Menoka has hanged herself Read online

  Still, Menoka’s death worried her. Somewhere, was it more than just another of those girls? Was it really more about this world of theirs, this world of bioscope pictures, and its twists and turns? Was it the precariousness of stardom that made her unhappy? Menoka was a star the studio had created. Yet, she did not belong to Bharat Talkies. In truth, she did not belong anywhere. What was it in what had happened to Menoka that made her think of herself? No, nothing, really…the Menokas of this world were meant to come and go, and not be remembered, but she…she was Ramola Devi and she stood for class and culture. Ramola drew herself up from her chair and pulled the silk dressing gown around her as Shankar walked in. He looked worn out but in command, as always, and she knew that he had come in only to cheer her. She smiled and felt calm at the very sight of him, and for that one moment was sorry that Menoka had loved but was not loved back.

  II

  It was the day after. The police had taken away Menoka’s body. There would be a coroner’s inquest and autopsy. No one had come for her, and no one at the studio knew if she had anyone to claim her mortal remains. She had come into Bharat Talkies with Ambarish Dev Burma and that was all anyone knew about her. Shankar had done his part. New Year’s presents had gone out to the newspaper offices, and full page announcements of the studio were to appear in the papers through that week. It was going to be an important year, and Bharat Talkies would be bigger than ever before.

  Shankar walked into the drawing room as Ramola was working though the piles of New Year greetings and fan letters. She always liked to open all her own mail, though most of it went unanswered. One or two she liked to keep, like the poem that a young man had written for her, and which she had acknowledged with ‘Thank you, you should keep up your writing.’ Shankar had teased her about it. ‘So should we get him on contract now, scriptwriter-lyricist?’

  That morning he strode in, almost bumping into a chair, then sat himself down on the sofa beside her. ‘Meeting this afternoon,’ he said, though it was the last thing they had talked over the night before. That was him, forever trying to mind her. Sometimes she would turn to him scornfully, even crossly, saying, ‘I quite forgot, thank you for reminding’ or ‘I’m old enough, thank you Shankar’, to which he would grin back sheepishly. But, today she smiled and nodded. Poor Shankar, he had had a hard time the last two days, what with the police coming to the house and all the explaining that he had had to do. That too when he already had his hands so very full.

  They were meeting at the studio in the afternoon, with the heads of all departments who would be working on the forthcoming collaboration with Miracle—to take stock of things. It had been Shankar’s coup of sorts. Hollywood’s famous Miracle Pictures was going to be collaborator of Bharat Talkies in their forthcoming production of a big-budget historical. It would be the first ever such partnership between an Indian studio and Hollywood and Shankar was keeping everything hush-hush until after his trip to America where he would sign the contract.

  The talks had carried on for close to a year, with many meetings with Miracle’s India office, and a visit by a team from Hollywood. Bharat Talkies was producing its grandest historical and Miracle Pictures would partner it in this picture’s production and distribution worldwide. Shankar himself was directing, with Ramola in the lead role of Mira in this grand production of the story of Mirabai, the princess-devotee who had renounced the world for her love of Krishna. Already, they had taken the sequences with Ramola and Devdutt Chowdhury as Bhojraj, Mirabai’s husband. Shankar had created the magnificent studio set of the Rana of Mewar’s palace and another one was going to be built for a song set in Mewar’s pleasure gardens.

  ‘We have to put our best foot forward with these Americans,’ Shankar had said. He was going to carry with him the reels of what they had taken. His friendship with Richard Banter, one of Miracle’s top directors, had him on very good ground. ‘And it’s going to be our stepping stone for bigger things…much bigger…’ he would tell Ramola. ‘Why can’t we be like Miracle someday…or one of the British companies?’ The signing was only a formality now. ‘The Americans want to get into our markets in a much bigger way, and they want this collaboration to happen as much as us.’

  Work on the picture would resume after Shankar got back from America. He would set off on the ship from Calcutta in another eight days to get to Los Angeles, in a journey that would take between six to seven weeks, stopping at Colombo, Singapore and Tokyo. He would return only by late April. With luck, the production would be back on the floors by that month’s end, and they would have an all-India and world release that year itself. After the signing, Miracle Pictures would send across its own team of technicians, to stay in Calcutta and work with Shankar at Bharat Talkies until the picture’s completion.

  Shankar would have liked to stay on in America some more days. He was going back after an interval of nearly six years. But with Mirabai already on the floor, he had to make the journey back soon enough. Ramola was not going, much as they both wanted it. Costumes needed to be finalized, song sittings and rehearsals were pending, and she would have to stay behind and oversee everything at the studio.

  ‘I’m going to miss you, darling,’ she told him as she got ready for bed that night. He was in his dressing gown at the table by the window browsing through the day’s papers. His eyebrows went up, ‘But you’ve got enough on your hands haven’t you?’

  Ramola sighed, ‘How nice it would be to dine again at Milano’s.’

  As new lovers they would frequently meet for dinner at the newly opened restaurant on Adams Boulevard where Ramola had loved the seafood specials. On weekends, they had champagne buffets and ice-cream at James and Damian, a little dairy tucked away in a back street.

  The very thought of those places brought back the fondest of memories. It was where they had met, on her first trip to America, with her uncle, the physician Debiprasad Banerjea. It was 1926 and she had been a twenty-four-year-old studying art. She had met Shankar at a gathering in Los Angeles two days after they had arrived there. He had been there with his American wife, Amy. Shankar had gone from India to work in the movies. He had assisted the famous producer and screenwriter John Seltzer. Amy had been assistant to Seltzer’s brother Patrick, and they had met frequently, fallen in love and married.

  Ramola and Shankar had gotten on well, and she had been drawn into his world of motion pictures and their making. With her training in art, she could picture the screen like a canvas, and surprised him with her ideas about framing and camera angles. He had made up his mind to return home to set up his own studio, he told her. His marriage with Amy would not have lasted anyways, he said later, because Amy could not have left behind her own world and come to live with him in India. Meeting Ramola had only made him decide sooner. Ramola had never really known how he had handled the whole thing, but she had always had feelings of remorse when she thought of Amy. Amy herself had been civil the only other time they had met, and by then she had known about her and Shankar.

  Her own family had been unhappy about her marriage, but she had been too much in love to care. They were in love and they had one dream. To have their own studio, to create something that would be truly world-class. It was not going to be easy. Making bioscope pictures was not what respectable people in this country did for a living, and the studios were the last place for women from good families. But then, she had not always been the very good girl that people thought she was. She smiled as she remembered their first clumsy lip-lock, after one of their afternoons out, when she had drunk too much champagne and he had not resisted her overtures. He had asked her to marry him that same evening.

  Shankar might have read her mind.

  ‘You can still come along, you know,’ he said gently, eyes fixed on her face, with a look he had on when he was quite plainly adoring her. ‘I can check first thing tomorrow with the steamship company?’

  She laughed, ‘Mmmhm no, not this time. I’ll come when we release Mira. Let’s spend two months
there then…but really, this picture is almost making me as nervous as the first time,’ she was serious now.

  With the hint of a smile, Shankar lifted himself off his chair, walked to the bed and sat on its edge next to her.

  ‘Ramola Devi, nervous? That can’t be true…’

  Ramola giggled, ‘Of course, I’m nervous, aren’t you Shankar Chattopadhyay?’

  It was a mating call, their rehearsed reiterating of their first lovemaking, when she had teased him unabatedly for being shy until he had grabbed and smothered her.

  ‘Not really nervous, are you,’ he whispered in her ear that night as their bodies moved to a practiced rhythm, both hungry and satisfied at the same time as they sought and pleased one another. When they lay together that night, she hugging him against her breasts and he caressing her bare back, it all didn’t matter so much—Miracle Pictures, the grand historical that they were making, or the deceits and brittleness of the world that they had built around themselves.

  As she lay awake that night Ramola’s thoughts wandered back to her first picture, when they had launched Bharat Talkies. Shankar had directed and also played the hero. It had been the early days of sound in the movies, and they had adapted the story of Queen Padmini of Chittor. In those days she learnt what she would never unlearn. To emote before the camera and make people cry and smile with her. She was the first educated woman to have taken up the movies as a profession, and critics and moviegoers alike had fallen in love with her. After their first picture together Shankar had put in his days and nights into building the studio, and she became a bigger star with each picture. Not all were hits, but they said a star of her stature lived beyond hits and flops. Still, even she was not bigger than Bharat Talkies, though Shankar said Mirabai would make her immortal.

  Mirabai had already created enough flutter in studio circles. Though the partnership with Miracle Pictures was not public yet, the rumour was that Shankar Chattopadhyay was making his biggest picture. Shankar had not directed in the last three years. He had gotten sucked into business matters and the studio’s working, and there were whispers that he had lost his touch. Shankar had shrugged off the insinuation but Ramola knew that it hurt him. He was one of the best directors of their time, only, he had looked beyond himself and worked to build a whole set-up. Only she understood how much he had given up so that Bharat Talkies could become the name that it was today. But he now wanted to return. They had hit upon the idea of making a grand historical, on a never-before scale. And a woman-centric script, like Garbo’s Queen Christina.

  Mirabai was a logical choice. The script would allow them lots of scope for songs, and everyone went to the talkies these days because they wanted to hear their favourite stars sing. She herself was blessed with a good voice, though she had never had any training as a young girl. Some of the other actresses were better singers than her, but hers was the angelic face that people adored. They somehow imagined that Ramola Devi could do no wrong.

  Shankar tossed about in his sleep next to her, sucking in his breath like his mouth was dry. On some days, he would complain of tiredness, and she had been worried. Perhaps it was his digestion, she always had to tell him not to gobble his meals. But it really had been impossible, even for her, to get him to see Sailen Kaka, their family doctor. He got headaches and back pains, and she had woken up in the middle of the night to see that he was not in bed. He would go back to his study to work on the script or look over his notes for the Miracle deal. And then still be up on time, fully dressed for breakfast.

  The Menoka business had added to his worries. Still, things should be easier after the America trip was over, after this deal was finally signed and sealed. She would get him to take a holiday then. Perhaps they could go away to the hills for just a few days…her aunt’s villa near the tea gardens. It had always been so lovely and peaceful to spend a weekend there, almost away from civilization. Shankar had liked it there. They would have breakfast in bed, play tennis and go for long walks, just the two of them, away from the studio and away from all of the people in their lives.

  Rajbala

  ‘Sunechish?’ Kamala Masi bubbled breathlessly. ‘Did you hear? That girl that hanged herself? Menoka re. Remember her? She was at Popular, then one or two months at Unique, at the beginning…sweet face but little peanuts for breasts. As if she had nothing there. Remember? Flying too high she was, trying to be a memsahib, now see…’

  Raju sipped her sweet tea, not replying. She knew, she had been one of the first people outside of Bharat Talkies to know. Why couldn’t Masi shut her mouth when she was getting a headache. Those stunts made her tired. She was good at them, and the better she got, the more difficult they made them for her. And she had to sing, and she had to get carried off…and keep that monkey of a hero’s paws off her backside every time he took her in his arms. Now they even wanted her to play with live snakes in the new song.

  She could hear Kamala bustling about the kitchen. ‘Masiiiii,’ she yelled for more tea.

  Being Raju Darling was no easy job. A Raju Darling picture was action and romance and adventure all rolled into one, and it meant the cash would come in fast and keep coming in, because her fans came back twice, thrice, even ten and twelve times to watch the same picture. The tickets were low-priced, and the shows were full, and kept going for days on end. That was something that even the biggest stars could not manage.

  Stars my foot, Raju snorted. Just big names. Did they have to carry a picture all on their own? She could give any big studio a run for its money. How much money the four-anna, eight-anna walas spent on her, to be with her those two hours in the darkness, over and over again, it made her laugh sometimes. And in a room somewhere, would be a hungry child and a wife, like she and her mother, who could do with those four-annas. She didn’t often think of her mother though. She was working too hard, and then, she had moved far, from those days of hunger and fear and despair. She had worked in the bioscope for six or seven years, and her mother was dead and gone. She had kept Kamala Masi with her, though. Not because she had felt anything for her, but because she needed a servant. Kamala knew the ‘line’ from her theatre days. Some of the stars of the old theatre companies had moved on to the bioscope studios, and Kamala had been at home in the studio para when she first took Raju from one bioscope company to another. Though now she kept house, fetched and carried, and cleaned up after Raju.

  Kamala came in from the kitchen, tea in hand. She was mulling over Menoka.

  ‘Saheb kept her, everyone knows…otherwise… Menoka and Bharat Talkies…’ Kamala scoffed, ‘she was only good for thooose pictures…full-showing, all naked, not a stitch on her…some whore she was, that one…’

  She shouldn’t have said it, she realized that very same instant, as Raju’s head jerked and she turned to glare at Kamala.

  ‘Bhalo to bhalo, when she’s fine she’s fine, then god alone knows what ghost gets her,’ Kamala grumbled to herself as she escaped back into the kitchen. Raju could scare her when she looked like that.

  ‘Arre baba’ she thought as she busied herself neatly slicing pieces of an oversized brinjal to make begun bhaja. ‘Who remembers now those pictures of yours, mad girl…who knew your name then…I was talking about that magi Menoka…’

  It was true, her first bioscope pictures, silent ones, never carried Raju’s name. Often, there were no title cards even, except the picture’s name, Jawan Taruni aka Young Girl or simply Dress Changing Beauty. Raju, then thirteen or fourteen, opened her sari in front of a running camera, flailed her arms about, walked up and down then disappeared off screen. Or she might go through the motions of taking a bath from an empty bucket, tenderly rubbing her thighs and back, and in between her legs, like she would do at home, then throw a gamcha over her still sprouting breasts before slowly walking away. They were short pictures, with no cuts and no background music, and no pretense of any acting. But they had their audience, those that went to the night shows and travelling cinemas, which were cheaper than even
the char anna seats. The travelling cinemas went to places where they had no picture halls and showed their wares in tents on torn screens.

  Sometimes, they would take her photographs, calling out to her to hold some pose or other. To not move or keep her hand too close, so it did not come in the way of her open breasts. One or two even made their way into the drawing rooms of the rich, pored over by the gents after the ladies had retired for the evening. None of these gentlemen had ever asked for the girl in person, and had they done so, Kamala would have made an earnest endeavour to get Raju to rise to the occasion. Kamala sighed, now chopping potatoes for alu bhaja… these were bad times, that Menoka hanging herself and then that other girl’s body in that producer’s garden house, everyone knew what was what, making her drink then choking her throat.

  ‘But the likes of us, meye manush, womenfolk, can we stand against men with money? Better be meek, that’s what I say, don’t fly too high. But no, who listens to Kamala Masi anymore. Who got you into this line, tell me…girl was a lamb then, she and her mother, did what Kamala Masi said…and now…she’s her own master…I am nobody, just a jhi, a maid…’

  ‘Even a jhi would have had more than me…’ Raju gritted her teeth as she drank her tea, remembering the scraps that Kamala would throw at them. Then, when she became a star, Masi had tried to get her to see men, rich men, who hung about the studios, and who had quite suddenly become smitten by her. She smiled, remembering how one day she had turned around on a coaxing and honey-voiced Kamala and hit her hard across the face, causing some half-chewed paan to jerk out from Kamala’s mouth, and then kicked her hard on the leg. She was wearing her kangans, the curved and spiked bangles that she had bought with her own money, and it had made a gash on Kamala’s left cheek. Kamala had fallen to her knees with a thud and Raju had walked out of the room, shouting to her to make macher jhal, her favourite spicy fish curry and rice for when she returned. Kamala never talked about what happened that day, but she had turned over a new leaf. She stopped telling Raju where to go and what to do, like she had done before.