1895

first balloon flight in Bombay

Phalke's family life is a happy one- he feeds the baby and waters the garden with a hose. A dog scampers around here and there.

Phalke is taking photographs of his wife and child.

While he is developing the pictures in the dark room, someone(Kamala) opens the door by mistake, and the pictures evarporate from the paper.

The large number of rats that are dying around them frightens Phalke's wife.

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Kamala is happy in Godhra and restless too. She has waited for this, time between her, her baby and her husband.. but here she is also very often alone. She has no conversations with anyone else, none at all. Who would she talk to? It seems almost like all the outcastes live in this city. Her husbands scolds her when she talks like this, but she knows, it is true..

He is getting more and more engrossed in his work, he tells her less. He did try to tell her in the beginning, quite what magic he was upto with his camera box, but she was too bewildered by the harsh sounding words, the odd concepts he talked of. She wondered where he had managed to come to this knowledge, both of them were from the same family, the same city and still, Dhundiraj seemed to carry so many other worlds within him.

She remembered the sight of that image disappearing, the people who lay underwater in those trays and who had, almost like they sensed her presence, left at once. Phalke scolded her for opening the door, but she felt sometimes that he must have engineered it, their disappearance. It was her unrestrainable curiosity to know just what her husband did behind that closed door for hours on end, that had prompted her, in violation of all rules set by him, to open it.

And then, the disappearance.

It was late night. The Muslim noise was starting from the mosque. The pillow by her head was empty, the head that lay on it was bent over those trays, shut in that room. Her child lay a little lower, next to her, unsupported by the dam her father's body should make on the other side. Kamala fell into a troubled sleep.

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Ravi and Raja Varma closely follow the proceedings of the case against a seller of German oleographs in Bombay, who is being charged with selling obscene pictures. The two judges, one British, one Indian, rule that it is not nakedness of the classical subjects that is objectionable, because loftier ideals than just a exciting of the sensual appetite, is visible- rather, it is the tasteless insertion of modern objects like a silk umbrella that is taking away from the idealism the pictures would other wise have.

Thursday 17th January 1895

Messers Dharmsey and Narotam Morarji invited us to his house the China Bay a beautiful building to see a novel performance in which first an earthern pot was transformed into a living human head which again turned into a glass fish pond and so on. The illusion was startling.''

Ravi Varma's brother, Raja Varma starts to keep a diary. The diary entries in Bombay, suggest the routines of the lives of two gentlemen painters, not very different from their European counterparts. A good day at work, a browse through a bookshop, an evening's entertainment, which could be a play, a nautch performance. There is also a lot of giddy, and perhaps, difficult travel from princely state to state, with shifting weather conditions, attrition because of various palace intrigues( as in Hyderabad, where professional jealously from Raja Deen Dayal, who had first invited them, leads to difficulties in completing the assignment). In princely states they see scenic sights, architectural wonders, as possibilities for paintings. Raja Raja Varma specialises in landscapes, Ravi Varma is coveted for the amazing likenesses he creates of his subject's faces.

In Bombay, there is a visit to "Tivoli Theatres" to see School of Scandala visit with Justice Jardine to see the High Court, a drive to Fort in the evening, or permission some day to see P and O company's steamer, 'Caledonia', "one of the largest we have ever seen. The first class accomodations and furniture were splendid".

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