HansaThapliyal at 08:26, 29 July 2010

2010-07-29T08:26:56Z

New page

Toward midnight, that night, there was another function. This was a Hindoo wedding - no, I think it was a betrothal ceremony. Always before, we had driven
through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with picturesque native
life, but now there was nothing of that. We seemed to move through a city of the
dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets.
Even the crows were silent. But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping
natives-hundreds and hundreds. They lay stretched at full length and tightly
wrapped in blankets, beads and all. Their attitude and their rigidity
counterfeited death. The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating
the city now. The shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of
the remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day. No doubt the city looks
now in the daytime as it looked then at night. When we had pierced deep into the
native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we had to go carefully,
for men were stretched asleep all about and there was hardly room to drive
between them. And every now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past
the horses' feet in the vague light - the forbears of the rats that are carrying
the plague from house to house in Bombay now. The shops were but sheds, little
booths open to the street; and the goods had been removed, and on the counters
families were sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present. Recurrent dead
watches, it looked like.

But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead. It was the
home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations, - mainly
gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of
brilliancy - flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors - it was another
Aladdin show.

The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as we
would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of course. She
moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked with the guests and
allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined. It was very fine. Particularly a
rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look at and handle. It had a great
emerald hanging to it.

The bridegroom was not present. He was having betrothal festivities of his own
at his father's house. As I understood it, he and the bride were to entertain
company every night and nearly all night for a week or more, then get married,
if alive. Both of the children were a little elderly, as brides and grooms go,
in India - twelve; they ought to have been married a year or two sooner; still
to a, stranger twelve seems quite young enough.

A while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced nautchgirls
appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang. With them were men who
played upon strange instruments which made uncanny noises of a sort to make
one's flesh creep. One of these instruments was a pipe, and to its music the
girls went through a performance which represented snake charming. It seemed a
doubtful sort of music to charm anything with, but a native gentleman assured me
that snakes like it and will come out of their holes and listen to it with every
evidence of refreshment And gratitude. He said that at an entertainment in his
grounds once, the pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had to be
stopped before they would be persuaded to go. Nobody wanted their company, for
they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but no one would kill them, of course,
for it is sinful for a Hindoo to kill any kind of a creature.

We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning. Another picture, then -
but it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage-scene than as a reality.
It is of a porch and short flight of steps crowded with dark faces and
ghostly-white draperies flooded with the strong glare from the dazzling
concentration of illuminations; and midway of the steps one conspicuous figure
for accent - a turbaned giant, with a name according to his size: Rao Bahadur
Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to his Highness the Gaikwar of Baroda.
Without him the picture would not have been complete; and if his name had been
merely Smith, he wouldn't have answered. Close at hand on house-fronts on both
sides of the narrow street were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the
natives-scores of glass tumblers (containing tapers) fastened a few in inches
apart all over great latticed frames, forming starry constellations which showed
out vividly against their black back grounds. As we drew away into the distance
down the dim lanes the illuminations gathered together into a single mass, and
glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun.

Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched
every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths counterfeiting
sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the
counterfeit death lamps. And now, a year later, when I read the cablegrams I
seem to be reading of what I myself partly saw - saw before it happened - in a
prophetic dream, as it were. One cablegram says, "Business in the native town is
about suspended. Except the wailing and the tramp of the funerals. There is but
little life or movement. The closed shops exceed in number those that remain
open." Another says that 325,000 of the people have fled the city and are
carrying the plague to the country. Three days later comes the news, "The
population is reduced by half." The refugees have carried the disease to
Karachi; "220 cases, 214 deaths." A day or two later, "52 fresh cases, all of
which proved fatal."

The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite; for of
all diseases known to men it is the deadliest - by far the deadliest. "Fifty-two
fresh cases - all fatal." It is the Black Death alone that slays like that. We
can all imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a plague-stricken city, and
the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing,
marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is
not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that
possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away. That
half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what
they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the half million
were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror without
chance of escape. Kinglake was in Cairo many years ago during an epidemic of the
Black Death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at
such a time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign in the
armpit, and then the delirium with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling
billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death:

"To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no
faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the
devil-may-care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds - to such
one, every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this
sort of sublimity. If by any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth,
be sees death dangling from every sleeve; and, as he creeps forward, he poises
his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right
elbow and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him clean down as it
sweeps along on his left. But most of all he dreads that which most of all he
should love - the touch of a woman's dress; for mothers and wives, hurrying
forth on kindly errands from the bedsides of the dying, go slouching along
through the streets more willfully and less courteously than the men. For a
while it may be that the caution of the poor Levantine may enable him to avoid
contact, but sooner or later, perhaps, the dreaded chance arrives; that bundle
of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labors along with
the voluptuous clumsiness of Grisi- she has touched the poor Levantine with the
hem of her sleeve! From that dread moment his peace is gone; his mind for ever
hanging upon the fatal touch invites the blow which he fears; he watches for the
symptoms of plague so carefully, that sooner or later they come in truth. The
parched mouth is a sign - his mouth is parched; the throbbing brain - his brain
does throb; the rapid pulse - he touches his own wrist (for he dares not ask
counsel of any man lest he be deserted), he touches his wrist, and feels how his
frighted blood goes galloping out of his heart. There is nothing but the fatal
swelling that is wanting to make his sad conviction complete; immediately, he
has an odd feel under the arm - no pain, but a little straining of the skin; he
would to God it were his fancy that were strong enough to give him that
sensation; this is the worst of all. It now seems to him that he could be happy
and contented with his parched mouth, and his throbbing brain, and his rapid
pulse, if only he could know that there were no swelling under the left arm; but
dares he try? - in a moment of calmness and deliberation he dares not; but when
for a while he has writhed under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of
will drives him to seek and know his fate; he touches the gland, and finds the
skin sane and sound but under the cuticle there lies a small lump like a
pistol-bullet, that moves as he pushes it. Oh! but is this for all certainty, is
this the sentence of death? Feel the gland of the other arm. There is not the
same lump exactly, yet something a little like it. Have not some people glands
naturally enlarged? - would to heaven he were one! So he does for himself the
work of the plague, and when the Angel of Death thus courted does indeed and in
truth come, he has only to finish that which has been so well begun; he passes
his fiery hand over the brain of the victim, and lets him rave for a season, but
all chance-wise, of people and things once dear, or of people and things
indifferent. Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and
sees the sundial that stood in his childhood's garden - sees his mother, and the
long-since forgotten face of that little dear sister - (he sees her, he says, on
a Sunday morning, for all the church bells are ringing); he looks up and down
through the universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton,
and cotton eternal - so much so that he feels - he knows - he swears he could
make that winning hazard, if the billiard-table would not slant upwards, and if
the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it is not - it's a cue that won't
move - his own arm won't move - in short, there's the devil to pay in the brain
of the poor Levantine; and perhaps, the next night but one he becomes the "life
and the soul" of some squalling jackal family, who fish him out by the foot from
his shallow and sandy grave."

Stopping by the crest of a hill, he is stunned by the tableau at his feet.

Vultures are wheeling in the sky.

Their hungry cries echo in a landscape of carts pulling the dead from Godhra.

‘The plague came soon after you arrived with your camera, Baba,’ the driver spits, fear on his face.

In a frenzy, Phalke runs from cart to cart, snapping open the shrouds, praying that he will not find the faces he seeks.

Bewildered, he makes his way home.

An empty house yawns at him.

Three women in the white robes of widows whimper at the gate.

A dog appears at the door and runs back inside.

‘Your camera imprisoned our soul. You’ve brought the black plague upon us,’ the neighbors wail.

A sound comes from his house.

Phalke rushes inside, calling for his wife and child.

The house has been ransacked.

The fire in the kitchen is cold. Even the cupboards are empty.

Only a few of his photographs have survived.

He runs into the child’s room.
It is dark.

He strikes a match.
Many matches later, he spots the bed.
A rat scuttles away.

On the bed is a slate with a child’s drawing.
His child’s last game.

By the flickering light of the match we see a stick man with a camera.

Phalke roams from camp to camp with photographs of his wife and child, looking for their bodies.

Wandering desolate after their death, a paranoid Dada meets Nicephore Niepce, one of the Lumiere Brothers’ 40 magicians.

Phalke travels with Niepce and learns the history of chemistry and mechanics.

They become popular figures in north and central India.

They play trick slides.

A large mirror in a carved frame is on the stage.

Phalke is invited onstage, where he is asked to walk around the mirror and examine it to his satisfaction.

Niepce asks him to don a hooded red robe.

He then positions him some ten feet from the mirror, where the vivid red reflection is clearly visible to the audience.

The theatre is darkened, except for a brightening light that comes from within the mirror itself.

As Phalke waves his robed arms around and bows to his bowing reflection, his reflection begins to show signs of disobedience.

It crosses its arms over its chest and starts waving them about.

Suddenly, the reflection grimaces, removes a knife and stabs itself in the chest.

The reflection collapses onto the reflected floor - it is he himself.

Now a ghost-like white form rises from the dead reflection and hovers in the mirror.

All at once, a ghost emerges from the glass.
It looks towards the startled, terrified spectators.

The masterful illusion mystifies even professional magicians who agree only that the mirror was a trick cabinet with black lined doors in the rear and an assistant hidden inside.

The lights were probably concealed between the glass and the lightly silvered back.

As the lights grew brighter, the mirror grew transparent, and a red-robed assistant showed himself in the glass.

The ghost was more difficult to explain, despite a big tradition of stage ghosts.

It was said that concealed magic lanterns produced the phantom, but no other magician was able to imitate the effect.

Even in these early years, there was something uncanny about the illusions.

But some said that Nicephore was not a showman at all, but had sold his soul to the devil in return for unholy powers.

As the guru and his disciple traveled across the country, Nicephore made him paint the backdrops with his chemical jugglery.

[[Phalke is a changed man when he returns home to Baroda.]]

PLAGUED BY MEMORY - Revision history

HansaThapliyal at 08:26, 29 July 2010