Herr Monocle

I had never seen a monocle on a man before. Actually, I had never seen a monocle before. It was the first thing I noticed about Fritz Lang. A concentrated pool of light bouncing off his face, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be the sun perched on his right eye. As he sat in the terrace of the Great Eastern like a bird, his fingers stitched into a bony knit, I noticed his large, rectangular face that was crowned by hair that looked like hot tar. His eyes were dark and large, almost without the white parts. Even as he was speaking to the people milling around him, his eyelids hung heavily in the sunlight, emitting a slight red glow that confirmed their thinness.

Initially, Charu Ray had been assigned as the assistant art director for the project. I learnt only a few minutes before my arrival at the Great Eastern Hotel that he had now been offered the job of assistant director. He was still flush with gratitude and excitement at the unexpected turn of events. It was audible in his voice.

‘Abani, Abani, there you are. I was wondering what had happened to you. Mr Lang is over there. But grab a drink first. Or do you want to get one a bit later?’

He sounded as if he had been running laps around the seated figure in the middle. His sentences were punctuated by quick gasps of breath which exaggerated the smallness of his frame. As I spoke, he gently guided me towards the Monocle.

‘Excuse me, Mr Lang. This is Abani Chatterjee.’

The Monocle clutched the sides of the cane sofa he was caved in, suggesting that he was about to get up and greet me. But there he sat, unclutching his hands, and using one of them to shield his face from the sun. It was the man sitting next to him who spoke and extended his hand.

‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, finally. It’s a pleasure. Robert Palney.’

He was a tall, fleshy man in a beige suit and hat and seemed to have the singular job of being a buffer between Lang and anyone else in the vicinity. I could make out by his strong and stretched out accent that he was American. ‘Fritz, this is Mr Chatterjee.’

The Monocle buckled and unbuckled his hands once again. Had the first round of hand movements not been to his satisfaction? Had he instinctively thought of responding to Charu’s introduction and then corrected himself because of some rule that had been set up by Palney for a smoother interaction with people? Was the Monocle interested in responding at all?

I almost extended my hand, but then realized that it wasn’t necessary.

He spoke with a thick European accent, looking at me as if I was a particularly ornate chandelier hanging from a mansion in the northern part of the city.

‘Abani Chatterjee, hello.’

He didn’t smile or employ any of those facial gestures that usually smoothen the process of introductions. There I stood awkwardly next to Charu Ray, who didn’t quite know how to continue matters while the American and the Monocle fixed their gazes on me.

‘I’ll just get myself a drink.’ That seemed to be an appropriate remark, considering that I got the feeling that the Monocle didn’t talk much.

‘Sure, the bar’s over there,’ Palney said, with his eyes still fixed on my face.

‘Could you please get me a gin? No soda. Thank you, Herr Chatterjee.’

Lang spoke in a single pitch and tone, as if speaking was a more sinewy version of standing. The harsh plainness in his speech, however, was not annoying. There was a dramatic quality to it that suggested that his words were more interesting than they sounded.

‘So Herr Chatterjee,’ he said a while later, not having touched the drink I had got him from the bar. ‘What do you think about acting in a German motion picture? I ask because my friend Herr Ray here finds it difficult, almost impossible, to believe that there can be any worthwhile bioscope outside America. And I think Robert encourages this view.’

Robert sniggered. He had a face that found sniggering comfortable. But instead of anything sinister issuing from his wide mouth after the snigger, I saw the American’s shoulders shudder as he squeezed out a laugh to give me and Charu a signal that Lang was having a bit of fun.

‘You were very competent in The Black Hole of Calcutta. I need competence, not acting. Robert invited me to the special screening of The Black Hole in Berlin. I have not seen any other Indian movie, but your approach appealed to me. You do not act and that is good. That is what is good.’

Both Palney and Charu waited for my reaction, the latter with a frown, the former looking up from his drink with a very slight raising of his eyebrows. Both of them seemed to confirm my belief that the Monocle was testing me in the balcony in lieu of a proper screen test. I sat down, taking a civilized sip of my gin. Then, without even hinting at a change of expression, Lang leaned forward, bridging the space between his chair and mine and spoke into my ear.

‘I have reasons to believe that you will not understand my picture.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Lang?’

I was flustered and probably showed it. But I quickly corrected myself.

‘Then why am I here?’ I said, banishing any trace of irritation that may have reached the surface of my face and the tenor of my voice.

The Monocle had already slithered back, this time reclining into his seat quietly as if a long wait was finally over. There could be no uncomfortable slabs of silence here. There were too many people, some in the highly excitable stage that a production team is in before the business of shooting begins. And the alcohol was also making its own gurgling sound across the terrace.

‘There is not enough gin in this drink. But that is nice. That is how this glass should be. Thank you, Herr Chatterjee. It’s warm here. Robert, you look as deep-fried as a Wiener schnitzel already. Maybe we should move inside.’

Once again, his words didn’t have any effect apart from giving flesh to sound. They seemed to be sophisticated objects strung together and left to hang from a coat hanger.

‘So what brings you here, Mr Lang? Why an India picture?’

He drew a cigarette out of a case and let it dangle like a diver frozen in the act of diving off a board. Palney, after a small fumble, lit it with a lighter that was bigger than his hand.

‘I don’t know really, Herr Chatterjee. But why do you ask? Surely, you really don’t want to know why. Or perhaps,’ a long, feline drag on the cigarette and, ‘you don’t know what else to ask. Don’t mind me saying this, but the story itself is banal and has nothing in it. Oh, forgive me, why should you mind? But see that spray of red over there?’

The Monocle barely turned his head in the direction of a fire escape of an adjoining building. But somehow I knew what he was pointing to. The wall next to the black metal twirl of stairs in the distance was, like the belly-high walls enclosing us at the Great Eastern’s Terrace, neatly whitewashed. A streak of red, however, broke the whiteness with considerable violence. It was the sort of visual rupture usually associated with a force of nature. This one was a paan stain. The splatter’s epicentre and the sparks that grew out of it seemed to be the beginnings of a process that would culminate in the making of a red wall—and ultimately a red hotel.

‘Well, Herr Chatterjee. That is a mere stab of colour, somebody’s unsavoury pugmarks that require to be removed. On the other hand, if that was on a canvas, a large white canvas, not a detail different from the way it is now, there on the wall, we would have something far more interesting, don’t you think? It’s the same thing with the story I will be filming. The story is banal as all stories are. It’s when it is converted into a moving picture, an image for every word and for every gap between the words that it will become worth its existence. By the way, she’s the writer of the story.’

This time, the Monocle actually raised a finger. The lady he pointed towards was busy talking to three men who were listening to her with rapt attention.

‘That’s Thea. She’s the one who thinks that there’s something wonderfully dark but anti-Gothic in the Asiatic way of life. She told me when she first wanted me to make an India feature quite some years ago that India is an animal, not a country. And that the English try to tame it, largely unsuccessfully—I’m not talking about political domestication, but aesthetically. What do you think, Herr Ray? Will there be shadows we can manufacture and capture in this heat and later let loose in cooler climates?’

Lang stood up, adjusted his shirt cuffs and looked down at the street below. ‘It’s an animal. Have you been to Europe, Herr Ray? Vienna? No? Well, Europe could have been Asiatic. It’s just that we domesticated the animal long ago.’

The Monocle touched his collar as if to see whether his head was still attached to his body.

‘There’s something about this place that makes me sweat.’

‘It’s the heat, Franz,’ Palney said with a broad smile.

‘The heat, yes, that must be it. The heat.’

As he staggered back from the edge of the terrace, he looked at me, smiled while fixing another cigarette to its holder and said loudly for everyone to hear, ‘No more drinks for me. Herr Chatterjee, let me introduce you to the others.’

He was sure-footed again. The clots of people standing all around registered his presence immediately. They faltered between their sentences or quickly destroyed any evidence of their conversations. I was being introduced to people in cinema after ages.

There was the art director Otto Hunte, a man with a bulging forehead and razor-thin lips who couldn’t stop talking about the interiors of the Kali temple he had visited a few years ago with a Bengali stevedore and how they reminded him of a Siennese catacomb he had once visited. Then there was the cinematographer Carl Hoffman, a teetotaller from Tübingen, who had also visited this country some years ago and was keen that his friend, a young poet and novelist called Hermann Hesse, visit this country for ‘a change of inspiration’.

‘Paul, this is Abani Chatterjee, our Pandit. Herr Chatterjee, Paul Richter. Paul will be our William Jones. And this beautiful lady here is Margarete. Fräulein Schoen is delightful despite all the attention she’s denying me.’

Margarete of the whimsical voice and flower-spattered cotton dress suddenly erupted like a mouse on fire, ‘Fritz, Fritz, about my part, you know how I am about …’ My lateral vision guided me to a corner where Mihir Das was listening to the tall lady whom the Monocle had earlier identified as Thea. So that was Thea von Harbou, the writer of the Joe May script that Bolu-babu had dangled above my head. Although I couldn’t yet see her face very clearly, I did notice that the hard edges of it were being smoothened in the sun, transforming her into the embodiment of something pure and exotic and without passion.

‘So you used to be in the theatre before, Mr Chatterjee?’ the chiselled Paul Richter asked me before squashing his cigarette into the nearby ashtray.

‘I’ve been in bioscopes some ten years. I never really had much exposure on the stage as I went straight to the pictures. Your first time in India?’

‘Yes, first time for all of us actually, barring Carl and Otto. Carl’s been interested in Buddhism for a long time. Thea has been to Ceylon. She came with Leni, another film friend of hers, to holiday next to the Indian Ocean. But she’s never been up here to India. Have you met Thea?’

Richter led me to the spot where Mihir and Thea had been joined by another woman. The sari-clad woman and Mihir, who had avoided me for five years the way a dog avoids another dog’s puddle, smiled at me nervously, looking quickly away when Richter nudged Thea and introduced me to her.

Thea did not look like an actress. As I had suspected from the distance, her face was too angular to be able to conduct any emotions barring the basic ones. It was a practised face. I smiled and told her that it was a pleasure to meet the writer and that she had done a wonderful job in capturing the mysterious communication between two civilizations and turning it into a tale of a personal voyage.

She turned around to face me properly, her face now rising more than a few inches above mine. I felt a warm scurry across the landscape of my body as she responded in perfect English. The terrace space suddenly tapered into a cluster of small rafts floating on a horizonless sea. I kept my emptied glass (I had forgotten whether I had stuck to gin or moved to schnapps or whisky) on the ledge, making sure that I did not lose my balance.

Encounters with women are more prevalent in my profession than in any other. Perhaps tailors meet more women. But actors, both in the bioscope and in the theatre, have to bear with this occupational hazard. There are only two kinds of women in this world—the predatory, and those who exist because they have to. The second kind are like air—only a bit more physical than a rumour, and far too absent to make their actual presence felt. The predator, on the other hand, need not always be a Mae West, planting her flag in landscapes and claiming territorial rights over people and the space they inhabit.

With this golden-haired woman who stretched out vertically in front me, I felt perturbed. She spoke in a manner that made her appear capable of tightening and loosening the iron bolts that hold up humans around her. Was she a predator?

‘Ah, Mr Chatterjee, Mr Das was just telling me about you. Fritz saw one of your bioscopes at the UFA-Palast am Zoo last year and told me that he simply had to have you in this film. I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of them yet. But Mr Das insists that I simply must.’

Mihir produced a weak smile that crumpled to the floor the moment it left his mouth. I acknowledged Thea’s hand as she shook mine and registered a near firm grip in the touch. Her mouth was moving at a completely different speed from the sound that was coming out of it. I distinctly remember having to lip-read her. Her eyes were blue, not quite large enough to harbour clouds, but as bright as those hand-tinted reels in shorts, bursting with reds and blues and greens that made the reds and blues and greens of the real world look drained and colourless. They also made me think back to Shombhu-mama’s old obsession about Kinemacolor cameras and projectors and his heartbreak over not meeting its prophet, Charles Urban.

(Incidentally, I was later disappointed with Kinemacolor. It turned out to be capable of depicting only wishy-washy colours. Just a few tints—mainly red and blue—would douse the running frames on the screen. One commentator in Jugantar even called the Kinemacolor experience ‘a breakthrough, if depicting a desert in Rajasthan in jaundice yellow can be deemed a breakthrough’. Between Kinemacolor washouts and hand-coloured bioscopes, there never was any contest.)

Our encounter was terminated when, with a flick of her neck, she responded to a man standing next to the rubber plant on the other side. She excused herself with a smile and was gone. So there I stood, mortally afraid that I would now have no choice but to indulge Mihir Das with polite banter.

Five years ago, Mihir had been desperately trying to break out of his standard stage roles as the brother of Ram, the son of Shivaji, the minister of Ashoka, the boot boy of Clive. He wanted to become a proper bioscope actor. I got to know him on the sets of The Black Hole in which he had a minor role as the adviser of Mir Jafar. He was one of the many people who had been there on the night I reportedly ‘jumped’ on Adela Heaslop née Quested. With each rendition of the incident, Mihir added his own colourful, verb-filled details. No wonder the man, one of the many responsible for turning me overnight from public darling to lumpen rapist, ultimately found success in bioscope direction rather than in acting.

Luckily, Paul Richter saved me.

‘Thea is not only Lang’s story-writer, collaborator and wife. She’s also the only person who can control him. The only one,’ he added in all seriousness, ‘he’s afraid of without having to be uncomfortable with.’

It had been the tiniest of introductions. But there I was, back in the whirring, chirping, hyper-emoting world of the bioscope, a toe returning inside its shoe-space. The Great Eastern terrace had already started to tilt in angles that were liberating despite it blocking off the view across the street. As I stood, momentarily by myself, squeezing the glass in my hand and feeling the Abani in me escape in bubbles, Lang rang the glass in his hand with a spoon. Standing next to a Victrola, which till a few minutes ago had been emitting sonorous music from inside its spacious, wooden bowels, the Monocle spoke.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s attention please. As the director, I demand a moment’s attention.’

A ripple of laughter aligned everyone like iron filings hypnotized by a horseshoe magnet. In clipped, hyperbolic understatements, Lang announced that he was looking forward to making his first ‘movie about the Orient and its dark wonderments’ and working with the cast and crew who were before him. Shooting would start next week and the budget required the feature to be completed in three weeks. There would be a meeting on Monday at nine in the morning in the hotel and he would like everyone to go through the script one more time before work started. I let out a loudish nod when he mentioned something about ‘the new people who have come aboard’. But when I saw Charu and two other gentlemen nodding like horses waiting at the Maidan, I quickly transformed mine into a jerky movement signifying some sort of discomfort.

‘Robert, I know you have to breathe over my shoulder to check whether we’re putting Decla-Bioscop’s money to any good use or not. You can let Herr Pommer sitting in his plush Berlin office know in the telegram you’ll be sending today that Otto, Carl, Herr Ray and I went to the studios yesterday. Shooting begins next Tuesday. So Margarete and Paul, drink slowly, we have work to do the next few days.’

‘Fritz, du diktator du!’ Margarete Schoen shouted out from the front, her voice leaning over flirtily. Even the Monocle allowed himself a smile. Everyone laughed at that exchange. I didn’t. By the time I realized that the moment for me to join in had passed, Lang had wrapped up his little speech and was moving away from the ominous Victrola, now being readied into action once again by a hotel staff.

But before he slipped away from the terrace, the Monocle theatrically pointed at the banner that the organizers had strung up above the doorway:

‘A GAL A DAY! WELCOME FRITZ LANGE!’

‘Well, that’s the most inviting welcome I will ever receive anywhere. But where are the gals?’ Lang said deadpan, a moment before the gathered worthies erupted into one dusty guffaw. My eyes were on Thea van Harbou towering next to a suited-booted Lalji. Once again I failed to join in the laughter. I was thinking of Durga. At the onset of my return to the bioscopes, I found myself afflicted with the worst possible problem that an actor can possibly have: bad timing.

Back home later that afternoon, I couldn’t stop thinking of Thea. But in the new face, I kept seeing the old one. Thea and Durga looked nothing like each other. One had hair that was yellow as a mustard field and tied into a tight bun. The other had hair as black as any daughter-in-law from Nabakrishna Deb’s family. One spoke English in an accent that would have not been out of place in any viceregal party. The other, I had heard speak only in heavy Bengali or, as was the case during scenes, not at all. And yet there was something more than the alabaster skin that brought the two together.

Thea was Lang’s second wife. His first wife had allegedly found the Monocle in the arms of Thea one evening and had left him. Lang and Thea had been together ever since. I, for one, could see the virtue of being enmeshed in tall, white arms.

The drinks had left me with a dull head-throb. It wasn’t quite an ache, but since no one has ever given the condition I was in a different name, I can only recall it as a headache. I sat down with my Haig and folded the script to the page where I made an appearance, somewhere deep inside the bundle. I was Pandit Ramlochan, the Sanskrit tutor of the great eighteenth-century Orientalist scholar Sir William Jones. The bioscope was about William Jones, his years in India, his decision to leave the successful and comfortable confines of London to undertake the task of reminding a forgetful country of its glorious past. But at the same time, it was about a man who, seeking an alibi for the failures in his personal life, finds the alibi, but to no avail.

The script of The Scholar of Calcutta was littered with detailed stage directions. It was almost as if Lang and Thea were not going to leave anything to chance or the whims of the actors. The script was full of typewritten lines like ‘He moves next to the lamp and peers into the paper’; ‘The look is more of a growl than a stare’; ‘The hand is shown in close-up, so the crumpling must be done extra slowly’. As I kept reading, it became apparent to me that the camera and the sets were going to be the real actors in this bioscope.

Even the scene in which Richter as Jones staggers out of the Asiatic Society after a rousing reception to his groundbreaking paper on Sanskrit phonetics and fights the desire to throw himself into the river is more about what he feels rather than what he does. According to the script, the viewer sees a nor’wester raging, and Jones nearly blown into the Hugli. All because his wife, the patient Anne Maria, grows impatient with his life of scholarship and her own in a strange land.

Charu told me that what had drawn Lang and Thea to the story (written by an unknown Austrian lady by the name of Astrid Schenkl, who had studied Sanskrit in India and mysteriously disappeared while visiting Allahabad some eight years ago) was not only the matter of a European scholar losing himself in a world that he was trying to understand, but also the situation of the local Pandit, his tutor, who was thought by the rest of his peer group to be part of a secret cult. The fact that William Jones seeks out this Pandit, a non-Brahman in a world of Brahmans, to be his tutor makes the story a tale of twin souls, a fable about two conservative outlaws, both of whom are condemned to hanker after something they can never consider their own, and in the process neglect what is rightfully theirs. This ‘explanation’, typed out in double space unlike the rest of the script which was in single space, was on a smaller piece of paper, tied by a string right at the end.

‘He’s been working on this project ever since he completed the feature Spiders,’ Charu explained. ‘He calls it his attempt to capture the “Expressionism of the Asiatic”.’

The more I read the script the more I realized that there was something awkward about it, something forcibly glued and yet not sticking. And yet, the real story, the real bioscope, stared at me as I held the slab of papers in my hand while resting my legs on the cane chair in my living room. For Pandit Ramlochan, it seemed to me, could be played—even within the tight prison that was the overwritten script—as a complex man fuelled by ambition and wracked by the guilt of being envious of a lesser, more fêted man. Dare I say, even at that stage and even with no guilt of envy harboured inside me, I saw the Pandit in me. Or perhaps, it was the other way round.

And yet, Lang had turned Ramlochan into a footstool of a character.

The Haig fuelled my thoughts farther afield. A shadow from the only light in the room was falling on the wall calendar depicting Kali in between the seated figures of Ramakrishna and Sharada. The three of them were shorn of their divinity and had the look of people in a hair-oil advertisement more at home on a Shyambazar billboard than on the wall of my room.

What was I to do? Creep up to the Monocle and tell him that his bioscope required a significant change of perspective? Tell him that the real story was not about the Englishman who wanted to unlock the past of a civilization but about the Pandit who was doomed to live his life out in an intellectual desert and only desired to move to a place where he would be finally appreciated by people like himself? Tell him that I saw myself in the man and the man in me?

But then, still young and with fireflies in my brain, I would rather have been consigned to the jatra than be mistaken as someone pleading for the role of my life. I grant you that when a man returns from an island-prison to the world that is not cordoned off, there is a sense of desperation that makes him willing to overlook acts of embarrassment that may be required to be committed. But my years in the wilderness hadn’t quite purged me of that other, older desperation to protect myself from appearing like a complete fool before people, especially people like Lang. So under the shadow falling on the Ramakrishna–Kali–Sharada calendar, on which a lizard had now parked itself, I decided that I would hold my tongue. And to make me refrain from constantly returning to the thought of how holleringly obvious it was to make the story revolve around Pandit Ramlochan—and not around Sir William Jones—I pushed myself to think about Durga. Or was it Thea von Harbou?

‘Paul, I need you to turn away from the camera when you hear the news of the new church being built. You don’t like the idea of a church being built with the money of thieves and people whom you despise. So your body must show the contempt you feel for all of them.’

I was sitting through the shoots most days. The action inside the studio was going on at breakneck speed, and I grudgingly admired Lang’s stubbornness each time he crushed a long-stemmed cigarette and shouted ‘Cut’ and wanted a re-shoot and got it. I also understood why the Monocle had the habit of gridlocking his fingers. Behind the camera, it was either Carl Hoffman or Lang himself turning the handle. Unlike Shombhu-mama or the others at Alochhaya, neither of them counted out loud. But what Lang did was bob his head, as if goading on what was being performed in front of the camera to get inside the box. And with his left hand having nothing to do during these longish moments, it would fidget about as if with a life of its own. So Lang’s clasping of fingers became understandable when he was not filming. The hands needed rest.

A day before my first scene, Richter invited me over to his hotel for a drink or two. We were only some hours away from becoming William Jones and Pandit Ramlochan and our bodies, the German insisted, needed to get used to each other.

‘His Dr Mabuse was absolutely fantastical. It’s about this man who controls minds and cheats, seduces and enthrals people with his powers. The sets, Herr Chatterjee! Oh, you should see the nightclub set that Otto designed. The walls tilt in and heave out around a gambling table and Lang plays the accordion with our eyes.’

Paul Richter’s eyes shone like a pair of reflected spotlights as he sped on. He had played a playboy duped by the evil Mabuse in the film. Every time he spoke of the man who played Dr Mabuse, his voice dipped in veneration. ‘Herr Klein-Rogge, oh … I don’t know that a man can have such eyes. He had the same glaring, boring-into-the-air look throughout the shoot as he has in the film. Lang took two hours to shoot the playing cards scene to get the light falling just right on his eyes.’

Richter was slightly less enthusiastic about the mythological The Nibelungen, the last two-part feature that Lang had made before diving headlong into The Scholar of Calcutta. But the lack of hyperbole this time arose not so much out of aesthetic preference as out of awkwardness to gush on about a feature in which Richter himself played the lead role.

‘Lang shot the scene in which I slay the dragon in a Zeppelin hangar that had been converted into a thirteenth-century forest,’ he said, looking beyond a hoarding advertising Silver Clouds cigarettes.

Silver Clouds weren’t bad at all. They tasted like trapped air before a thunderstorm—a quality endowed, I would learn, to the tobacco after a careful double-roasting. Rona, in his continuing attempts to be a sophisticate-husband, had switched from our regular brand to Silver Clouds, and I had tried them a few times. Launched as Gandhi Cigarettes, these were the country’s first ‘nationalist’ cigarettes and were gaining more and more smokers for being healthier than other brands. Instead of being touched by the gesture, Gandhi wrote a whining article in Young India objecting to his name being used to sell cigarettes.

I have a strong feeling that this objection was because of the frustrating failure of a three-week fast that he thought would magically patch up the growing problems between Hindus and Muslims. This was a man who was worse than a bioscope starlet. If things didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to, he would sulk and go on a fast. So the brand name ‘Gandhi Cigarettes’ was dropped and a new name given. It’s another matter that the company had to fold up a few years later because of the change in nomenclature. Names still mattered a lot. I remember reading Pothan Joseph later in the Bombay Chronicle: ‘Sales dropped and it melted like clouds in the silver sky.’

Silver Clouds was, however, still alive when I was on the balcony with Paul Richter that evening.

‘Herr Chatterjee, can I ask you a personal question?’ Richter turned around, leaning against the balcony wall. ‘Do you think a German blacked up can play the role of an Indian? I mean, however good an actor he may be and with the necessary knowledge of Indian behaviour, can he convince the audience that he’s an Indian?’

Aah! Richter was talking of the powers of convincing people and the need to be authentic.

‘Mr Richter, what do you see in that cigarette hoarding there?’

‘A man holding a cigarette … and the line “Every dark moment can have a … silver …” does it say “cloud”?’

‘Yes, it does. It’s advertising Silver Clouds cigarettes. They’re not too expensive and are overwhelmingly smoked by Bengali gentlemen. The lower classes smoke cheaper cigarettes, while the English smoke Pall Malls.’

Richter blew a smoke ring that floated away in the hope that it would one day encircle the city below us.

‘And so?’

‘Well, that man on the billboard, does he look like me or like you? Do you think he’s a Bengali, Richter?’

He turned around, took a good long look at the man illuminated by street light. The face was long, white, the beginnings of a dinner jacket peeping out around the shoulder region. His hair was fashioned in the style of Fairbanks, screeched to perfect combness, the billboard artist suggesting reflected light by a few streaks of white in the curve of black. The words next to his face, suggesting that his cigarette was his only true friend, were curled and a little fussy, almost effeminate in their effect. But the man’s face was clearly that of a Charles, Peter, Edward or Albert—not that of Harish, Syed, Dijendra or Prabir.

‘I must say that’s the most Anglo-Saxon Bengali I’ve ever seen,’ Richter said with a smile. His white shirt fluffed up in the evening breeze, making him look like a cricketer at the Eden Gardens in mid-run-up.

‘If that European man on the billboard there can do his job, I don’t see why any other European can’t, with some deft makeup, pull it off as a screen Hindu.’

I, in my white shirt and brown trousers, remembered my stint as John Zepheniah Holwell, powder-dabbed and breeched, with a wig heavy with strands of manly blond curls straddling over my crow’s nest hair. But more importantly, I recalled seeing myself as Holwell on the screen, as much of an Englishman as the Silver Clouds man was a Bengali. Had the people watching those climactic scenes fidgeted slightly in their seats, discomforted by the fact that it was Abani Chatterjee and not an Anglo playing the survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta? Had they caught on to the fact that they were being fooled by bioscope actors with make-up? I don’t think so.

‘Ha! Well put, Herr Chatterjee. I ask because Lang seems to agree with you. It’s only with you that he has made the exception.’

That was true. Till that moment I hadn’t realized that, barring the scores of one-rupee extras, I was the only Indian in the cast. All the other characters in The Scholar of Calcutta were being played by consonant-munching Germans—not only William and Anna Maria Jones and the other Europeans, but also the Brahmans of Nadia, Raja Nabakrishna Deb, Pandit Ramlochan’s helper Putu, and at least eight more non-firingis.

‘Palney had suggested getting a few local actors apart from you. It would, he said, make the film “genuine”. Lang simply rejected the idea. I guess he has his reasons.’

With my mouth lined with a last drink, I left Richter to his devices, but not before I had picked up the fanciful phrase ‘Auf wiedersehn’. In the backseat of a Studebaker, I looked at the streets outside. It was late and the electric lights made the city look like a running bioscope. We circled half around the place where the Holwell Monument, that giant non-Shaivite phallus at the corner of Dalhousie Square, had stood during my grandfather Bholanath Chatterjee’s time. The driver and I then rolled along wide-screen surroundings with pastel coloured buildings that seemed always freshly painted. I heard a click the instant we entered Boro Bazar, the entry point into the inchoate. Instead of the seaside silence of Chowringhee, the old Black Town announced itself with night loudness. If it wasn’t the sound of splashing water or snatches of a quarrel, there were the less subtle sounds of entangled and maddened dogs.

Just as the car turned a corner—for here was a particular stretch that was only made up of corners—the Klaxon horn erupted. Whether the man lit up by the arc lights of the Studebaker was shaking from the after-effects of a bone-crumbling hooter or because of the amount of alcohol he had consumed could not be confirmed. The driver had proceeded to stick his head out and spill forth a volley of words that referred to the man’s pedigree and incestuous behaviour. But under the canopy of the car, I simply saw his face. It was bursting with a white light of its own and staring back at me.

‘Gggghnaaaaaaaaa …’ was the sound that erupted from his mouth, before he gnarled himself up again and shouted, ‘The English are here! The English are here! Can anyone hear me? The English are here!’

I shook myself forward from my seat and barked at the driver in front.

‘Just drive! Just get us out of here!’

With the arc lights falling one last time on the illuminated man in a white panjabi and dhuti and a thrice-wound garland of white flowers round his right wrist, the car quietly turned, sidestepping him. He was rooted to the ground even as he followed the car with his hub-cap eyes.

‘Can anyone …’ he had started again as his face receded through the window. But he was cut off by another burst of the Klaxon that left Boro Bazaar and its blackness jangling for minutes. I had crossed over to Lang’s ‘Asiatic side’. And this was where the city was, by civic and sensual order, supposed to provide me solace and an untrammelled feeling of belonging. Some twenty minutes later, I closed my eyes, no longer required to be in that day or hanker for tomorrow.

Ten minutes on the set, it became clear that Fritz Lang’s bioscope was not going to be like those directed by Dhirendra Ganguli, Shishir Bhaduri and the other yodellers. As soon as I stepped out of the make-up room after getting myself into a greying dhuti and strapping on a gamchha across my shoulder, I was awash with a peculiar kind of happiness. After half a decade of not being allowed to be anyone else, I had almost forgotten what it was to step inside another skin, into a place where Abani Chatterjee disappeared.

I was Pandit Ramlochan Sharma. There had initially been a suggestion that I get my head shaved, leaving only a horse-tail strand of a tiki at the back. Then I reminded Lang that Ramlochan was no Brahman and my unshorn head would visually make me stand out from the Brahmans—played, of course, by shaved Germans whose heads were domes of skin bouncing off the powerful set lights. So I kept my hair, on which another longer pile was added.

In my heavy make-up, I was in my early sixties and I felt it. A head-rush of arrogance, like the first cigarette of the morning, greeted me as I walked towards the pool of light a few metres away from Lang and the camera. Otto Hunte was walking up and down the phalanx of arc lights, directing and redirecting positions.

‘Ready?’ the Monocle asked me with his hand resting on the camera handle. He could have been a zamindar, hand on elegant cane, posing before a slick-haired photographer.

Already, the machines, the railings, the criss-crossings that held up every part of the set had vanished. As I sat down at my position, next to a blacked-up Brahman and in front of a sweating William Jones, I was already thinking of how to impress the Englishman with my understanding of Kalidas and other gems from the Sanskrit language. The desire to catch his attention made the camera, the lights, the Monocle all sizzle and disappear. I was Pandit Ramlochan Sharma inside a courtroom in the company of people I despised.

Somewhere in the vague distance, I heard a voice shout out, ‘Roll camera!’ It could have been street noise.

Ramlochan meets William Jones for the first time. He is supposed to be intimidated and impressed by the man and the setting. I, however, feel neither. All I feel is the need to tell the man in the wig and jacket that I must be sent to his country to spread the knowledge of an ancient nation. I feel a good need to shake him by the collar and state that I am that person and no one else—certainly not any of those pompous, parroting Brahmans who pass themselves off as scholars discussing the exact number of asuras that died fighting the Goddess Chandi. But there is a stronger feeling: the desire to be fêted by the world and by those who truly value knowledge. Below that, the way the foundations of a building hold up its floors, lies another feeling, making itself felt like heartburn: to be in the place where it’s not impossible to touch women with skin as white as salt.

‘Don’t act! I don’t want acting. I want architecture! And for that you must stop acting, Herr Chatterjee. You read the script. So can we please stick to it! Okay, another take. Ready? I want you, Herr Chatterjee, to look into Jones’s eye shiftily. Hold back the beginnings of a smile. Look at him the way a child looks at his father in army uniform for the first time. Okay, positions. Roll camera!’

I saw Richter and me and the other actors in the black and white of my eye. There was going to be a halo powdered all around Sir Williams’s face looking on to the small multitude of scholars before him. He was to choose, in a cherry-pluck, one of them to teach him Sanskrit. Among the crowd, I would stand out as the only person without the caste marks—and still, in his magnanimity, the English scholar would choose me. That choice would be translated in a medium-shot on my face, a title card explaining who I was, my face explaining what I wished.

But as shooting continued, I grew increasingly uneasy with my Ramlochan. There were only three scenes to be shot in the entire shot with me in them. Later that evening, things came to a flashpoint. It was the scene when William Jones discovers that his Pandit is planning to sacrifice a child for the purpose of mastering a new science. Lang wanted Jones to drive sense into Ramlochan, making him give up his diabolical plan, with a momentous ray of light falling on my face inside my hut-room.

‘I want the change to be fast,’ he said, clearly with a detailed picture in mind. ‘I want you to move as fast as good can change to evil.’ He clapped his hands sharply to emphasize the point he was making.

The studio was hotter than the outside and the lights were making the Monocle sweat enough for his eyeglass to mist up from time to time. He kept rubbing away the moisture with an impeccably white handkerchief. But what started worrying everyone was that his normal aristocratic look had begun to change into something more dishevelled. There was a moment before the child-sacrifice scene that I noticed Paul shuffling over to Thea, who had arrived at some point, exchanging looks and words. It bothered me that Lang, in particular, and everyone, in general, were treating me as a child. Ramlochan was completely in their hands and the palpable feeling that I got was that there was a tussle under way between them and me.

Takes flew like garbage birds, picking on each scene and then shooed away until another take. The mumblings between Lang, Thea and Otto grew. Even as a man following a fixed script, placed inside the eighteenth-century and growing wary of not being able to think the way the Pandit was really supposed to think, I realized that there was something going deeply wrong. The film was turning out to be a joke. Despite my complete lack of reputation at that point, I feared for my reputation. I spoke about this to Charu at the Dilkhusha over mutton cutlets.

People were gently noticing me, with my unwigged hair cropped to a widow’s mop. Certainly the regulars who had stopped noticing me since The Black Hole of Calcutta were now looking at me again, trying to place me, if not acknowledge me.

‘Charu, how do you think the bioscope’s going?’ I asked before glugging down some water so that I could listen to his response without any interruptions.

‘Oh, this is an experience, Abani. I really sometimes wonder what would happen if our bioscopes were shown to regular audiences in Berlin, London, Paris, Chicago, New York.’ And then he repeated ‘Berlin’ again without realizing it. ‘All the places where performances are going hand in hand with the latest technologies, the latest tastes. Well, this is the big break, Abani. Don’t worry about the takes. That’s how Lang works with everyone.’

‘What do you think about Lang?’

‘Oh,’ he said with a knowing double-shrug, ‘he’s different all right. Not at all like the Madhu Basus and the Jyotish Banerjis of the world. But that’s the whole point. What he’s capturing on film is distilled movement. I can’t wait to see him on the cutting table.’

Clearly, Charu was not in any way perturbed by the way Lang conducted the making of the bioscope.

‘Tell me something. You’ve seen any of his other films?’

Charu hollered for some water. He had bitten into a chilli. An answer was delayed for a while, as he sucked in air by the windful, hanging out his tongue to dry after each downpour of water. Breathing heavily, he finally said, ‘Tea?’

‘Sure. Have you seen any of Lang’s movies?’

‘No. But Franz Osten has.’

‘Who’s Franz Osten now? The man you met in London during that art course?’

‘That’s right. Osten’s the brother of Peter Ostermayr the producer. Osten is getting into the bioscope business full-time and had mentioned something about the “Austrian Lang” to look out for. When he learnt that I was going to work with Lang, Osten got all excited and wrote to me about how he had immensely enjoyed his Dr Mabuse the Gambler recently. An “incredible document of our time”—his words, not mine. And this isn’t official yet, but with Lang making The Scholar of Calcutta here, Osten is already getting ready to make his own India feature. I smell a trend. And guess whose name I’ve recommended?’

He chuckled merrily, almost like a child, making me forget that he had been choking on his food just a few moments ago.

‘I recommended you! I told him that Lang’s got you in his feature. He’s keen. But Abani, stick to the script, will you?’ he added in case I had lost my powers of understanding.

‘Listen Charu, maybe it’s nothing to worry about and it’ll be sorted out in the cutting room, but I’ll be honest with you. Lang’s idea of the film is all wrong. It’s silly. And I know you’ll think that just because I’m playing Ramlochan I’m saying this, but the Pandit’s is the real story.’ It was true. The more I thought about Ramlochan, the more I thought of my own condition. A man surrounded by the rabble and being mistaken for one of the rabble. I knew that there was a tuning fork that was ringing both of us, pretender and pretended, in the same pitch. The Pandit could not but be the real story. Anything else would be horrifying. Empty and horrifying for me.

Charu looked up, emitting a wan smile.

‘Abani, listen. Correct me if I’m wrong: you’ve been out of the pictures for five years now. You remember how Lalji treated you? Not to mention the whole bioscope industry? You really want to throw it all away? For you to start nitpicking again … I don’t know. What can I say? We’re talking here about a rising European director. You are the only Indian actor he’s chosen. For god’s sake, Abani, why can’t you take your costume off like other actors after a day’s shoot? You have just another day’s shoot a week later.’

‘That’s how I play a character, Charu. That’s what I do, that’s what I’ve done, for all bioscopes since Prahlad.’

Charu let out a wet guffaw. Squeezed it through his lips.

‘Okay Ramlochan Pandit. I can’t argue with that. So you’re not drinking for a month either, eh?’

‘Ramlochan isn’t a Brahman, Charu. And I would certainly be drinking if I was as frustrated as he was living under the shadow of a fool who’s a leech to boot,’ I said, a glass of Haig flashing in my head.

Silence. I could see that Charu was getting impatient and upset.

‘Charu, who is this Fritz Lang?’

I don’t know why I asked him that question. The waiter had just plonked our change in a white plate pillowed with mouri and Charu took a sprinkleful with his fingers and threw back a pile into his mouth. After a few rounds of mastication, he pushed his chair back, stood up and replied as if I had asked him the time.

‘I told you, Abani. He’s a European director. What else can I say? You know, if you weren’t interested, you could have told me right at the start …’

I squeezed out of the chair. My eighteenth-century dhuti, which looked not a stitch different from a twentieth-century dhuti, may have planned on getting hitched to the chair leg. But I have always had a way of dealing with obtrusive furniture. I shift them around.