Puffin Classics by Satyajit Ray

Author:Satyajit Ray [RAY, SATYAJIT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789390914531
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

As I lived abroad, my connection with Shejokaka dwindled. I’d just started teaching when I received a piece of strange news in a letter from my mother. Apparently, Shejokaka had got a chance to act in a film. I must mention that Shejokaka’s face faintly resembled Swami Vivekananda’s. But his physique was not quite the same. Shejokaka was five feet six inches tall, yet everyone noticed the similarity in his eyes, nose and face with Vivekananda. When he got the news that a film was being made on the life of Ramakrishna Paramhansa that also featured Vivekananda, Shejokaka directly went to the producer and mentioned his desire to act in it. He had no difficulty getting the role.

However, after a couple of weeks, I learnt that he had been removed from the film. And why not? Despite shutting himself in his room and memorizing all his lines with utmost zeal, if in scene number one he blurted out the dialogue of scene number three in a reply to Ramakrishna, could it have worked? In other words, Shejokaka proved that he was worthless also as a film actor.

When I was forty-eight, my younger brother who was also in Chicago, told me in a letter that Shejokaka had become a disciple of a mendicant and had left for Coimbatore.

Last December, along with my wife and two daughters, I visited Calcutta to attend the wedding of my Chhotokaka’s daughter. Born and brought up in that country, my daughters are completely American. In the meantime, I hadn’t heard anything about Shejokaka. Therefore, after arriving in Calcutta when I realized that he was living in the same city and was doing well, I naturally felt an urge to meet him. I was sixty at that time, and hence Shejokaka was ninety. I’d assumed he had passed on.

For the past three months he had been living with my aunt’s son Dr Ranesh Gupta in his house in Fern Road. I also realized that religious convictions hadn’t agreed with him. Even after ten years, idli-dosa held no appeal. Staying half-fed every day for those years had made him lose thirty kilos. When he heard I was in town he told his nephew doctor, ‘Ask Jhontu to visit me.’

So one Sunday evening I landed up in Fern Road. In the candlelit room on the second floor, Calcutta undergoing one of its frequent bouts of load shedding, Shejokaka sat reclined against a bolster wrapped in a green muffler over a tussar covering.

One could certainly recognize him, but I must also add that he had preserved himself rather well. All his hair had indeed turned white, but more importantly, he had retained his hair. When he opened his mouth to grin widely at me, I noticed a dozen original teeth. And when he spoke, though his voice had become feeble, there was a touch of vigour in it. I had never observed this robustness in him before. Perhaps the realization that he was now the senior figure in the family and no longer needed to bow before anyone, had helped him acquire such a personality.

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