And then, the Last Sacrament (2nd edition)

Manorama News - Interview

Manorama News - Interview

And then, the Last Sacrament

A Tennessee Williams Named John Paul

When Tennessee Williams wrote the story for the 1982 Bharathan movie, Paalangal (Railway Tracks), World War II had already been fought, won and lost but not forgotten, India was on the verge of becoming a free state and the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, a Hollywood starlet who would later inspire many stories and movies under the name, Black Dahlia, had been found at a lonely Los Angeles courtyard. A Street Car Named Desire, a Pulitzer Prize winning play, originally written for Broadway before the close of the decade, had already been conceptualized on stage by Elia Kazan; it would take another four years for Kazan to bring out the silver screen version. It was in 1951, when Margaret Roberts, the later day Margaret Thatcher, was preparing to lose her first election contest, the movie was released in the USA.

The story line was simple. A young woman, Blanche, takes a streetcar named "Desire" to arrive at a shanty American town to stay with her sister, Stella, who is married to Stanley, a street character with many rough edges. Stanley is not amused by the arrival of his sister in law and starts bullying her at the slightest of provocations, which, at one time, ends in a rape. Mitch, a friend of Stanley, is enamored by Blanche, and in due course, proposes to her. Stanley intervenes, sabotages the marriage and digs up Blanche's past to find out that she is not mentally stable. The film ends with Blanche taken to the mental asylum where she was once a patient.

A Street Car Named Desire opened to critical acclaim, offering a new experience to the viewer. The main character of Blanche was played by Vivien Leigh, and not Jessica Tandy (we would later fall in love with her in Driving Miss Daisy) who acted the part in the Broadway play as the producers believed Leigh bested Tandy in appeal. Leigh had handled the part for the 1949 London production by Laurence Olivier and was an instant hit there. Kazan carried on with his stage experiments with method acting, a new genre of acting style propounded by Constantin Stanislavski, popularized by Lee Strasberg and followed later by some of the notable Hollywood stars like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Daniel Day Lewis. Kazan's message was best grasped by Marlon Brando, establishing his Hollywood presence with the movie (his debut was with Men, a Fred Zimmermann film released a year earlier), whose portrayal of Stanley, a down to earth character with negative shades, human frailties and masculine good looks in a custom-made T shirt, was a novel experience for the viewers. Karl Malden (Mitch) and  Kim Hunter (Stella) excelled in their roles while Vivien Leigh, with her fragile beauty, appealed to the viewers and won their sympathy; Leigh is said to have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder towards the end of her life and used to mistake herself for Blanche on many occasions. The three won Oscars too, and, quite surprisingly, the one who missed the boat was Brando. The film still holds the record for maximum number of major acting Oscar honours for a film.

The film had an opening sequence where Leigh alighting a train and slowly appearing from amidst the steam emitting from the engine but the connection the film had with train and railway and tracks ends there. However, this beautiful opening seems to have influenced John Paul and Bharathan to place their offering near a railway station, Shornur Junction to be precise. Passing years transformed the original story and when John Paul modified it for Paalangal three decades later, he left out certain elements alien to Malayali psyche but retained the four major characters and their interactions with each other. The film was shot at and in the periphery of the railway junction, barely moving out elsewhere, and gives us a relatively true depiction of the lives of railway workers. Gopi, another method actor, did not lag far behind Brando in terms of performance quality and the duo of KPAC Lalitha and Adoor Bhavani fulfilled their parts well. Bharathan who did magic in making Zarina Wahab, an average looking actress with unconventional looks, appear beautiful in Chaamaram a couple of years before, repeated the trick here, succeeding to a considerable measure. The let down came from the normally reliable Nedumudi Venu whose Ramankutty, with his ill-defined portrayal, was almost a caricature of the role carried well by Karl Malden years ago.

Bharathan arrived the Malayalam film scene at a time when the industry was undergoing a radical transformation from the melodramas of the 60s, with Swayamvaram of Adoor Gopalakrishnan inaugurating the movement. The so called Art Film movement was taking root, generating enough enthusiasm state-wide, tempting even a movie manufacturing personality like Kunchacko to venture into making one, Neela Ponman, a cinematic blunder of Himalayan proportions. Prayaanam, Bharathan's debut movie promised to carry the trend forward but his subsequent films, Aaravam and Thakara progressively witnessed a breach of promise and an eagerness to join the mainstream bandwagon. Yet, it is to his credit that he stayed with a set of filmmakers who tried to tread a middle path, thus cementing his position in Malayalam film history.

An attempt to compare the films of Elia Kazan and Bharathan is a futile one; the Hollywood classic, rated as one of the 100 greatest Hollywood movies of all time on a number of movie portals which it may or may not be, was a trendsetter in more ways than one while the Malayalam flick, a critical and commercial failure. Still, both the movies were a fair reflection of the cinematic cultures they represented and paraded some of the most exciting acting talents of their times. The turnout is that while the Kazan movie is more than the sum total of its components, the Malayalam version taught us it need not be the case always.

Sculpting Life

One

The crowded bar was noisy.

On the far corner, where the sparse light of the hall faded even further, she sat crosslegged on the table, her listeners sitting around the table, trying to give her as much attention as their wavering foci would allow them to. But she went on talking, disinterested in the loyalty of the listeners, her mind at times wandering to the tea estates of Assam where the patriarch who owned vast expanses of them, her father, Dhirendra Roy Chaudhary, waited in vain for her return.

The girl was one of a kind. She was born in a highland mansion in the Northeast Indian state of Assam where tea plants carpeted the slopes of the undulating land and, occasionally woke up from their slumber to murmur to the silvery white clouds descended from heaven for a friendly chat. She forsook her affluent life in the mountains for the Friday races of Calcutta, abandoned her horses for the skies British Airways flew through, lost the fatter purse the European airline offered for a wider horizon and sparser returns Air India promised her, gave up the carefree abandon of the airlines job for the job as full time wife to Bhim, vacated the royal palaces of Jaipur and Tripura for the streets of Delhi. Winning a beauty pageant, scrubbing floors at the destitute homes of Mother Teresa, gambling a fortune at Calcutta racecourse, begging all and sundry for money to run Ila Trust, the NGO she founded, all came easy to her. She shared her birthday with Amitabh Bachchan and shared her whiskey with Khushwant Singh. At the race course, she wore a waist coat and a pair of trousers, sported a derby hat and wielded a cane but the masculine make over never succeeded in camouflaging her stunning beauty. At Missionaries of Charity, she offloaded all the money she won at the previous Friday races and merrily spent the day with the homeless. During a time when rich ladies travelled in chauffeur driven cars, she drove a Maruti Gypsy only to sell it off to fund the construction of a hospice for the Aids and TB patients in Guwahati.

Her friendship with Satyajit Ray made her do a cameo in Seemabaddha. David Bailey and Anthony Snowdon trained their lenses on her many a times. Elton John opened his purse to fund some of her charitable projects. At the end of the frenzied journey, she reached the streets of New Delhi and started running an ambulance and mobile clinic network, dispensing medical service, free of cost, to the slum dwellers of the capital city. While her husband, Bhim, took multiple trips a day down the streets of Khan Market area in New Delhi feeding stray cats, she scurried around gathering money to foster her free medical service. These days, the automobile hosted clinics travel around the city and the financially compromised inhabitants of the city wait for their arrival, with disease ravaged bodies but minds lit up by hope.

Reeta Devi Varma, nee Reeta Roy, one of the My Fair Ladies of Khushwant Singh, remains a quintessential maverick, though mellowed down a bit by the affection showered on her by the thousands of poor people who have experienced the whiff of her universal love.

Two

A car accident paralyzed half his body, a heart which functioned at 17 percent made him go for a pacemaker, an attack of cancer butchered his larynx forcing him to use a voice box. But all those setbacks did not stop Sharad Kumar Dixit, or Sharad Kumar Dicksheet as he later came to be known, from becoming the quickest plastic surgeon the world has seen, the one who would complete a cleft lip correction, with his left hand, in under 20 minutes, while his right hand hung wasted, refusing to listen to his biddings.

On November 14th, 2011, when the children of India slept tired after celebrating the Indian version of Children's Day, six days prior to the day United Nations prescribed for the observance, the man who brought back smiles on many of them was bidding farewell to the world which picked him for its choicest atrocities. A fatigued Sharad Kumar breathed his laborious last, lying on a ragged bed in a run down Ocean Parkway apartment in Brooklyn; the man the ''World of Children'' organization called an unsung hero had had enough of this unjust world. His long hair, which looked like a cheap wig bought from the corner store, spread in disarray; he had long since stopped visiting the barber.

The exhausting journey started in the wretched house of a local post master in a small hamlet in Maharashtra, in 1930, the year the Indian National Congress declared India as an independent state. That was the start of an extraordinary journey which carried the boy through the science classes of Nizam College, the ophthalmology lecture halls of Nagpur Medical College and the plastic surgery rooms of Fairbanks Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and the New York Methodist Hospital. Life was looking up and rosy with his energies divided between his professional duties in the US and his humanitarian efforts in India, launched under the banner, "The India Project" in 1968, till a 1978 Alaska tour intervened in the scheme of things in the form of a car accident to spoil the plans. The accident left Sharad with his body paralyzed on the right side and would later play havoc with his married life. Four years later, before he could get used to the limitations imposed by the misfortune, he was diagnosed with cancer of larynx which took away his voice, he spoke for the rest of his life with the aid of a voice box. Still he plodded on, working intensively for six months in North America and taking a winter hiatus to move to India where he repaired cleft lips, ptoses and squints, free of charge, associating with several NGOs and local hospitals. The effort seemed to take its toll on the healer, he was having difficulty, at times, in breathing and experienced constant palpitations. The diagnosis came a decade later, his heart was functioning only seventeen percent. A cardiac surgery followed and a pacemaker was installed.

Sharad Kumar carried on his selfless service for another seventeen years and the exhausting labour ended on a Childrens Day, an apt day for a children's doctor to call it a day.

Three

Endless miseries, ravaging terrors, cultural ruins, inequalities in wealth, health and emotions all would have made the world a lesser place to live in but for some of these people who sculpted their lives, ever so arduously, like a weaver bird builds its nest, fiber by fiber, twig by little twig. Mindless of the struggles, they ignore the hardships, neglect the tyrannies and push forward. Like Phoolbasan Bai Yadav, born in a poor family in Chhattisgarh, with only primary level education, who braved her husband's torture to set up "Maan Bamleshwari Janhit Kare Samiti", a poor people's movement, which grew over the years into a mass movement holding together 12,000 self groups and 200,000 members. Like Reema Nanavati, an IAS officer born amidst riches, who abandoned the comforts and social status of the hallowed bureaucracy to venture into the dusty villages of Gujarat and worked with the famished women of "Self Employed Women's Association of India" (SEWA) of Ela Bhatt, shared food with them, worked for the rehabilitation of the victims of two earthquakes in Gujarat in 2001 and 2002, gathered 40,000 families, convinced them to produce goods which she sold, for them, in upscale towns, went to Bhutan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka to bring comfort to the victims of civil war in those desolate lands.

Reeta, Dicksheet, Phoolbasan and Reema were all honoured by the Government of India, at one time or another, with the civilian honour of  Padma Shri. That was the least a nation could do.

A Street Dies On The Poet

21 October 2010

It was dark but crowded at Thampanoor. People scurrying to and from the Bus stand and the railway station did not notice the man lying on the pavement, among a few used cartons.

The man lay there watching his soul preparing to leave him, but could not muster enough strength to prevent it. The inebriants he had consumed that evening revolted with his innards and managed to escape through his mouth, though only partially. A faint stench of yellow vomit pervaded everywhere.

His face and hands had wounds, seemingly endured from a minor road accident. Blood had not yet clotted; the man unwittingly spread it while wiping his face. He thought about the Asan Prize award ceremony in Chennai in two days and could not decide on which poem to recite there. May be he would recite his latest work which he had started that day on a piece of paper now kept inside the folds of his shirt sleeves. He could see the arrow that would pierce his soul and, in pain, he closed his eyes.

Soon passers-by crowded around the weary man, who watched them, with closed eyes and unconscious mind,  lifting him up and placing in a cab that sped towards the General Hospital. The muddy old man with unkempt hair lay patiently on the hospital bed till the Doctor arrived to pronounce him dead. The people who brought the man to the hospital started to disperse leaving the medical staff to complete their duties. The dead man was not in a hurry. He was waiting for his dead friends with a calmness not ever seen while he was alive, not even thinking about his daughter Meena and Mariam Beevi, the unfortunate woman who carried his daughter in her womb for 9 months.

A sunny morning in the year 1971

The young man was waiting for his girl, wearing a smile which concealed the agonies of a troubled childhood; despite that, anxieties of a first love showed on his face. His mind was searching for the precise words for opening a conversation which he hoped would kick off a relationship lasting a life time.

The girl slowly walked towards him, carefully trudging on the fallen leaves on the campus of University College; she was nervous. With a half smile, she sat beside the youth to hear him singing, “Oh autumn, my beloved…” The baritone voice of the singer reverberated through the sleepy leaves of the elderly trees that canopied the lovers.

As the young man finished singing and drew a breath, the girl leaned over to him and planted a kiss on his cheeks.

30 May 1987

They were quarelling on the street, as usual, two shabby men. One of them, a noted film maker, in his customary rags, was talking about his forthcoming works which drew scant attention from the other, a man in his late thirties. He made fun of the film maker who rarely delivered on his promise which angered the director even more. Knowing he would not receive a listening ear, the film maker started to leave, with a promise that he would return, a promise he would never fulfill. He took a loan of Rs 100 from his mate to cover the expenses of his evening drinks and walked away to a building under construction where he, a few hours later, would fly down from the parapet, like a dove, towards his destiny. Enduring the negigence of the hospital staff all through the night who failed to recognise him, John Abraham died a pauper’s death a day later.

The man in the thirties would imitate his friend 23 years later.

A dark evening in 1950

A group of men brought Arumugham Achari home.

Muthammal, his wife, carrying a little boy, watched them with a dead face. A girl held on to the woman’s hand, rather perplexed at what was going on. The men carefully placed Arumugham on the verandah.

It was drizzling; the thin threads of rain enveloped the house and the courtyard. As she watched the inert face of the gold smith, Muthammal’s mind was wet, too. A murder and a suicide and the incidents in between rained misery on her mind. Unable to bear the onslaught of the excruciating thoughts, she hugged the little boy closer; the boy had already gone sleeping by then.

A humid day in 2007

The poet was unusually silent during the journey. He was feeling uncomfortable in the peaceful cool interiors of a luxury car and missed the humid turbulence of the pavements. He answered the questions of his companion in monosyllables or in a few words at the most. He wanted the vehicle to arrive at the destination fast where his mind had already reached.

Wind started to blow as the poet and the interviewer sat in the courtyard waiting for Jenny and Sathyan to appear. The poet’s face lit up when he saw his love emerged from the house along with her husband. He became animated seeing his chokki.

The interviewer’s questions were mainly directed at Jenny and occassionally at Sathyan. All through the meeting, the poet regularly bothered jenny with his antics and cracked miserable jokes to no one’s laughter. He was noticeably elated to be with his love and laughed when Sathyan narrated the hardships during the shooting of a documentary on the poet and how Jenny banished him and the poet from the house. Though the poet was visibly active, his soul was elsewhere.

The poet was living his poems with Jenny in his dreams.

October 27, 1949

Arumugham Achari waited impatiently.

Muthammal was in labour. He prayed for her health and he prayed for a son; his first born had been a girl. As bad thoughts started clouding the nervous gold smith’s mind, he heard the cries of a baby and smiled.

Ayyappan Acahari was commencing his torturous journey which would last 61 agonising years.

A. Ayyappan

October 27, 1949 - October 21, 2010

Remembering Kochi - Part Four

Kochi of the sixties permitted no beginnings, no ends.

Bulk of the commerce in the city was transacted within a rectangular piece of land bordered by M.G. Road on the east, Banerji Road on the north, Shanmugham Road on the west and Durbar Hall road on the south. This block of land accommodated the Central Market, principal shopping centres and commodity business houses along Cloth Bazar Road, Jews Street, Market Road and several smaller roads where traders of different faiths offered commodities and services of all sorts to the buyers.

No one kew where Jews Street started; at Pullepady junction or at Padma junction or at Flower junction but the street ended no where. The westward stretch from Flower junction, however, was crowded with dirty puddles all along and hardware vendors on both sides. Steel traders from outside the State set up their offices there; one of them, a steel manufacturer from Mahadevapura in Bangalore, had its office on the first floor of a shabby building. A wooden staircase in poor state of repairs led to their office.

In the seventies, a young lad from Thrissur joined the steel company, immediately after his graduation from Kerala Varma College, as office manager. The diligent  young man steadily broadened the business and positioned his company as a strong competitor to the established steel traders. Soon the shrewd man realised he had opportunities to make a fast buck by making the most of his status as the depot manager and, with the help of a few friends, embarked on a tour of embezzlement.  He opened many bogus companies and brought truck loads of steel to sell in the local market evading central sales tax. Every evening, his office desk would be filled with cash as he was unable to use normal banking services due to the grey nature of his business.

Sivaraman, one of his acquaintences on whose name he had opened a bogus company, knew about the cash stored in office. One evening, Sivaraman visited the office in company of an accomplice, slashed the manager with a country sword and escaped with lakhs of rupees stored there. Anil Kumar survived the attack though, but with serious injuries.

A few shops away from the steel company’s office was a hardware store. Lawrence, a young hardware merchant,  hailed from a wealthy business family in Kunnamkulam which owned many hardware shops in central and north Kerala. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the youth had extravagent tastes. Soon he fell in love with a penniless counter girl at a travel agency which shocked his orthodox family. They disowned the prodigal son and banished him from home and the family businesses. With no resources to fall back on, the young man turned to fraudulent deals to be eventually caught by law and ended up in jail.

Travelling north from Shenoy’s cinema, one entered a small junction which hosted a famous tailoring shop, Byblos, owned by Antony, Antho to his friends, a favorite place for most of the youngsters, particularly girls. Antho started his career in Bahrain and returned to Kochi in the seventies to work in his brother’s tailoring shop, Thara Tailors, where he paraded his couture skills, first on himself and later on his young customers whose number grew by the day. Later, gathering a small capital together, Antho started his first own venture, Fila Tailors, near Kacheripady. The ambitious young man soon moved his business to a larger place, renamed his business as Byblos and opened a branch in Palarivattom, bringing in a partner to his business. The first setback of his career was waiting for him there. A few unintelligent business decisions and a break up with his partner saw the man in heavy debt, forcing him to move to Al Ain in the U.A.E., looking for greener pastures and ways to pay off the debts that seemed to pile up with time.

A few years of hard work in Al Ain and his innate enterprise helped him to save enough money to clear the debts. Antony, the ever smiling handsome dude, is now happy managing his new fashion business, a few steps away from his old shop, Byblos.

In 1947, as India was gathering itself to embrace freedom from colonial rule, a young man was planning his future. He opened a small textile shop in Cloth Bazar Road, specialising in silk sarees. The shop was so small that there were no pieces of furniture, the sales girls sat on floor mats and the buyers stood on the pavement selecting the goods of their choice. Exclusivity of their stocks and the smiling countenance of the owner attracted the upper class women by hoards to the store and business soared. Jayalakshmi Silks, the textile major with many huge outlets all over Kerala, had its humble beginnings at that narrow selling space.

Years have transformed Kochi into an aspiring metropolitan city but denuded it of the grace it once had. The frenetic pace of professed progress has made life complex and difficult. The trees that hovered as a canopy over the wild celebrations of a Santhosh Trophy victory have been shaved off to accommodate the metro rail project, wiping off the memories of a generation along with it. The massive escalation in the number of buildings, a lot more than the frail roads could handle, has clogged the city’s arteries. The stench of excrement at Kaloor junction is now replaced with the disgusting odour of gasoline, a pollutant of higher order. The open lands where boys played games of varied sorts have disappeared, ugly structures have taken roots in their places. The omnipresence of garbage, but, remains.

We have lost the Kochi of Antony and Lawrence and Anil Kumar the way we lost the multiplication tables to the calculating machines, the way the fragrance of the flowers leaves the man whose nose has been put under the surgical knife; Kochi has been shorn of its purity.

Life is not pure or simple any longer.