Menoka has hanged herself Read online

  SHARMISTHA GOOPTU

  MENOKA

  HAS HANGED

  HERSELF

  For

  Aisha Gooptu Majumdar…my Rajbala

  And

  Rochona Majumdar

  who fought off cancer and made our everyday battles seem so very small

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book has been a long time in the making. I always knew how the story would end, but it fleshed out slowly, sometimes in moments of inspiration, at other times uneasily. And a lot changed around me in those years. Aisha arrived in 2014, and motherhood went on to give me an entirely new and different perspective on everything. In this time, I also found new people, and tried to understand them. Their simplicity and their greyness became infused with my characters.

  I must thank my commissioning editor Dharini Bhaskar, who patiently read and reread earlier drafts. My editor Himanjali Shankar has been supportive and appreciative, and my thanks are to her and Sayantan Ghosh for their editorial work on the book. Many moons ago, Rochona Majumdar had read the earliest drafts of the first chapters and had egged me on. My friends, Madhuja Mukherjee and Avantika Gupta sounded out some ideas, and gave useful pointers. Annesha Ghosh and Umakanta Roy were able and enthusiastic research associates.

  But more than anyone, it is my husband, Boria Majumdar, who, as always, has driven me to find the best in myself, never asking questions of me, but always being there for whenever I need him. My overwhelming gratitude is to him, and my mother-in-law Roopa Majumdar, for keeping their patience with me and holding my hands through the trials and joys of little Aisha’s growing up. Sulekha Gooptu, my mother, may well have held her own in the cruel world of bioscope pictures, with her own undying spirit to always fight the odds. This book also remembers Menoka Devi (though it in no way draws on her life), lead actress of the 1930s, who died in penury in her old age. There are many like her, who are unknown and unsung, and who had their moments of glory, in what was, ironically, the disreputable profession of the bioscope. I also remember here Jamuna Devi, who became famous overnight as Parvati of Devdas (1935), and whom I had interviewed shortly before her death, along with Bharati Devi, who had a long career as an actress. Both ladies had provided me with rare insights into their world of the pictures.

  And finally, Aisha, whose feistiness is what makes the Rajbala of this book. Being a mother made me want, more than ever, to tell this story.

  PART 1

  Ramola

  I

  ‘What a perfectly horrible start to the year…’ thought Ramola as she looked up at the clock one more time. Its hands were perfectly poised, one covering the other.

  It was five minutes past one in the morning, the first day of 1937. Ramola Devi, star of Indian films, sat at the Victorian desk in her tastefully furnished bedroom, staring out of the window at a deserted Elgin Road. The lamp at her bedside illuminated her fair complexion and delicate features, her silky tresses hanging around her face, reaching almost to her slender waist. Without any make-up she looked almost unreal, her slight frame resting on the velvet cushion of a mahogany chair. Her window overlooked a street lamp and she watched it flicker slowly, as she caught snatches of a telephone conversation in the next room.

  ‘Bad lot, Sir, these ones, but we have to make do with them, that’s how the business is…very true, Sir, gives us a bad name, though we do try our best to better their lot, these girls…educate them…I’m sure you will understand…quite, quite…’

  Then a minute or two of silence, the person at the other end was having his say.

  Then once again, the voice in the next room broke in, ‘He should never have opened the gate at that hour, I was very angry myself. We have imported machinery, cameras, all very expensive…but possibly because he knows the studio girls…[laughing], he might have thought he stood a chance with her, if he let her in. You know these classes Sir…though it should never have happened…and I can assure you, we will not deal with it lightly…’

  Then the other person spoke briefly before the voice at this end was heard again, this time a markedly relieved tone, ‘Absolutely, Sir…this is much appreciated…we have good relations with all the papers…that should be no worry at all…’

  The clock in the next room had fallen behind again. It struck one, and Ramola lost Shankar’s words in the loud chime.

  ‘Tea, then, any day that suits you, Ramola and I would be delighted to see you again…’

  The conversation had ended, and Ramola heard the receiver touch down on the cradle with its familiar tinkle-clang. But almost at once the instrument whirred back to life as more numbers were dialled in.

  She had told her maid to make a cup of her favourite Darjeeling tea and as she waited, nursing the hot cup in her cold hands, she shivered a little bit in the morning chill. Her husband Shankar Chattopadhyay, head of Bharat Talkies, was in the next room, making these untimely calls, the last one to the city’s police chief, whom he happened to know well, and who had been located at his favourite haunt at the Bengal Club. Luckily for Shankar, if at all one could say that under the circumstances, it was the early hour of New Year’s Day, and several among the city’s notables were still up and about, ringing in the New Year, and he hadn’t needed to rouse people from their beds.

  That moment, as Ramola was finishing her tea, he was trying to place a call to the police thana. And Anil, his deputy would be on his way there by now. Anil was good in any predicament. He had a way of talking things through with people. He would know how to handle the police. Subol, the accountant at Bharat Talkies who lived inside the premises, had telephoned from Shankar’s office at the studio, about an hour and quarter minutes back. Menoka had hanged herself in the bathroom of the women’s dressing room, wearing one of the costumes from her new picture. The very thought of it made Ramola feel sick in the stomach. She couldn’t, simply couldn’t for all her life, fathom the kind of despair that made people take their own lives, leaving behind everything that they had lived for.

  ‘I couldn’t do it, if even I wanted to die,’ she mused. ‘Maybe…it is a thing with these classes, not able to think through a difficulty…excessive in everything, uncouth… dramabaazi, dramatics in death even…’

  She couldn’t but think harshly of Menoka’s breed, though of course she was horrified at the girl’s fate.

  Menoka was Ambarish Dev Burma’s newest find, and had moved very fast from being chorus girl in one of the theatre companies to one of Bharat Talkies’ best new faces. She was a fast learner, and had delighted in being in front of the camera. Menoka had quickly picked up the ways of the studio para, the studio environs of Tollygunge in Calcutta, and even some social graces in the time that she had been at Bharat Talkies. Under Ambarish Dev Burma’s direction, she had appeared in two of last year’s hits, and had become rather a favourite of the variety papers. Though, of course, Ramola herself had never acknowledged Menoka in any way. Menoka, not too long ago, had inhabited a house of disrepute in Bowbazar, a beshyabari, and all respectable ladies kept their distance from such girls even if they had made a name for themselves.

  Even that night, Ramola, in her mind, rehearsed what would be her declared indifference to the whole thing. ‘So many of these unfortunate women come to us for a better life,’ she would say if asked about Menoka. ‘We do try our best to uplift them from their fallen lives, but alas, their past often returns to haunt them…’ It was a line that one mouthed, keeping up the façade…one that was so carefully crafted and maintained in this ‘line’ of theirs. But really, how inopportune that this should happen on the first day of the New Year, a time she always looked forward to, when everything seemed so nice somehow. What a very horrible start to the new year.


  It had been the night of 31st December, and the city’s elite were raising their toasts in the hotels and clubs around Park Street and Chowringhee. Ramola and Shankar had been invited to the year-ending ball at the Grand Hotel, a magnificent affair attended by England-returned Bengalis and nouveau riche Marwaris. Her Excellency, the Lieutenant Governor’s wife, the evening’s distinguished patron, had taken a great liking to Ramola and they had spoken about making pictures for public instruction. Ramola had worn a shimmering chiffon sari with a short-sleeved blouse, and diamond chandelier earrings and slender diamond bracelets. By far she had been the most beautiful woman in the ballroom, and she had acknowledged it with quiet grace.

  Menoka had been out that night, with whom no one knew. She had arrived at the studio sometime after half past ten, woken the night guard and forced him to open the gates. She had been drinking, the guard had said, but seemed in her senses. She had made her way towards the women’s dressing room, where costumes were laid out for the rehearsals. A half hour later the guard had found her in the bathroom, hanging by the sari she had worn that evening. Ramola and Shankar had just gotten home from the ball, when the telephone rang, and Shankar had rushed into action so the matter did not get into the papers and no names from the studio were dragged in.

  It was a scandal, and the other studios would try to make some gossip out of it.

  “Young Actress Kills Herself: Does Bharat Talkies Have an Answer?”

  or

  “Is Our Cinema Industry a Safe Place for Women? Was it Suicide or Murder at Bharat Talkies?”

  Ramola could well picture the headlines in the grubby little mouthpieces that some of the studios brought out in the name of house magazines. Not that it would matter very much, by and by. All the studios used girls like Menoka and they all had things to hush up every now and then. Still, respectability was the motto these days, what with the big studios claiming they made ‘serious’ films, or that ‘so and so is from an educated and cultured family and is trained in the classical arts’ when they launched some kothawali or other. High class ladies like herself were still a rarity in the studio precincts, and girls like Menoka played those ‘devis’ on the screen that they never could be in real life.

  Ramola quite easily predicted the mood at the studio when they opened for work again the day after. ‘Ki re, ghatona shunechish? Did you hear what happened?’ Not just the hushed whispers and rabid rumours, but also the smirks and gratification. A beshya had died the death that befitted her kind—though Menoka’s every endeavour had been to pull away from that past—and any iota of pity was quite evidently unfitting. Menoka had risen to stardom too fast and too soon, and there were many who would have liked to see her dragged in the dust. Not least, some of the other studio girls, who vied with each other to bestow their favours on the likes of Ambarish Dev Burma. Ambarish was Bharat Talkies’ top director, who made and unmade the fortunes of the likes of Menoka. By all counts, he was a genius, and he had crafted some of the silver screen’s most unforgettable female portrayals.

  Ambarish…or ‘Saheb’…as everyone in the studio para called him…had a penchant for those women that survived on the margins of society. He almost hunted for them. He picked them up from the city’s darkest gallis, or like Menoka from among the studio’s chorus girls, loved them, and turned them into screen goddesses. Then, without reason he would let go of them, and Ramola believed that he sometimes would go that extra way to drive them to the brink of their senses.

  For him, it was almost a game, one that he had to keep on playing, though what she never could fathom was, why did each of these girls fall prey to it? All of them. Again and again. Why did they not see through him? Why in god’s name did they not step back, before it got too late? Go away. After all, there were all the other studios. Surely they had known that something was not right? Surely. And still…they had kept on. Was it because of the fame and fortune he promised them? Or did they really think it was love? That he loved them, like he had loved none before? It made her angry again, just thinking of it, stupid wretches, all of them. Before Menoka there was Tara, who had taken to the bottle and one day had just disappeared, where she went nobody knew. And Radha, who begged on the streets before they had found her dead. Ambarish had taken up with Radha’s younger sister, and it was whispered that he had kept them both together in the same house, purposefully setting one girl against the other. They were all so very young and he had made them stars of their day, then seen to it that they never worked with another director. Menoka was his muse, and as if from the start of it her fate was sealed.

  Two months ago, Ambarish had announced his new picture, with Menoka as the heroine. Her role, that of a dancing-girl who would return the hero’s love with deceit and unfaithfulness. It was said that Menoka had resisted this particular portrayal. Ambarish had almost fashioned this character after the real Menoka, even naming her the same. It was one which he had promised would bring her untold fame. Yet, Menoka had not wanted it. It was too close to life for her, a life which she thought she had left behind. Almost like somebody had pulled her clothes off her, made her naked, Ramola reflected.

  Menoka had wanted to play the other woman—the suffering and tormented wife, who still got her man in the end. Hadn’t she played Sita and Rukmini—those women that people worshipped? And hadn’t the public loved her in those pictures? ‘But that’s the second lead, my dear,’ Ambarish had laughed at her. He had insisted that nobody could play the fallen woman the way that she could. They had started work two weeks before Christmas, and in the ten days that this picture had been on the floors, Ramola and Shankar had heard reports of Menoka’s misbehaviour on the sets, her frequent arguments with Ambarish, and his relentless pressuring of her to get into the skin of the character. Still, as producer, it had been Shankar’s rule to not interfere with the director.

  ‘Remember, Ambarish is good at what he does and how he goes about making his picture is his matter entirely…it’s how things work in this place…’ he had said to Ramola. What the studio wanted was a good picture, and a hit picture, and there Ambarish Dev Burma had a reputation that few could match. On some matters, Shankar did not brook an argument, and the studio’s running was one of those things.

  Ramola herself was uncertain in her feelings about Ambarish. She admired him for the work that he did, but often, she had felt discomforted in his presence. Like he was laughing knowingly, ‘like a hyena’, she screwed up her nose at the thought. Almost like he was waiting, for when she no longer could work her magic on the screen. Of course, he had always seemed to hold her in high esteem, forever displaying the courtesies typical of the high society to which they both belonged. Ambarish Dev Burma was the scion of one of Bengal’s oldest landed families, had been to school in England, and was as much at home at a high class tea party as he was in his nights spent at a Kalighat brothel.

  Though publicly he had always shown the greatest admiration for Ramola, he had never asked for her to work in any of the pictures that he had made at Bharat Talkies. Ambarish was driven by women in an almost perverse way, and only those that he could push to the ends of hope and despair interested him. Sex itself was only a small part of it. Rather, it was the sense of power that came from being able to lift someone out of the depths of their darkness, to give them a name, and then to show them that in fact they were nothing, or rather no different from what they had been.

  ‘He’s going to do it again, what with no dearth of these wretched girls,’ Ramola thought wearily. But it really was no good telling Shankar that. As producer and proprietor of Bharat Talkies, Shankar had a very matter-of-fact view of things. Even when he had worked as director, he seemed to have been perfectly oblivious to the bickering that brew behind the making of every picture. Shankar Chattopadhyay was a powerful figure, and few in the business of bioscope pictures, in Calcutta, Lahore or Bombay, could hold their own against him. He had created one of the country’s top studios, Bharat Talkies, and together Shankar and Ramola made the ind
ustry’s first couple.

  It was Shankar who had brought Ambarish to Bharat Talkies in its very first year, and given him every freedom to make the kind of pictures that he wanted. Ambarish, on his part, had given the studio some of its biggest hits. When Ambarish had gotten a new heroine, Shankar had asked no questions. If he had shunted her out in the next picture, there too he had gotten his way. With Menoka too, Shankar had let him have his way, and so far as this whole business went he would do all he could to keep Ambarish’s name out of it. Ramola knew that.

  ‘How hard it is to tell right from wrong?’, she thought. Bharat Talkies was what it was because of Shankar’s untiring efforts, his days and nights spent in building something from nothing. He had given leeway to Ambarish and some others because what mattered was only the name of Bharat Talkies, and they in turn had helped him to create that name. Ambarish was wooed by the other studios, but he had not looked beyond Bharat Talkies. Was it his loyalty to Shankar, or was it because he knew that the name of ‘BT’ was now bigger than any one of them could ever hope to be? She had often pondered these things and she still did not know.

  What was certain, of course, was that the likes of a Menoka were easy sacrifices on the altar of a Bharat Talkies. They came out of nowhere and where they went at the end of the day was nobody’s worry. True, they were what they happened to be through no fault of their own, yet, her own upbringing had taught her to loathe such women. Her family had been frontrunners in education and culture, and she herself had been to finishing school in Europe and studied art before she had met Shankar and gone on to work in the movies. Being in the pictures had made her a sensation in her own society, but her background had shielded her from disrepute. She was different in every way from the other kind of woman that went about in the studios—and she herself had always impressed that home truth on studio girls like Menoka.