From the State of Grace

Overnight, Durga and I were forever joined together in some never-decaying couplehood. Only a few months earlier, the public had made a similar connection between Jibananda and Shanti after Anandamath. But with Black Hole, Abani and Durga had become more than bioscoped sweethearts. Mary and John had given out the signal that there was more to amorous attraction than glances, glimpses, gestures or even passionate kisses. There were no distributors those days, but theatres lined up to buy prints of Black Hole—European, Bengali and Anglo theatres.

And then they started showing the picture across the country and beyond. The Europeans and the Anglos lapped up the account of the survival of John Zepheniah Holwell and Mary Carey. The rest cut straight through the chase and stared at the more elemental side of the story as depicted by the giant, visual, more-real-than-real activities of two bodies thrown together in a cauldron seething with humanity. This was Oriental reality cleverly played out in a story about Europeans. With The Black Hole, the bioscope had discovered senses beyond just the visual.

In all this, I attained a stature that can only be described as something born of a mix of worship and envy. Durga, on her part, found herself swimming in a sea of male adoration that cut across race and colour. This, I would later recognize in others as stardom. But in those glorious early days, there was no word for it, not here, not in Europe, not in America.

No one, least of all Lalji Hemraj, was in doubt about what had brought the vast crowds to pay for and watch The Black Hole of Calcutta. But the reviews, each reviewer trying to show how clever he was in discovering and savouring nuances in the bioscope that the others had missed, hailed it as a ‘bold’, ‘unflinching’, ‘educative’ spectacle that ‘has made the bioscope take that unthinkable leap from a plaything to our age’s true form of dramatic art’.

(It is true that unless you have actually seen The Black Hole—and I’m glad that you have—it can sound like a production that romanticizes the Europeans who were locked up in an English guardhouse by the Nawab’s men. But if you want to, you can also see it as a nationalist bioscope. Though not, I must emphasize, a crude, one-dimensional patriotic flicker like Hiralal Sen’s agit-prop shorts or the even more cloying nationalist bioscopes that were simply mythologicals in disguise. Our production was subtle, sophisticated—equivocal, if you must, but is that not a quality to admire in art?

For one must understand that my John Zepheniah Holwell, a man who had come across the seven seas as a surgeon’s mate, was a native-hating lout with a groin of steel but a heart of gold. In our bioscope, while he has no qualms kicking one of his servants to near-death because the poor chap’s caught staring at one of his master’s lady guests, and in another scene he is shown forcing himself on a nautch girl, he also has, after all, a ‘civilizationing’ mission in mind. Like all the other Englishmen who braved the journey to our teeming tropical lands.)

As for our moments inside the Black Hole, the crowds that came to see it cheered every moment of our torment and pleasure, in glorious black and white detail. However, the loudest cheers and heaviest torrents of coin-throwing were unleashed each time Mary Carey bucked and shook next to me in the simulated death-heat.

The air inside bioscope theatres showing The Black Hole across the land was found to be heavy with sweat, cigarette smoke and something intangible after each show. The doors leading in and out of the halls were kept open extra long in between shows for the next audience to walk into a tolerably comfortable theatre. In the safety of the bioscope one witnessed, for a rupee or less, an event that was not natural even in the scheme of motion pictures make-believe.

And if my memory serves me right, when Lalji Hemraj Haridas shook me proudly by my twenty-three-year-old shoulders in the middle of a small gathering to celebrate the runaway success of The Black Hole of Calcutta, or Survival of the Fittest, he invented a word that would outlive my ridiculously short glory days.

‘You’ll now be shining as bright as a star, Abani. You’re a star,’ he said smiling a gleaming caterpillar smile that must have been at least two feet wide and nine reels long.

It was pure coincidence that the year The Black Hole was released also saw a dramatic change in a large section of the population.

Till then, there had been only a few oddballs here and there who, finding nothing better to do, indulged in activities that they called ‘nationalistic’. How going on and on about a figure wrapped in a sari that was supposed to represent the country in fetters could be helpful in any manner eluded the rest of us. These oddballs were mostly oily-haired students who suddenly found themselves charged with an energy that came from nowhere and settled inside them like sediment gunk. They changed their attire, spewed slogans and catchphrases (instead of the traditional banalities directed at female and effeminate passers-by) and made noises about changing the world. At the bottom of this pile was the bhadralok loafer criminal class, breeding young people who were more terrified of becoming middle-aged and then old than living out their lives under an English administration. Infiltrating into this pile of flotsam were the pure and simple thugs, thieves and criminals. For them, ‘nationalism’ was an opportunity for expanding their business and getting themselves a new sympathetic image. ‘Movement’ clearly suggests motion. But the ‘Independence Movement’ was a stagnant mosquito-breeding pool that suddenly formed when many gutters coalesced.

This was boom time for ‘freedom fighters’ who were criminals with ambition. As for the rest of us—indifferent enough not to be caught in any slipstream of loyalty or revolt—it didn’t matter one bit who was in charge as long as the trams worked, the roads were cleaned, the oil bills didn’t jump, the weekend food appeared on the table and the bioscopes ran from the first reel to the last.

All this changed a few months after The Black Hole came out in early December 1918. No one was allowed to be indifferent any more. Fence-sitting, a very different activity from being indifferent, also could result in fatal impalement. The Black Hole, I must reiterate, had nothing to do with this change.

It was slightly odd that the papers reported the upsetting incident that actually pushed things off the precipice more than a month and a half after it had taken place. (The biggest news in the papers around that time was not even about India—the killing of two dangerous communists, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in faraway Germany.) It was in the last week of May 1919 that we learnt that a large gathering of people had been fired upon in Amritsar on April 13. Children and women were among the dead. Why the authorities had decided to open fire on the crowd was not mentioned in any of the reports. I had even picked up the Jugantar for details. None were provided.

At the Carlton, even the Anglos had become less raucous after the massacre in Punjab. Amritsar may have been as far away from our city as Belgian Congo was, but the place got closer all of a sudden. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the earth stopped spinning. Indeed, life went on and nothing ground to a halt. As summer approached, people still bathed next to tubewells and ruptured pipelines, building up the lather as if it could be the last time they would encounter water.

Carriages still trotted up and down Esplanade, the horses automatically trotting faster when they sensed an automobile nearby. Marriages proceeded as planned, functions were hosted with the usual banal pomp (potted plants on the dais still being mandatory), lectures were attended at universities and at the Asiatic Society with necessary gravitas.

People still drank, laughed aloud, cut vegetables (the vegetables making the barely audible hiss of dying that vegetables make when put to the blade). Experienced customers still haggled; irate mothers still slapped their children; couples still quietly copulated in the other room. But everyone did whatever they did with one difference. No one could quite put their finger on this difference simply because nobody noticed it. However, there it was, a change that comes with the knowledge that people not completely unlike oneself have been permanently removed in a cool, efficient manner.

June onwards, the crowds increased to a serious torrent. More picture palaces were showing The Black Hole and there were also special screenings in certain theatres across the country. A German bioscope company had bought prints and was running the film in three theatres in Berlin and Paris. Here at home, it was running to packed shows, the usual catcalls and suction sounds mimicking kisses during the climactic prison scene had been replaced by raucous shouts of ‘son of a pig’ and other more loosely constructed expressions of easy contempt and safe rage. An earlier scene showing the European forces being cut down by the Nawab’s men were greeted with enthusiastic whistles and showers of coins directed at the screen.

‘Didn’t I tell you, eh? Everyone loves nationalism these days,’ Lalji had chuckled as Ram Bahadur and others collected coins of various denominations from the front of the screen after each show.

I attended a few screenings alone and witnessed the transformation first hand. People who earlier seemed capable of finding happiness only through a good oil-massage were now shouting expletives at a giant white face that resembled mine on the screen. When Mary Carey was dragged into the prison and became the sole lissome element in a tumble of bodies, the crowd hooted with barely hidden hormonal happiness. There was something that had been set loose the year after The Black Hole made me a star.

The movie became the first feature in the country to have four shows throughout the day seven days a week. Another projectionist, five more men at the ticket counters and half a dozen additional hands were added to the Alochhaya alone to keep up with the sheer jump in demand. At this point, Lalji was negotiating the purchase of two new theatres, one of them being Minerva, which had an Anglo-Indian and European clientele.

Piggybacking on The Black Hole was an Anandamath revival. So there it was—Durga and I as two couples, coming from two diametrically opposite worlds and yet conjoined by images being spurted out from the same machine.

The first couple was the estranged and then reunited husband–wife pair who used a very public struggle to repair private disaster; the second, two people with nothing in common barring their firingi stock, thrown into a tight space and finding out that between lust and love there lies an escape clause. I admit that 1919 was the most interesting year of my life. But I wouldn’t know that till much later, would I?

In that whirligig, however, there was always the worry that the authorities would now find something objectionable in The Black Hole. Even though special banners, showcards and publicity material had been made for theatres outside our part of town, specifically for English and Anglo consumption—‘A Tale of Extraordinary Courage and Daring in the Face of Native Savagery!’, ‘The Two Whom the Black Hole Could Not Consume’, ‘A Love That No Prison Could Contain’—we were worried. After all, it would have been foolish not to expect that the bulk of the audience response would escape the notice of the authorities. Even the papers had started mentioning The Black Hole and ‘the tyranny of the Empire’ in the same paragraphs. We had to be extra careful about the shows in the Anglo theatres. For that was where misunderstandings were likely to start.

A complaint did pop up against The Black Hole, Anandamath and, fortunately, bioscopes in general. It was in the form of a newspaper letter that was later picked up and given editorial space by The Statesman. The first irate letter was published in Sandhya, and its content would be echoed in a tirade during a protest gathering outside the Chitpur mosque. The letter was signed by a certain Shamsul Haq.

Dear Sir,

I think there is much evil that has been depicted in the moving picture The Black Hole of Calcutta, or The Survival of the Fittest. For one, it shows Muslims of this country as bloodthirsty barbarians who take great pleasure in torturing and killing Europeans, including their women and children. This is, to put it mildly, scandalous. The Muslim community bears not the slightest ill-will against the English Government or the Crown and continues to be loyal subjects of the latter. The other picture Anandamath is perhaps less direct in its anti-Mussalman message, although no less damaging.

For another, the depiction of the female body in all bioscopes, especially those dealing with Hindu mythologies and legends and portraying European ladies, is leading to an increase in immoral and lascivious behaviour throughout our society. I ask the Government in its capacity to control and contain these degenerate bioscopes. For the sake of our women and youth, this ‘entertainment’ should be stopped immediately.

I read about the Chitpur gathering in a small news item in The Statesman the very next day and was not surprised to read that one of the speakers had been an ‘S. Haq from Metiaburz’.

On the same day that Mr Haq’s letter appeared in Sandhya, there was another letter in another newspaper whose name I can’t recall. I showed it to Bikash, who by that time had become a bona fide intellectual flirting with the idea of representing the proletariat despite not quite giving up his aspirational ways. I figured that he had already seen the letter. But it turned out that he hadn’t as he never read ‘any of those papers catering to the bourgeoisie’. While he stirred his infusion and I sipped my late-afternoon milky brew, he read the letter in the corner of the large chattering hall opposite the fair edifice of the Presidency College.

The tone of the letter writer was agitated. At the same time it was firm in the way that observations that can’t ever be refuted are. The letter itself had nothing to do with the bioscope or with the monumental nuisance of somebody’s sensibilities being hurt. It just pointed out what it thought to be a writer’s stupidity.

Dear Sir,

It would seem to me that Mr J.J. Gambraith’s article, ‘Nationality and the War, with Reference to the Ethnology of Europe’ that appeared on these pages is the product of the kind of thinking that is delusional at best, propaganda at worst. In his quasi-scholarly tone, he has written that the main difference between the Celtic and Teutonic races is that in the latter there is ‘all the horror of disgusting and blood-embraced barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the disinterested taste … for destruction and death’; while in the former there is ‘a profound sense of justice, a great height of personal pride’. I find this laughable and flying completely in the face of reality, especially since Mr Gambraith’s nonsensical ideas were aired at a time when the world now knows what has taken place at the Jallianwala Bagh.

Mr Gambraith writes that the Celts ‘seem possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy with the weak’. The Lt. Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, and his henchman Gen. Dyer, if I understand correctly by their surnames, both come from Celtic stock. Both of them have conspired to gun down and kill innocent people on Baishakhi Day in Amritsar and for Mr Gambraith to then insist that it is the Teuton, and not the Celt, who is ‘revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury’ is indeed laughable even as it is subsumed by tragedy.

Yours sincerely,

Subhas C. Bose

Scottish Church College

‘Hmm,’ Bikash said meaningfully, before looking at me with an expression that denoted manufactured anguish. ‘I’m surprised that The Statesman published it.’

I had started wearing powerless glasses in public by then, if only for the pretence of being a gentleman when I was moving about in the non-nitrate world. The truth was just the opposite. I was no dignified gentleman at all. Instead, I was thrilled to be fêted, to be recognized and to be occasionally stared and pointed fingers at. The more vociferous ones were to be found at the market, which I drove through, sitting in the back seat of my Model-T, hoping to be caught reading from a book that I would never actually read.

‘So when’s the next bioscope then, Abani?’ Bikash asked. His interest in the motion pictures was tangential. What interested him was the people who had now become devotees of this new science that was trying hard to be considered an art. His question in the hall might as well have been, ‘So when’s the next magic show then, Abani?’

‘There’s some talk of a new one next month. But I think they want to start pacing them out a bit from now on. Give us a bit of breathing space. It seems we run the danger of squeezing this lemon dry if we’re not careful.’

And then he suddenly asked the question.

‘This Durga Devi. How close are you to her? Isn’t she an Anglo?’

So that had been what Bikash had wanted to ask all along. We had driven down to the coffee house in my motor and throughout the journey he had had a look on his face that suggested some sort of mental constipation. Unable to ask me what, how, why and other such questions that demand answers, that day in the motor his eyes had been restless, as if a group of very tiny creatures was running about just under the skin of his brow. I remember him having the same look just after my mother died. Till finally one day, after his brother Rona was out of sight and while we were—though no longer boys in shorts—urinating out of the window of my room, he had asked me, ‘Abani, does it feel bad or does it feel good with your mother and father no longer here?’

I had mumbled a reply that was a lie—something couched in sentimentality and probably a line plucked out of context from one of those strings-searing theatre productions. I had then buttoned my pants and that had been it. The matter of my (happy) orphanhood was never raised again.

And now, sitting in a hallful of slurping, chattering people, Bikash had asked another awkward question. And yet, I recognized it for what it was: a question that I myself had never asked, afraid of answering it correctly.

‘Oh, you mean Felicia? Hah, Bikash! She’s nothing but an Anglo airhead who’s ugly to boot! Give me more credit, will you?’ Just to drive the message home, I let out a very believable snigger, shaking my head in bioscope mirth. But a gramophone needle skidded across inside me. Felicia Miller was anything but an Anglo to me. She was, at the time, the only object that could leave me exposed, like a filmed reel left outside its canister, like a target running about on a ground with no cover and no choice but to dive into a dry, deep well, like a liar whose lie had been caught, like a neck whose purpose can only be to be caressed or snapped.

It only made sense, therefore, to defend myself against charges of having any feelings for Felicia Miller.

Acting is not about pretending to be someone else. It’s about peeling the swathes of people wrapped around one’s body and exposing whichever person suits the occasion. Sometimes while walking down a street, careful not to bump into passers-by, I watch my feet. They’ve become slower now, but the basic concept remains the same. Left foot, right foot, siblings who know each other so well that they don’t have to talk to drag my body forward. The body that they transport—whether from this room to that or along longer, far more complicated routes—is a bundle of muscles and bones that have no history, except for time-serving banalities like diseases or injuries. All the actor does in a bioscope is take control of this body, deny it its zombie-life for the duration of the performance.

Effectively, nothing is allowed to be automatic for the actor. And yet, consummate performer that I had become by then, feted for my ability to control every visible part of my body for the camera to record, I lost all control and broke into splinters the day I heard that Durga Devi had quit the Alochhaya Bioscope Co.

Ronny Heaslop had been a tea estate man before he expanded into coal transportation. It was only after he realized that a steady pile of money was being made without him having to even lift, let alone shuffle, a finger did he notice that being a young, successful and rich Anglo-Indian had made very little difference to his social standing among the Europeans in the country. It was wonderfully different when someone was arriving from Home for the first time. He had valuable tips to give and his presence was appreciated with invitations and social meetings. But after a few months, even these green-horns from England would stop short of being too familiar and would restrict their dealings with him to the strictly professional.

Perhaps this was something Heaslop imagined. Or perhaps it was something real. But the Lucknow boy couldn’t shake off the feeling that in any gathering of import there were whispered conversations exchanged whenever he was just out of earshot—and those inaudible sentences were invariably about his balmy pedigree. He tried his best not to show that such rumours, which he may have circulated in the confines of his head, bothered him. But the fact of the matter was that Ronny Heaslop wasn’t happy despite his success and riches. He wanted something more.

It was through his ventures in coal that he had first met Edward Quested, formerly of the East Indian Railway. And it was through Mr Quested that he would get introduced to and then acquainted with his charming daughter, Adela Quested.

Adela had been a resident of this country for more than seventeen years and had picked up, among other habits, more than just a smattering of Hindustani, some local habits and a tropical imagination. But because of her birth and subsequent years in the therapeutic English town of Bath, she was never clubbed in the same league as the other ladies that Heaslop had come to know during his bachelorhood. That, however, could not be the sole reason why he started courting Adela with the determination of an Assam rhino. A subliminal desire to rise through the ranks of society may well have played a small part in his romance, and Ronny was honest enough to admit that to himself.

The association with Quested had started working soon enough. After his application for membership to the Bengal Club had been rejected twice (officially for ‘not providing adequate information about his recommendees’ and unofficially for having been ‘a regular customer at the Carlton Hotel & Theatre in the past’ and ‘having no permanent residency in the English mainland’), it took one glowing recommendation from the general secretary of the Asiatic Society and former head of the East Indian Railway to get him in this time. That Ronny Heaslop was now engaged to the general secretary’s daughter must have quickened things up considerably.

Ronny’s new-found confidence also translated into his desire to put his money into something a bit more glamorous than tea and coal and poker—like in the burgeoning moving pictures business. Through an acquaintance of Edward Quested’s fellow Asiatic man Douglas J. Smith, a man who had as keen an interest in the new technology of bioscope cinema as he had in ancient Pali inscriptions and seals, a dinner party had been arranged at the Bengal Club in which senior members of the Alochhaya Bioscope Co. had also been invited. It was also a chance for Quested to show that he was not the kind of insufferably hidebound Englishman who was uncomfortable with Indians and Anglo-Indians.

Lalji Hemraj Haridas was pleased as rum punch to be invited by the Questeds. Before setting off, he had refrained from munching on a mandatory before-dinner paan, opting instead to douse the high collars of his black jacket with his wife’s perfume. Lalji and the rest of us who were invited were obviously not allowed inside the Bengal Club building. But Quested had thoughtfully arranged a garden party and shamiana dinner just outside the main premises. This he had managed after reading the club rules and convincing George Godfrey, the club president, that the Europeans-only rule was applicable only within the polygonal walls of the Bengal Club building. The food and drinks ordered would officially be for the consumption of the European guests at the party, of course. The others who would join in would be ‘invisible’—not totally unlike the gnats and mosquitoes that inevitably hover around their human guests.

‘And that’s the thing, Mr Hemraj …’

‘Call me, Lalji, please, Mr Heaslop.’

‘Ah, and that’s the thing, Lalji-ji, the bioscope is universal. You don’t have to learn another language to follow what’s happening in the story. I mean, apart from a few title cards, the pictures are the language—a Bengali, a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Marwari, they all understand what’s going on. Like when I saw an Alochhaya picture two days after I had seen a Griffith film. It could have been made by the same man from the same studio and the audience wouldn’t have known the difference.’

Heaslop was visibly excited. He had plans and was all asweat. The news of Indian bioscopes had filtered back Home, but apart from a few public screenings in Europe, Britain was still an untapped market. He was planning to use his proficient coal–tea network to export Indian features. Or was it a plan to import Indian bioscopes?—considering that somewhere not-too-deep inside his head, Home was still the cabbage-smelling place his grandfather Gregory A. Heaslop had come from as a pale young man to this country that fights paleness. He would ultimately bring the bioscope from the East to picture houses across England. Instead of selling the prints outright to European picture houses as Hemraj and every other bioscope man in town had been doing, distributing them and renting out the prints would make more capital sense. And Heaslop would be the distributor. Over a glass of brandy, he told Lalji that he would be going to England the next month and it would make incredible good sense to take stocks of The Black Hole, Prahlad and a few other Alochhaya films with him.

‘England is waiting for your pictures, Lalji-ji.’

‘Not Lalji-ji, Mr Heaslop,’ Lalji reminded him with a smile, ‘just Lalji.’

‘Yes, yes. I have business partners in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Edinburgh who have already shown interest. The Elphinstone people and another Bombay bioscope company are already keen about this. But to tell you honestly, Lalji-ji, it’s the Alochhaya bioscopes that I’m impressed with. They’ve been …’ Heaslop cocked his head back as if he was an army man on night duty creaking his neck all around, waiting for it to snap into place, and emptied his glass in an eye-blink that could have been deemed as dereliction of duty.

It was at this point that I had walked into the Club lawns. Lalji caught me by his eye and gestured me to join him. That, however, was easier gestured than done. As soon as I helped myself to a drink from an exaggeratedly turbaned waiter whose job was to waft by everyone like a ghost with a silver tray, I was approached by a small swarm of people that included ladies in silk saris and gowns and men in bow ties with cigarettes. Minutes passed by with me telling admiring strangers about the ‘gruelling prison scene, where the camera was almost on us’, about the various trick shots in which I was made to stand or sit in carefully selected positions that would later be translated into ‘impossible actions and images’, about my plans and about Durga Devi’s acting prowess.

It was finally Ronny Heaslop and Lalji who crept up to me.

‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, I hope you’re having a good time?’ asked Ronny as he hopped back a few steps to widen the circle that till then had comprised no one I knew. ‘I hope our star actor is not getting bored.’

Lalji introduced me to Ronny. We shook hands. I saw Ronny Heaslop as a large man who used his largeness as an introduction in a gathering. I saw, too, that he was clearly awkward meeting me. Even as he spoke, his booming voice spreading like just-burst pollen, I could see by the regular bobbing of his head that he had rehearsed this moment at least a few times. He was keen on making a good first impression on me as an investment.

‘No, not at all. It’s quite delightful here, thank you, Mr Heaslop. Lalji, I don’t see Durga. Won’t she be coming?’

It was my idea of a conversation-changer. It would, I had figured, give Lalji the necessary time and space to do whatever he had intended to do when he first caught my eye as I walked in. Lalji muttered a hurried ‘excuse me’ and gently guided me towards a giant pedestal fan that looked more like a caged bird forced to flutter for a living.

‘Abani-ji, about Durga Devi, there’s been a slight development. It was all very sudden so I couldn’t announce it to anyone at the office. I would have told you first in any case. It’s just that …’ He had taken out his handkerchief and was dabbing at his bumpy forehead the way he did each opening week as he waited for the ticket receipts to come in. ‘Durga Devi has left the country.’

Half my face was inside the glass of brandy, so if I managed to hide my splutter—and in any case, I had, by then some years of professional and amateur pretending behind me. I looked up and waited for Lalji to continue.

One clear-cut symptom of adulthood is that everything quietens down in a nice, underwater fashion. If it’s bad news, it drops like a spanner in a lake, heavily, but without the ferocity of a fall on the ground. As for experiencing joy, that too is stunted by adulthood, watered down and served as polite grog. Something on the Bengal Club lawn splintered into pieces and the giant rotor fan was simply blowing the pieces away, silently.

Because of who I was in that titterful, chattering garden, I was able to conduct myself during the first half-hour or so of that evening as Abani Chatterjee, a particularly famous bioscope actor in a composite world created a bit from here and a bit from there. Yet, when I heard Lalji say the words ‘Durga Devi has left the country’, the words and pretty much everything else exploded without a sound. In the evening air lit up by lights that were being fed by those old-style generators that lay far enough not to be heard, objects floated about like dust in the sunbeam. ‘Durga’, ‘Devi’, ‘has left’, ‘the’, ‘country’. Splintered words seeped into the people all around me. They were soaked in the drink I was downing.

It was a surprise. I had not expected Durga’s absence to shock me, in so cinematic a fashion, with emotion. How much, after all, had we to do with each other? She was not the first thought I had every morning, nor the last every night. Her presence, next to me, affected me, her touch when we performed for the camera moved me to conscious feeling, and that much I could understand. But the intensity of what rose and spread inside me, like a mushroom cloud, that evening when Lalji spoke those words left me bemused and startled. I hadn’t the means to understand or deal appropriately with it. My instinct was to duck; to smoke a cigarette.

It was necessary to say something entirely natural in a completely natural manner. With Lalji having done his bit, it was my turn to speak. ‘Some more ice, please,’ I told the waiter who was floating by like a giant insect. I had switched to whisky, and after Lalji had convinced himself that I had taken the news of Durga’s departure well enough (I had simply asked, ‘Oh, has she left for another studio?’, to which Lalji had replied, ‘No, she’s left for Australia … family reasons’), I made the same waiter pour me another double.

It was an hour or so since I had joined the party and the gnarling sensation I had felt earlier in the evening had vanished like a scene that never made it alive out of the cutting room. People were talking all the while, some of them talking to me. I could hear snatches of conversation erupt around me. And I entered one conversation and slipped into another like a trapeze artist swinging from one pair of hands to another.

‘Darjeeling, I’m afraid, is getting increasingly crowded by the day,’ I heard a familiar face tell a man whose ruddy cheeks had started getting redder even as I stood staring at them. ‘I honestly think it’s better to go off to one of the hill stations in the Central Provinces for some peace of mind. I went to Dalhousie last year. I think I’ll go there again. Been there, John? Or to Mussoorie?’

Then there were two Englishmen talking bioscope.

‘Comedy is still an avenue that needs to be explored in the motion pictures here. I saw a splendid American short a few years ago called A Lucky Dog. Oh, it was hilarious! The two actors, Oliver Hardy and Arthur Jefferson, should seriously pair up for more movies. But I don’t know, do people have a sense of humour here?’

I moved about for a bit in the crowd gathered in the garden, the tables of food forming the border of this artificially lit picture in motion. Then I positioned myself, glass in hand, next to a stairwell. Lighting up a cigarette, I heard an important-looking man in a cravat tell Heaslop: ‘If measures for educating these children are not promptly and vigorously encouraged and aided by the government, we shall soon find ourselves embarrassed in the large towns with a large floating population of Indianized English. These people, I must tell you, Ronny, are loosely brought up, and exhibit most of the worst qualities of both the races.’

He seemed completely unaware of Heaslop blanching and blinking uncomfortably, for he continued, ‘This Indianized English population, already so numerous that the means of education offered to it are quite inadequate, will increase more rapidly than ever. Frankly, I can hardly imagine a more profitless, unmanageable community. It might be long before it grows into what one would officially call a “class dangerous to the State”, but it’ll only take a few years, if neglected, to make it a glaring problem for this government. Mark my words, Ronny, mark my words.’

‘I can’t agree more with you, sir,’ Heaslop replied with a sad attempt to replicate gusto.

‘Ah, Mr Quested, so what new findings from the Society will you educate us about tonight?’ asked the tipsy gentleman who had, till now, been busy giving a lecture on social engineering to the now visibly relieved Heaslop. Someone else had joined them, a man with a scholar’s voice.

‘I could tell you about the latest paper by Rakhal Banerjee about Harappan sites, but why don’t you ask him yourself next week, Mr Allen?’

Quested. Quested? Had I heard the blubbering man right? Considering that the chance of too many Questeds walking about town was fairly slim, could this Quested be Tarini’s Quested? As if on cue, Heaslop swung his future father-in-law and the other man towards me just as I was wondering whether the next sip should be a gulp or a sip.

‘Mr Quested, let me introduce you to the man who is the face of Indian cinema and whose talent I intend to showcase in England: Abani Chatterjee. Mr Chatterjee, this is Mr Edward Quested.’

‘A pleasure to meet you, Mr Chatterjee,’ said the elderly but not old gentleman, whose kind horse-like eyes immediately made a favourable impression on me. ‘Both Ronny here and my daughter have told me about you and your excellent skills. Unfortunately, I must admit, I haven’t seen enough of you. Just the The Black Hole of Calcutta and Anandamath.’ A friendly laugh emanated all around and, just for a moment, I thought that they were laughing at me. Alcohol does obstruct clear judgement.

‘Yes, I thought you were splendid in Anandamath. “India’s Valentino” is how my daughter describes you. I must introduce you to her. She’ll be thrilled,’ Quested spoke with breakneck speed. But instead of bringing the admiring Adela to my attention, the troika of Heaslop, Quested and Justice Allen—joined intermittently by others who fluttered in and out like pigeons landing on ledges during sundown—continued their peripatetic exchanges. These exchanges included the matter of a particular snail population from Africa wreaking havoc in a few tea plantations in Assam, the British Conservative Party’s shape-shifting (and therefore ‘comic’) imperial policy, Adela Quested’s weakness for the many historical artefacts of this land, the ‘excellently argued and packed with telling facts’ leader in The Statesman about the need for a separate goods-train-only rail network between the major industrial cities …

But regardless of what fleeting subject was being lobbed about in our tight but easily breachable circle, the conversation kept skidding back to motion pictures. It was either part of a sinister plan to get me to talk about something they needed me to talk about. Or it was just one of those English conversational tricks that ensured that there were no uncomfortable spells of blank silence within the conversations. My presence could have been utilized for the purpose of furthering business plans as well as filling awkward silences. I, on my part, was becoming increasingly quiet and drunk.

The next whisky was waiting for me. The fluid turned opaque and Lalji’s distant figure was blocked out as I tilted the glass to my mouth. When I lowered my glass, I saw Lalji transport a few pieces of spiced-up cucumbers into his stain-free mouth near the giant rubber plant. Conducting the bottoms-up routine, I walked up to him before he got stuck to another round of small talk.

‘Lalji, so this Heaslop fellow will be taking our movies abroad?’

‘Ah, Abani, yes, it’s all been worked out. It could mean America, my friend, America! Try some of those shami kebabs, I believe they’re really good.’

‘So why has Durga gone?’

I slipped in the question as if I was asking something about distribution rights or about the next film we were planning on the life of Tipu Sultan.

‘Oh, Durga Devi? Well, I tried to explain things to her father. But he was very upset for some reason.’

Durga’s father, Sam Miller, had stormed into Lalji’s Alochhaya office a week ago. He was terribly agitated, to the point of being flushed and furious. As he shouted his ruddy face off, Lalji could make no sense of what he was saying. And it sometimes was quite impossible to understand what a European was saying, especially if he was blabbering on in white rage.

In between more cucumber and other vegetarian delights, Lalji told me how Sam Miller, ‘all smelling of liquor and tobacco’, had barged into his office and told him that his daughter was not ‘a fooking nautch girl’ and that he was not going to stay quiet while Felicia had any sort of association with ‘the fooking Bengalis of the Alochhaya Bioscope Company’, or for that matter any bioscope company in the country. Before Lalji could explain that not everybody at Alochhaya merited the tag of ‘fooking Bengali’, Sam banged his fist on the table, scattered the betel nuts that were till then resting in a small silver box all over the cheap wooden surface, and announced that he and his family were moving to Australia.

Still calm, Lalji tried to get a word in about ‘Miss Miller’s contractual obligations’, at which Sam stared at him like a Victoria Terminus gargoyle for a few seconds. By this time, Ram Bahadur had appeared behind him, but Lalji’s eyes told the hulk to stay where he was.

‘She’s not coming back here,’ Sam said bristling all over. After looking beyond Lalji at the posters depicting his daughter in various forms, he looked at the man sitting again, let out some more spit and stormed out of the room leaving a few more blasphemies hanging in the Alochhaya air.

It transpired that Sam had gone to the Carlton with his mates Bob Davis from Oldham, Bill O’Brien from Slough and John Davies from Glasgow, for the ostensible purpose of ‘celebrating’ O’Brien’s decision to move to McLeodganj where he had been offered a pretty respectable job as an overseer of something—no one was quite sure exactly what. It transpired that they had proceeded to go and see The Black Hole of Calcutta, or Survival of the Fittest at the Athena. Less than halfway into the film, poor Sam was horrified to see his daughter being held half-naked, and on display for the hundreds of others in the hall. Things only got worse as the bioscope rolled on to a hallful of hoots and applause that kept drowning out the orchestra in the front.

That was how Sam Miller realized that Durga Devi, a name that he was moderately familiar with in the papers and the publicity posters, was none other than his sweet daughter from the convent, Felicia. Till then, he had been resisting the offers made by well-meaning authorities helping him to relocate from this city to somewhere more genteel. The two gentlemen who had come twice to his house, trying to convince him to move to a hill station in the United Provinces, had finally come up with an inviting proposition for the Millers to move to Australia, where a man of Sam’s talent and fortitude could make a more decent living and have more than a decent life.

Sam had planned to turn this offer down as usual. He had given out the usual signs of polite rejection to the two frock-coated-in-June gentlemen. The pursing of the lips, the tilting of the head in fake apologia, the quiet shaking of his head while he smiled—he had done all this when the gents had presented him with the ‘McLeodganj option’. He knew that they knew that he was going to also turn down Australia.

‘Let’s face it,’ he had said to the turbaned bar man at the South Calcutta Billiards Club, ‘Australia is on the fooking edge of the world.’

This edge hurtled to the centre after he saw Felicia cavorting shamelessly on screen. It took him less than two hours to seek out the frock-coated governmenters, thrash Felicia without uttering a word and land up on Lalji Hemraj Haridas’s doorstep. Ten days later, he had boarded The Baltimore with his wife and daughter, looking forward to starting a new life in the windy town of Perth.

The cucumber-consuming Lalji continued, ‘I haven’t seen Durga Devi since. I had sent Ram Bahadur over to her place with some money and to return her things. Technically, she was breaking the contract, so I needn’t have sent Ram Bahadur. But Abani-babu, she has been part of the Alochhaya family for so long. I liked her, I respected her. But Ram Bahadur found a lock hanging on their door. They had already upped and left.’

As Lalji spoke, I felt abandoned and desolate—both emotions that came unnaturally to me. Standing on the lawn, ostensibly celebrating my prowess as an actor, I contemplated the reaction that my leading lady’s abrupt and permanent departure was having on my body.

There were people, strangers really, who were coming up to talk to me, shake my hand or simply say hello while looking into my eyes. They were all sparrows, moving about friskily, stop-motion fashion.

The effects of alcohol are difficult to put in words. For the man getting progressively drunk, it’s like sitting in a boat which has sprung a leak and the hole is allowed to grow unchecked. As I sloshed back another gulp, not emptying my glass but leaving enough in it for another instalment, I pushed back my coat and shirt sleeve to see my arm. The whisky must have already been well into its looped journey, conducting circuitous turns around the bends of my arteries. And in all its wisdom, the alcohol in me was unaware of what was going on in my head. Everything had become amplified. The words ricocheting around me, the clutter of the forks and plates, the luscious chewing sound that seemed to come from the mouths around me. But exaggerated above everything else was the hammer sound of dejection and disappointment I felt just under my chest, above my belly. As I saw each point of light, each blob of face quiver into many, the fact that Durga had departed without a word became harder, sharper.

The best replication of inebriation I have come across was in a short French feature I had recently seen. In the short, the effects of liquor were shown as if it was a study of the seasons. Instead of a landscape changing its light and foliage, it was the changing man’s face that was being shown in seamless detail on the screen. There were changes that were taking place in his gait, posture and behaviour. But it was the shape-shifting face of the actor that had left an impression on me. He was so good, plotting the incremental change with every bottle, every glass, every sip, that it was like watching the hour hand of a clock move in minutes. I still believe that he wasn’t acting and it was deft work in the cutting room that had expertly kept out the genuinely unsavoury parts of the trajectory of his induced oblivion.

But no one drinks to replicate the visual effects of heavy drinking. Why, then, you could ask. I haven’t bothered to find out and ruin my drink. I leave that to the zealots. I only know that there’s a familiar place I reach after my fifth drink, or the seventh. There is in cinema, in life a landscape that lies outside what can be shown and seen—not a large tract of land, I admit, but a landscape nonetheless. And it was in this territory that I found myself that evening when Mr Edward Quested and his son-in-law-to-be Ronny Heaslop had thoughtfully thrown a dinner party.

‘Could you tell me where the washroom is?’ I asked the turbaned angel flitting by with a tray of ice-box-tongs-and-glasses.

‘Straight down the corridor and right, sir. It’ll be on your left, sir.’ He spoke without emotion.

Ploughing through the gaseous swirl of people, I made my way inside the Club building, its architecture slipping and sliding before me with its flotsam of potted plants, framed watercolours and ominously dignified lights in tow.

A woman was on a ship bound for Australia, that slab of land floating on the Sea of Forgetfulness. If she hadn’t already reached Australia, she was probably holding on to her hat, trying to prevent it from being blown out into the great wide open, and looking at the bald expanse of evening sea. This was Felicia shorn of being Durga, but it was the same woman whose face was known by countless people in its various forms. She was now returning to what she was before she joined the bioscopes, before she became a household name and the more adored half of the silent era’s most famous couple.

As I swam through the cool passageway, careful not to swing too close to the watercolours presenting the city in various phases of its life, I caught a form moving and vanishing in one swift frame. From afar, all I could make out was a figure in a burgundy dress. As I turned left after spelling out the letters C-L-O-A-K-R-O-O-M with considerable difficulty, I imagined a dark pair of eyes, lined with kajol, staring back at me. As I entered the bathroom, I realized that it was a mixture of drink and imagination that made me see those eyes, for in that considerably large and bright room, I was alone.

This bathroom inside the bowels of the European-only Bengal Club was a far cry from the abomination that had, until only a few years ago, existed in my house. There was a green settee next to a glass table with a single, squat vase on it that was pretty because it was so out of place. I thought of sitting on the green velvet-like material, but I wanted to first splash water on my face so as to snap myself out of uncontrol. The white basins sparkled like the water they were supposed to catch and let go of. I smudged my way in front of one of the basins, suddenly catching my face in the mirror above it.

A drunken man looking into the mirror looks at a never-ending stretch of reflections reflecting reflections. My eyes were red, but more than their colour, what struck me about them was how heavy they were. And it wasn’t only the eyes. Looking at my face, I also looked into it. Was that face that was slipping in and out of solidness a confirmation that I inhabited my body?

‘Abani,’ I said slowly, watching my mouth conduct itself in perfect synchronization with the sound that came out. I smiled and noticed myself smile back at me. I uttered my name again, this time in a normal fashion, barely noticing the intricate mechanical workings of my mouth. I turned the tap on. I had turned it on too much and the water gushed out in a violent rush. I had sprayed the first instalment of liquid refreshedness on my face and was cupping my hands to catch the next, when I registered a brief but sharp click, the sort that a projector makes when the film reel jumps from one spool to another. A woman in a burgundy dress with ruffles around the collar and down the front came out of nowhere. She hadn’t finished pressing down her dress when her eyes locked on to mine and, for that brief moment, both of us seemed to have been thrown into a vacuum from where all air had been utterly drained.

It would have helped me if that really had been the case. But there could be no doubt that the room was not only blessed with plentiful of air but also had splendid acoustics. For as soon as the time-stopping moment of us staring at each other passed, the woman in burgundy let out a scream that overpowered the loud sound of gushing tap water and the pleasant silence that had surrounded it. Her body, wrapped as it was in ruffles and fabric, shook for minutes like a single leaf held out of a window in a storm. It was actually a series of screams, long ones punctuated by the smallest of breaks, that left her face quivering in a manner that made me fear it would split along that short, sharp nose of hers.

I panicked. Instead of turning the tap off and proceeding to explain matters, I tried to move away from and towards her at the same time. In the process, one of my legs caught the other and I fell on her like a lizard that had just lost its grip on the ceiling. As I lay on her, my head foaming with smashed-to-smithereens thoughts of self-preservation, her scream continued, this time directly into my ears. I don’t know how long it took for everyone to rush into the Club’s north wing L-A-D-I-E-S Cloakroom, but by the time Ronny Heaslop’s fiancée, that is Edward Quested’s daughter, Adela Quested, was extricated from under my weight, the deed had been done.

If I recall correctly, I was pulled up by my collar and pelted with blows that fell like wide and blunt rain. What abuse was hurled at me, I could not make out then, so I cannot recollect now. But I did register the very odd presence of Lalji, who was standing behind the green settee along with a huddle of others. He stared at me, his mouth ajar the whole while I was being dragged out of the bathroom, out of the Club building, out of the premises of the Bengal Club, out on to Chowringhee overlooking the Maidan, and out of the world in which, only a few hours ago, I had been graciously fêted. Adela Quested lay there on the settee, spreading distressed burgundy on green, being fanned furiously by the shocked but understanding guests.

But what really lay there was my future in tatters. My one single tumble was much more real than the one that my mother had concocted. And what made it more real was that it turned me overnight from bioscope’s top talent and draw into an industry leper, a member of the bhadralok loafer-criminal class. It was as if I had been transported to the edge of the world. It was like being shipped to Australia.