1876
Dada: Six year old Dhundiraj
Babaraya: You!
Dada: Six year old Dhundiraj is being trained for a career as a Sanskrit scholar. He is learning the grammar of an ancient language, and its verses.
One day, he goes to swim in the Ganga Godavari. He chops the waters with his arms and legs that are gathering strength
Late evening, Sarasvati is writing in the book, Quite unaware even of her, back to her, Prabhkar is sitting like an adult, in Phalke's chair, telling the story. The others are not around.
Prabhakar:
He jumps into the water like a frog.
He laughs as he hears the water break and fly away.
Saraswati writes: He is a frog in a large river, the sun warms his skin.
That is when he sees her.. the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, far more beautiful than even his mother, resplendent with jewellery like you have never seen on this earth, pearls like falling drops of milk, gold from the heart of the sun.. She was smiling where she sat on the back of a river crocodile, his jaws snapping, while she let the breeze into her open hair, and laughed suddenly with the pleasure of her sport- river rafting.
Sarasvati writes:
Dhundi watched like a open mouthed frog, and ducked under the water.
Prabhakar closes his eyes, very much like his father does. Dada closes his eyes.
Dada: I feel I will see her again one day.
Sarasvati writes:
Maybe when this skin had started closing over my eyes in protest of my having seen too much, of having asked too much of my eyes. Then Ganga will reappear and take a ride on the river of my mind.
Dada is on the same chair, he is looking at a strip of film, from one of his own films. He runs it on the table, with a glass counter and a light source below. In that small rectangle, a large river seems to move from within, we can see the current. Two devis, the river goddesses, appear on it.
Dada:
Your tata and I were bathing in the river once. In this very river. See..
The father recites purush shastra, and the son repeats. We hold our noses and plunge into the water, the river flowing over their heads. When father emerges, child is out of sight. Father anxiously looks for him, calls. Terror. Then suddenly son emerges at a distance. Father is angry. Walks out of the water. Son runs after him. Father pleads with him not to touch him.
Sarasvati Bai writes out a section of the Purush Shastra, carefully copying it.
Sarasvati Bai thinks: This language is unknown to me, the alphabets are alien.
Image of Bhairava from Vidarbha, 19th century
Shri Trymbakeshwar Jyotirlinga
Dada dictates:
What do the learned books say about the mystery of the jyotirlinga? Because the word 'jyotirlinga' talks of light, and the word linga expresses both creation and destruction. Because the word 'linga' has two roots, one is drawing,form, and the other is movement. From the invisible, to a sense of the immanent, to the visible. In other words, for the darkness to open out of itself the multifarious forms of the visible world.
Famine between 1976-78. Bombay affected seriously
At the same time Lytton introduced a Custom duty on textile goods exported to England.
Dramatic Performances Act, 1876. Restriction on subversive, anti state content in performance April 8, 1876. Bell gets the patent for the telephone. Patent list from the newspaper "Scientific American" where it is listed at Telegraphy
They fly over fields, hills with trees on them, and then over a low meadow. Dada points excitedly;
Dada:
Look there she is, Ravi Verma's Shakuntala.
And indeed she is there, lying on painted grass, comely, full bodied
Dada:
The Governor of Madras himself bought the painting from the Madras Fine Arts Exhibition.
Shakuntala never lifts her eyes, even when they fly lower. The children at the windows turn back to look at Dada
Dada:
Shakuntala Patralekhan. She is lost in the fantasy of the lover she is writing to.
