The Lonely Wife....

Satyajit Ray’s, 'Charulatha'…. The Lonely Wife is a vivid description of a woman’s heart which is like the sparklingly clear flowing river that in its natural course can be life to the ones surrounding it. But, it conceals what it should, only to bear the weight of all such unspoken pearls on its floor, afraid of revealing them to the outer world that most often lacks the perspective to understand them. And at times, it surfaces with tides that are caused by upheavals in the heart of the river. And when the tides surmount, they can wipe out everything in its premise, fetching destruction that cannot be recalled. Charulatha is a home-bound wife, happily married to a loving husband whose first love is of course, his work. Not that he is inconsiderate or inattentive towards her but Charu’s life is devoid of the drive that makes life more than it appears to be on the surface.

She is fond of reading, embroidering and singing but is all by herself in the gigantic lavish bungalow all day, for days and months together that form the core of her life. Despite several encouragements by her husband, she is not willing to bring her writing to life, for the world to read or for anybody.

With the arrival of her husband’s younger brother as a helper in her husband’s occupations, comes that fresh whiff of air that smells of youth and chirpy adolescence. A naïve and struggling writer, Amal is also fond of his brother and sister-in-law and is a natural winner of hearts.

Charu takes good care of Amal, feeding him and domesticating his wild ways like a mother would. Unaware that her husband has cajoled Amal into convincing her for writing, she spends time with Amal, moments full of laughters, singing, adding notes to his infant write-up. She also stitches up a personalized notebook for him to write in, only on the condition that he would not send it for publication anywhere. Its only when she asks him to give a gentle push to her swing that he feels they might be going a little out of the way. But, Charu’s thoughts have already taken flight and don’t succumb to his comments.

The movie flows through with excerpts from poetic creations of Bankim Chandra and verses from melodies sung in the air. However, episodes of jealousy towards Amal’s banter with a guest lady staying at the bunglow have also been shown here and there. However, Amal is unaware of these surges going on in Charu’s heart and amidst their playful conversation, reveals that he had been asked to encourage her for writing and spend time with her, discussing literary bestsellers. Charu is furious to know this and rushes to her room, not able to come to terms with the sudden flash of divide between her surreal bliss and the harsh reality. She becomes all the more outrageous to see Amal’s publication in one of the contemporary papers and his joyful treat of ice-cream to the guest lady to celebrate his success.

Going through waves of affection, possession, envy and despise, Charu confines her annoyance and unexplainable emotions, not venting them in front of anyone. A revengeful pang in her heart causes her to start writing, which she is determined to and succeeds in getting published in the most competitive paper of the time. Flushed, she carries her publication to Amal and declares that she could write better than him but that is not what mattered to her.

Amal is stunned to read her beautiful piece and said he could never believe she was capable of writing so well. But, he is unable to reciprocate her feelings owing to guilt and hesitation. At his honest reaction, Charu’s anger subsides and she wipes off the tears that had rolled down from her cheeks to the freshly starched white linen of Amal, freeing his shoulder which she had been clutching so far to vent out everything her heart had kept locked so far.

While all is at peace and even Charu has reached a leveling line of understanding in terms of her feelings and the reality, life takes a twist. The printing press of her husband is shut down and Amal leaves the household, unwilling to be a burden on his brother who is already broken owing to prevailing circumstances.

Charu is shattered and pleads to Amal not to take any such decision, only to find in the morning that he has fled. Concealing and expressing her disgust at the same time, she asks the housekeeper to vacate the room and discard all of Amal’s belongings. She even brings back the hand-embroidered slippers she had kept as a replacement for Amal’s tattered shoes which she had initially meant to please her husband with. She reads and re-reads the note left by Amal only to find her new found basis of living gone.

Days pass by and the couple tries to sustain the normalcy in their lives. Its while sitting on the sea-shore on a silent evening, watching the drowning sun that Charu suggests to her husband that they could start a new newspaper wherein she could write a column of herself and manage a page of the otherwise political paper. He finds the idea extremely appealing as he had been overjoyed at her publication in a paper of such repute earlier.

They rush home and wasting no time, he decides to visit his friend immediately with this proposition and start off. Meanwhile, they find a letter from Amal stating that he had been doing good and was now ready to accept the marriage alliance he had been running away from so far. The alliance would open up new avenues to his writing as he could visit the foreign lands for inspiration.

While Charu’s husband is delighted at reading the letter, she is in a trance and only after he leaves the home, she sits to ponder upon it. All the pebbles which had sank to the bottom of her heart resurfaced and led to an emotional outburst. As she was crying and screaming at the loss of Amal, her husband happened to step in to pick his forgotten umbrella and was stupefied at what he heard.

He stealthily retraced his steps, mounted his cart with a heavy heart. Only to return in the evening, standing at the door, hands too heavy to knock, rather attempting to resolve the dilemma of the need of the knock. Just then, Charulatha opens the door and throws her arms open, asking him to step in…..

Thus, a woman’s heart is like a deep blue ocean with innumerable secrets and marvels that have withstood the time and the tides. They often exhibit compelling and unparalleled strength in admitting their feelings which their counterparts might not, irrespective of the fact if the society approves of them or not. And, when the threads of those corals unwind, they are no more solitary, they take into loop whoever happens to touch them, be it the diver or the dweller.

An evening at Rangashankara………

It was the evening of November 13, when my long-unfulfilled desire of visiting the hub of expressions, came true !

Rangashankara....a place I had once mentioned in my earlier posts I would like to visit on an occasion and in a company, both of which I wish to find difficult to resist.

And...it happened !

Not to mention of its embracing steps that at once render you a feeling of belonging. The grandeur which entices you as if awaiting your foot-steps, all in service when you arrive there !

The flock you mingle with, once in its premises is a perfect palette of so many colors...you just add one more to it and wouldn’t want to leave it in quest of any more.
Its difficult to resist eavesdropping on a medley of amusing conversations when people are innocently chatting in languages they think are exclusive to themselves, ignorant that how closely those words might be interwoven around the strings of somebody’s heart who just overheard them. Attempting to familiarize with unlike tongues but like minds is theatrical in itself…

The paintings that adorn the walls narrate numerous stories that have been staged in the hall for years now, circumscribed by people from places near and distant, seated beside each other, held by the bonds of destiny.

The cafetaria that is the incubator for new stories to arise and to be staged, unknown to the playwright itself, leave alone the prospective viewers who might come to the same place years later to witness an idea that had been incepted at a fleeting moment they had then belonged to, unaware. Emotions that had traveled seas of thoughts are finally framed as expressions, ready to be dramatized, to be told for the times to come, again and again often becoming the possession of more than one master.

And the enchanted auditorium which has never been short of people under the spell of its magic cast by the performers, even for a single day since it started except for the weekly offs !

The seated viewers are like the rocks lying on the beach unattended, who gather a different form and shape after having been swept away by the waves of laughter, cries, sighs and screams all conveying a different meaning to each one of them.

Hence, goes on the process of Lights, Camera and Action, not visibly though, but meticulously hand-in-hand, making it tough for us to decide when the show began….and even after it has come to a halt, we stay stupefied in the hope that The Show Must Go On !!!

It was a soulful experience to witness the awe-inspiring Arundhati Nag perform a monologue in ‘Bikhre Bimb’ – 'Broken Images', written and directed by the connoisseur Girish Karnad, the plot too richly laden with thought, language and expression to be captured in my words as of now !

So, for now, wait for your turn...till you experience the magic ! :)

The biggest fish of the river gets to be that by not getting caught !

Very well said by a movie character who was actually featuring as a witch with a glass eye in which one could see the way he was supposed to die. This witch happened to give the wisest advice to the central character of the movie who eventually turned out to be a story-teller, so much so, that the advice not only enabled him to channelize his determination and make something meaningful out of it in this materialistic world but also helped him identify the love of his life whom he won over through his unconquerable willpower and witty yet honest ways of trespassing the obstacles offered by fellow human beings. These fellow human beings are the ones who are of no worth other than to maintain the little importance endowed to them by the meager knowledge they possess that might assist somebody in attaining what they covet more than anything. And, hence they make a living by extracting a heavy price for extending their cooperation to the men who need it the most.

Coming back to our central character, he is our favorite story-teller, Edward, whom everybody likes for his fascinating ways of narrating the adventures of his life. Or should we say, who makes them sound interesting for the so called audience he loves by giving it a slight twist so that the ending of every incident is surely an unprecedented one, leave alone the entire trail.

But, apparently, there is always a fidelity test every good thing has to pass through before it is labeled as one, no matter how soulful or how true the person behind it or in this the fabricator is !

The person around whom Edward’s tales used to spin was his son, Will and as it turned out to be, it was Will who eventually grew up to believe that his father had been faking all life and that nothing of what he narrated could ever be true ! No matter how much his father tried to vouch for his honesty, Will would call him an iceberg whose only 10% he knew that too as on the surface and nothing about what he really was deep within.

So much so, that Will didn’t speak to Edward for a consistent period of three years on the account of feeling embarrassed by his father’s tell-tale habit every night, on every occasion and in front of every audience, without realizing that some occasions needed to be strictly reserved for the importance of the reason for which it was being celebrated. Neglected and disgusted, Will felt that he was only the ‘foot-note’ of Edward’s stories whereas the latter believed that he was actually the context of all his tales and at least the very much reason of his most favorite and life-changing important tale.

Nevertheless, Will himself was a writer and consistently pleaded to his crafty father to reveal his real self to his only son now that he was on death-bed. And, as Will himself was going to father a son, he didn’t want to loiter in the dark. Be it good, bad, success, failure, he yearned to know the real human being his father had embodied, hidden from the outer world, all his life, no matter how enticing and charming his tales seemed to them. But, Edward maintained his stand saying that he was what he seemed to be and it was not his time yet as he knew how he was going to die, the way he had seen in the witch’s eye.

Lurching with his quest to know his father in vain, Will was in the store-house amusing himself with the stuff his father had gathered in the course of the adventures life had offered him. And to his disbelief, he found a few things that stood testimony to the fact that the incidents his father always narrated to him, had actually happened. If not all, at least most of them. And this led Will to travel all the way to ‘Spectre’ that had been described by his father as the land of perfection. Not only did he end up being there but also met the person who had influenced Edward in the most unique way. As deciphered from the situation, he comprehended his father as a flirt, believing that there were a lot of facts he had hidden from Will and his mother. But, this lady at Spectre added a new dimension to Will’s beliefs when she revealed the fact that it was she who had turned out to be the ‘witch’ in wait of Edward and her unfulfilled love for him because Edward had been always loyal to his wife and he vouched of loving her till the day he died and saw no other woman.

This led Will to develop some respect for his father and he left to pay him a visit at the hospital. While sitting beside him in the still of the night, Will was suddenly awakened by Edward’s husky voice. Unable to figure out what he needed, Will offered him water. But, it wasn’t water. Edward was restless and requested Will to tell him the way he was supposed to die. But, poor Will said that his father had never narrated that story to him and didn’t know what to say. For the first time in life, he was feeling so helpless and sorry that he didn’t know his father’s stories well.

But, Will had no choice. Destiny seemed to have brought him to the toughest point in life, both as a son and as a writer. He decided to give it a try and narrated to his father how he would die, all full of adventures and improbable situations. Throughout his description, Will spun the threads of the story so well that his father could visualize all he was saying vividly and seemed to be in a different world. The story ended where it had embarked and featured Will carrying his father to the deep waters where he becomes ‘The Big Fish’ and goes deep down to the place he had always belonged, this time forever !

As Will finished, he realized it was the most beautiful piece of creation he had ever come up with and Edward seemed to have got wiped over with satiation. Convinced this is how it happens, he closes his eyes and leaves for the world of his immortal stories.

The funeral takes place and Will along with his wife are pleasantly perplexed to see different breeds of people attending it, The Giant who had once been a threat to the town of Ashton and whom Edward had counseled and taken along to the city where his talent could be recognized, The Ring Master who had hired the giant and helped Edward get the love of his life, his wife, The Siamese Twins who had helped Edward escape from a enemy camp during the wars in return of an idea for getting rich, The poet cum robber from Spectre who was inspired by Edward to travel all across the globe and establish an identity as a poet and later become a rich man, the Mayor of Ashton who had bid him farewell with the Giant thanking him for his kind deed with the note that the city doors would always be open for him and amongst many others, The Witch !

Contrary to the usual funerals, all the people present there were talking and laughing aloud on the tales Edward had always narrated to them. He lived in the hearts of so many of them as a socially likeable man who made people happy.

And like this, the stories passed on for generations. Truly said, some stories are told so many times and over so many ages that the narrator of the stories himself becomes a story and lives on forever !

Edward too lived on as The Big Fish whom none was able to catch !