I Am an Executioner (21 page)

So, I was thirty when Jogesh joined, fresh from university, a young, handsome star of a copywriter from one of Kolkata’s prominent families. He looked over my shoulder while I was sketching on the day we met. I was preparing a storyboard for a television ad: a family picnicking in a hill station, their clothes all brilliant white thanks to Rim! Brite-And-Clean clothes soap.

“Your composition reminds me of Jean Renoir’s film
Partie de campagne
,” the voice behind me said in tailored English. “Have you seen it?”

Who was this proper young sahib wandering the wrong departments? I wondered. His tall shadow obscured my easel; his European cologne invaded my nose. Was he trying to flatter or to mock me? One could never trust these privileged types.

“A lovely movie,” I answered in a neutral tone, trying to figure what the boy was up to. It is only incidental that I was lying.
Difficult to admit, but I had not yet even heard of Jean Renoir or
Partie de campagne
. How much I had been missing! Not speaking French, I even thought Jogesh might be referring to some Malayali film.

“One day I will make a film like that,” he informed me, quite plainly. “It will be set in the Bengal countryside, using deep-focus shots as suggested in your beautiful storyboard. The story will revolve round a real Indian family, none of this popular humbug, and our local actors will act.”

I turned and looked up at him: I could not help laughing at the boy’s simple confidence and plain ambition, and Jogesh also laughed. Perhaps it was artful naïveté, but the impression he gave was of a talent so robust it could not be constrained by our normal, disingenuous Indian modesty. I was taken immediately by these qualities, even as I envied his lack of encumbrances, his youth and privilege, that allowed him to make such plans.

As for his own fondness for me, that is easily explained. He saw how I could sketch a scene even after five glasses of local brandy at our after-work dhaba, capturing every nuance of pertinent detail. He appreciated my thoroughness with an ad mockup, my considered choices for the props on shoots. He admired my aesthetic values.

He took me to all foreign film screenings, asking my opinions, in turn giving me such an education. (The Americans became my favorite: Ford; Hawks; Hitchcock; Nicholas Ray.) He wanted to prepare me because I had skills that would be necessary for him, and since our first film, he has relied entirely on me to create the visual scheme. It was I who urged him to shoot half of
Calcutta Nights
in black-and-white (village scenes) and half in color (city life). I sketched the costumes vivifying the family’s progression up the social ladder. I carefully picked the furniture for the successive homes. And, of course, I drew up the storyboards that he was clutching in his hands as he instructed Anant on how to frame the shots. In effect, I created the visual world through which Jogesh’s cinematographer moved the camera.

And Jogesh’s skill? He was a manager and manipulator of people—a director, through and through. How he could talk! With such confidence, making each crew member feel they were the crucial link in a grand endeavor.

Jogesh quit his job in the ad agency to make that film. It was some two years after he had started at the agency. He simply walked up to my easel and bluntly he informed me: “I have submitted my notice, and so should you. Bibhutibhushan, I have secured financing. In twelve weeks’ time, we will begin filming my screenplay.”

I was speechless, exhilarated. Who else but Jogesh could make me even to think of quitting my cushy job, and facing the fury of my mother and young wife—both so quick with an insult.

“Bah bah! Where did you find the money, good friend?” I laughed.

He showed me then a small square photograph of a girl with huge eyes and creamy skin, staring into the camera with a wise and weary gaze even at her tender age.

“Our mothers play bridge on Sundays. Our horoscopes match perfectly. And her father—I am happy to inform you, Bibhutibhushan-brother—is unspeakably wealthy.”

That Jogesh married for money was not the most shocking thing; in those days, very few of us married for love. What surprised me instead, in her quiet way, was Nirmala herself. At their winter wedding, as the priest babbled prayers and relatives anointed her, and later at the Tollygunge, as one by one the eminences of Kolkata society offered their empty blessings, this strange girl remained calm and apart, neither impressed nor intimidated, succumbing not at all to the whirl of pretension, rocking her head and smiling as needed. Her face was barely out of childhood, plump and sweet; but her eyes were like the eyes of 3-D Jesus glued to the dashboard of the car belonging to our soundman Mr. George—compassionate and knowing eyes, eyes aglow with the sad wisdom of two thousand years, mysteriously following you even if you move left, if you move right.

In the reception line, I made some swift, jovial little crack about all the overstuffed babus that even Jogesh didn’t capture, nor my own wife. But a knowing smile flitted over Nirmala’s mouth, a brief intimacy between us. At that moment, even through her silence, I became allied with her. I would not have been bold to have called it
love
, but in fact it was. And thereafter, at functions and parties, or visiting Jogesh’s home office, I always went out of my way to attend to lonely Nirmala, to ask what magazine she was reading, and make some small joke and pull a smile from that face. She was so bored, with a mind like hers, in a house filled with servants and nothing to do. How could Jogesh be so preoccupied as to ignore this treasure? When she visited us on set, amid all those grave and intent persons, where everything was pukka tension, she in turn would seek me out, because I would always give her a little time, and we’d share some wry comments on the serious goings-on.

“Bibhuti-bhai, cheer me up. Tell one of your jokes,” she used to beg of me, making my eager heart to melt. I would assume a voice or make a funny sketch: Nirmala’s face on the body of a swan; Jogesh’s sleek mug attached to a peacock or a wolf. It was the great pleasure of my day to elicit those satisfied giggles. She was my perfect audience.

Such diversions were entirely to Jogesh’s satisfaction, for it took away some stressful burdens from him, freeing him to focus on his job—to focus, that is, on whichever beautiful and sophisticated actress happened to be on the set that day.

“What is he telling to her so earnestly?” Nirmala would ask me.

“Just directions, move this way, that way, speak more loudly and so on.”

“Taking a long time for such simple directions, isn’t he? Doesn’t she know to move without his touching her like that?” Jogesh was bending over the actress, whispering animatedly, then pausing to listen. Taking her arms and moving them gently, like doll’s arms.

“Indeed. We could all be eating dinner by now if he didn’t take such a fuss over the actors. Vain creatures, actors; they will suck up all the time if you allow them. Look here: my own face on a swinging monkey!”

“What?”

“A monkey, swinging from a tree! Jumping into the water with the inscrutable swan.”

“Looks nothing like a monkey.”

“It does!”

“Chup. Enough nonsense,” she said, smiling despite herself. “It’s not amusing.”

For all those years, we were not unfaithful. We were not malicious. At that time, nothing could have happened between someone such as Nirmala Swan and someone such as Bibhutibhushan Mallik, even had we met each other as unmarried persons. As our local films repeatedly remind us, this is the tragedy of our Indian system.

It would take more than thirty years. My sons would have grown, and through my connections, found jobs on Kolkata film sets: one a script supervisor; the other a cameraman. My own marriage would have further devolved into a graceless and purely practical arrangement, completely lacking sensuality. All of us would have grown into old people. And, while Jogesh was abroad and she was using the home computer, Nirmala would have stumbled into his open e-mail inbox, and read the fond and familiar message from the Mumbai Actress: final, irrefutable proof. And only then would she call me to her home and fall, weeping furiously, into my arms.

“Oh, God!” she cried, scratching her arms with her nails, pulling her own hair with her fist. “How could he have done this?”

“Ah-ooh-wa, careful, careful,” I cooed, holding her arms gently to her sides and pulling her close against my breast—where she melted, where she melted.

“I want to kill him!” she wailed. “I want to cause him that much pain.” Patiently, I flicked away her tears and kissed her on the hair—at first like a brother would kiss, and then … before our eyes our long-waiting love finally found its door and came into the beautiful open. Our children were grown; we were finally free to do as we pleased, society be damned.

Of course, we still kept it only between us, for how could I proclaim my love for Jogesh’s wife while remaining dependent on Jogesh for my livelihood, while also living in small-minded and clannish Kolkata? We met monthly, weekly, whenever I found a stolen weekend, a private afternoon. Nirmala’s fury at Jogesh had released a passion so intense, which she had never before acknowledged; while I myself discovered in her such universes of thoughtful tenderness. Nirmala would make me tea, would ask after my health, and then her watery wide eyes would drift, lost and anxious. That look, I learned, was the precursor to love. Until, mutually assuaged, we shyly wore our clothes again. She would offer me tea once more, also sweets. She would straighten my shirt and fold up the packet of sweets into my hand (for the long drive). She would walk me to the door and close it only after I had rounded the corner for the taxi.

That night, the premiere in Lincoln Center is a gala affair, drawing a full six hundred people to the auditorium. In the audience, I spy some American actors whose faces I have seen in cinema halls of childhood (look, there is Eli Wallach! And nobody recognizes him!), causing my stomach to revolve in giddy flops; even after so many films and so many festivals, the excitement of such moments never diminishes. As the film begins, my eyes gleam with satisfaction to see the results of my effort, the soundness of my design choices reflected in the rapt eyes of the
audiences around me. When the credits roll, our film receives a deafening ovation.

During the Q-and-A afterward, one panting questioner begs, “Mr. Sen, how have you enjoyed New York?” Jogesh takes the microphone. “I wish I had more time to enjoy the city properly,” he chuckles, in his finest imitation Oxbridge—the accent he always uses with Western audiences. “You see, New York is always so busy for me.” I suspect he means this in more ways than one, because at the back of the auditorium I finally notice the Mumbai Actress. She is sitting, tall and fine-nosed, among a group of men in their neat stubble and linen scarves.

Eyeing the Mumbai Actress at the cocktail reception afterward, Nirmala asks me, twisting with both hands the corner of her dupatta, “Could it be that I was all along mistaken about the two of them? After all, she has come here only to promote her own film.”

“Mistaken?” I ask. I hand to Nirmala one of the drinks I have waited in a long line to retrieve, gin with a splash of tonic, plus one big squeeze with my own fingers from a lime wedge. This question—this naïveté—somehow irritates me. “Come on, Nirmala. They are behaving innocently now, avoiding intimate conversations, but only because you are here, naturally.”

“Oh, but she is beautiful!” cries Nirmala. And Nirmala’s lovely face—crinkled with lines like a fine batik—tightens in distress.

“My darling, what difference does it make to us, anyway?” I whisper, moving my lips dangerously close to hers. “You are the real beauty in the room, and that dancing girl cannot take away one bit of happiness from us.”

My words evidently reassure her. Nirmala rocks her head in agreement, blinking down her tears, and then (Deborah Kerr,
Affair to Remember
!) she takes one step away from me for our mutual protection.

“I want to get away from here,” she whispers. Together, we step out coatless into the blustery wind of the vast Lincoln Center
plaza. Its beautiful bright fountain towers grandly, spraying us with icy mist. Nirmala tightens her grip around my arm, and I pull her close.

“Over there,” I say, pointing to the distant west. “That is where we will live when I am making my film. My cousin’s condominium in Jersey City. He will loan it to me.”

“Is it a nice place?”

“Beautiful, Nirmala. A full view of Manhattan.” She leans eagerly to hear my description, so I continue. “It is on the thirtieth floor. You can see from the Statue of Liberty all the way up to Empire State Building. The whole city sparkles at night, brighter than stars. We can lie in bed and watch it.”

“I hope there is room for Sharmila?”

Sharmila is her servant, her cook. I look at her a little confused—is she joking? “None of that in this country. At least not until we move to a bigger place.”

“How about Chapati?”—her dog.

I shake my head sadly: “The building does not allow pets.”

She stares at me a moment, on the verge of speaking, but then quickly looks away. She points up at the glassy Lincoln Center building. There are giant murals behind the enormous windows.

“Wonderful,” she sighs.

“Marc Chagall.”

In the paintings, some angels and villagers swirl into the air, unburdened of all heaviness, riding on birds toward the stars. “Like they are flying to a different part of the earth,” I say.

“As if they don’t wish to be tied to any earth at all,” observes Nirmala.

After the grand success of
Calcutta Nights
all those years ago, life became a new thing for all of us. Jogesh’s name was spoken with pride along names of great Bengali artists: Rabindranath,
Satyajit, Jogesh. Was it warranted? Never I minded: I was enjoying the fruits of it. “Even as we feel the international economy crowding us out, Mr. Sen gives us hope that India, specifically West Bengal, continues to offer something unique and invaluable to the world,” wrote
Times of India
. Our Kolkata audiences filled theaters for months and months to see up on the screen a village like those their own parents had grown up in, brought to vivid cinematic life; a family struggling to make a living off the land, finally pulling up stakes and moving to the city, where they suffered and prospered, fell out of love and back in it, and raised children who turned into people just exactly like those sitting in the audience, staring up at the screen.