. Don’t move a muscle.’

The voice was calm, and collected because of its calmness. The face was covered with a handkerchief but the light bouncing off his hair left me with no doubt as to who he was. It was the boy from the Dilkhusha, the one who had been staring at me. Another figure came up from behind and joined him.

‘You’re Shombhu Lahiri of Alochhaya.’ It could have been a question but it wasn’t.

‘Yes, but … who … what do you want?’

‘Quiet now. I can blow your brains out and just walk away. So listen carefully. And who might this be with you? The famous Abani Chatterjee, I see.’

‘He’s my nephew.’

‘And so our friend of the uncles is a mama himself.’

The second man gave out a small grunt. I now noticed that his face, too, was covered by a handkerchief, but one that was less spotless than his companion’s.

‘I don’t understand …’ Shombhu-mama had started to whimper, his shirt still in that indeterminate state between tucked in and taken off.

‘You, Lahiri-babu, are an informer. And you have been an informer since you were at the Carlton, then at the Elphinstone and now at Alochhaya. I can understand the English. But you’re the worst kind—a traitor to your own kind.’

‘Nooo! You’ve got it all wrong. I’m just a cameraman. I work for Lalji Hemraj at Alochhaya and I don’t know any Englishmen, you fools!’

‘Ah, but perhaps you know an Englishwoman, a mem, eh? Perhaps the name Faith Cooper rings a bell?’

‘I never knew her! She was at the Carlton where I was then working.’

‘And we know that you had planned a meeting with Charles Urban. Are you now going to say that you’ve never heard of Charles Urban, Mr Innocent Bioscope Babu?’

While Shombhu-mama frantically tried to explain that there had been a huge misunderstanding, I noted that the breath of the other man, the one without the gun, was incredibly bad. There must have been a rotting tooth or two lying somewhere inside his mouth. Perhaps he had bad gums.

‘Shuren, I’ve seen him with that Madan chap at the Elphinstone.’

‘Shut up! Shut … up! Haven’t I told you not to call me by my name while we’re working … TAPAN?’

Tapan breathed out from under the piece of cloth covering his face, making the handkerchief flutter and reveal a chin as shiny as his hair. So they were members of the Char Murti.

‘Look, I’m Bengali. He’s Bengal …’ Shombhu-mama flubbered on.

‘Yes, Shombhu-babu, you are Bengali. Which makes it doubly sad, doesn’t it? Which is why it’s also fortunate for you that you didn’t actually get to meet Mr Urban.’

‘But … but he’s American. I was supposed to meet him about the Kinemacolor …’

‘Would you call Charlie Chaplin American?’

‘He lives in America, works there too …’

‘No, no Shombhu-babu. That doesn’t make him American. Does the British Minister of Munitions become an American just because his mother is American? No, Lahiri babu, Churchill is English. I guess you’ll say that the Anglo actress isn’t English either, eh? Now what’s her name, Tapan?’

‘Face Cooper,’ grunted Rotten Breath.

‘It’s Faith Cooper. And then there are your old friends from the Carlton and Elphinstone. When was the last time a Bengali found himself working at the Carlton or working for a Bombay stooge of the English? I’m afraid we’ll have to make an example of you, Lahiri-babu. But we’re not impractical. You will leave the bioscope business immediately. If you’re still at Alochhaya next week, Lahiri-babu, we will be disappointed. Won’t we, Tapan?’

‘Shuren, there’s somebody coming,’ Bad Breath said suddenly.

In the streetlight I could make out two figures coming our way. Shuren quickly tucked his gun away inside his shirt.

‘Don’t be too smart. I won’t hesitate to shoot,’ he added briskly.

But if anyone seemed to be acting too smart, it was Tapan. He seemed to have suddenly developed some sort of breathing problem and had started wheezing furiously. He bent over once and mumbled out something to his partner that none of us could make any sense of. Shuren pulled the handkerchiefs off both their faces and, as Tapan painfully unburdened his lungs, we all stood there, waiting for the passers-by to pass us by, which they didn’t.

‘Oh, look who’s here! Abani, coming from the studio, eh?’ It was Bikash. ‘Not in your fancy motor? Shombhu-mama, hope things are fine? Rona and I are just returning from an evening of divine music. Heard of Manikarnika Tambey? She sings kheyal. Oof, terrific!’

Ever since Rona had settled down into a new, improved life of domesticity, the two brothers had been left to themselves to do what they did best—go to Bagmari and while away their evenings listening to music at a friend’s.

Shombhu suddenly regained his composure. ‘Arre, Bikash, Rona, haven’t seen you two for a while. Returning from the Palits, I see. So you’re into kheyals these days. You don’t care for our local singers any more?’

‘Oh, only last week we heard this young havaldar from Karachi, Nazrul Islam. Bengali chap, actually, from Bardhaman. Used to be part of a leto group before he joined the army. You should have heard him, Abani, this kid is better than …’

‘Nazrul Islam? Boy with glasses? Funny hair? Didn’t we meet him at Nibaran-da’s?’ It was Dragon Breath Tapan.

His partner just stared at him, waiting for him to turn to ashes.

‘We met this chap at Nibaranchandra Ghatak’s place the other day where this Islam fellow had also gone for training,’ Tapan informed all of us.

‘You mean Nibaranchandra Ghatak the seditionist?’ Rona asked looking straight at the still-wheezing man.

‘He’s no seditionist, mister. He’s a revolutionary, isn’t he, Shuren?’

‘Let us go now, Tapan,’ Shuren chewed the words out, staring fixedly at his friend. ‘We’ll see you again, Lahiri-babu. Sleep well. And all the best for your new job.’

‘Sleep well,’ repeated Tapan as he followed Shuren into the night.

Bikash, Rona, Shombhu-mama and I turned to walk towards the lane that ultimately led to the safe confines of the Chatterjee–Moitra household. Before we entered our respective quarters, Bikash asked my uncle about his new venture to which Shombhu concocted some lie or the other. Rona pointed out that there was a mark on Shombhu-mama’s shirt. My uncle took off his shirt as he walked up the narrow wooden stairs to his room.

Not a week had passed since this night when Shombhu-mama announced that he was leaving for Bombay. This was a pity, since some twenty-five years later I discovered that Shuren and his cousin Tapan were not members of any seditious gang but lumpen elements hired by Star Theatre to scare off bioscopewalas who were affecting the theatre business badly. My uncle never told me what offer he had got, but he did say something about a man by the name of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke offering him a position in the newly formed Hindustan Cinema Films Co. in Bombay. Shombhu mentioned in passing that Phalke was apparently the first Indian to make a feature, having made Raja Harishchandra some four years before Madan’s Satyavadi Raja Harishchandra and Horen Ray’s Prahlad Parameshwar.

Initially, he would send letters once every two months describing the ‘total revolution in bioscopes and bioscope audiences that is taking place here at the Hindustan Cinema Films Co.’. In one letter he wrote five pages of scribble and scrawl about the new Indian Cinematograph Act with such passion that I seriously believed the pressures of being surrounded by non-Bengalis in Bombay had finally got to him.

The letters stopped in another six months. No one heard from or of him again, till years later, when someone brought news about a certain Shombhunath Lahiri, by then ‘late’, who had been legendary in Bombay for complaining about how cameramen, all apparently Chitpavan Brahmans, would change the aperture setting ring from its correct position after every shot and refuse to let him touch the filter lens. In other words, he didn’t achieve fame, didn’t become a bioscope legend—something that I did, in the next few glorious years of my life.