May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (37 page)

“I hate Calcutta,” she began, in a clipped, upper-class accent. “Even posting a letter is difficult. Transportation is difficult. Drying clothes is difficult. Even if you have a dryer, you often don’t have the electricity to run it.” Professionally, she said, Calcutta was even worse. “Our studios are very ill equipped, and the equipment itself is ancient. We have some antique Moviolas which are rejects from God knows when. The film tears and you can’t rewind. But it does tend to make your work technically simpler, which is not necessarily a bad thing.”

I remember thinking that evening that Sen presented a warm, self-possessed mix of glamour and brains, although anyone who wrote and directed the kind of emotionally tumultuous film she did could not have been as collected as she seemed. Later, when I watched her work on location for
Sati
, I saw another Sen, a high-strung perfectionist who
was so tense at the end of a long day of shooting that she would relax with a glass of whiskey, or, alternatively, by weeping. “I do burst into tears, yes, but not in regularity,” she admitted, explaining that she was especially possessive about the few moments she had to herself. “For instance, when I am having my tea in the morning, and dunking my biscuits, which I like to eat all soggy, if there are any telephone calls or if anyone bothers me, I can even start crying, I get so upset,” she said. “Yoga helps, although I don’t do it regularly. I wish I could sing. I think singing could really release the tension, but I am completely tone deaf.”

Sen’s father, Chidananda Das Gupta, had, with Satyajit Ray, founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947 and would later become Ray’s biographer and a great champion and critic of film. Aparna Sen grew up in a house where the Russian classic
Battleship Potemkin
was shown on the veranda wall after dinner, and where Jean Renoir, the greatest filmmaker of his day and the idol of all Bengali intellectuals, came for dinner one evening and asked her, a precocious two-year-old, to sit in his lap. By the age of ten, the young Aparna was seeing the films of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, and at thirteen she starred in Ray’s
Two Daughters
as the village tomboy who is married off against her will and escapes from her husband on the night of her wedding. Making the film, she has said, “was like a prolonged picnic.” At fifteen, her rain-spattered face appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine for a story about the Indian monsoon, and by her mid-twenties she had become Calcutta’s number-one actress in Bengali commercial films. These films offered the same lowbrow entertainment as the ones made in Bombay, but in Bengali rather than Hindi. Sen, with her intellectual background, was an unlikely star, but the money and fame were irresistible. “I used to count on my hands the number of films I had at a time,” she said. “I was quite determined to prove myself as a box-office star. But once I had them I started feeling, Well, if this is what it is all about, then it’s not all that hot. I wanted to do something better. And then I started writing.”

The plot of
36 Chowringhee Lane
grew out of a short story that Sen had written about a teacher she had known in school. Released in 1981 and starring Jennifer Kapoor, an English actress who was married to Shashi Kapoor, the Indian film star, Sen’s first movie instantly established her as a brilliant new talent.

Four years later came
Paroma
, named after the film’s protagonist, a Bengali housewife imprisoned within a decorous but unexamined
life, Again, Sen had written the story, basing the housewife on a friend who had excelled in college but had then become trapped by children, in-laws and domesticity. “She’s a very beautiful girl to look at,” Sen said, “and she told me once that whenever she got a compliment, which were then coming very few and far between, she nurtured it, and turned it over and over in her mind. I can live on it for a month,’ she said. Which I found very sad and very revealing.” The film was itself a powerful look at Sen’s view of the conflicts surrounding women’s identity and consciousness.

The story begins when a photographer for
Life
magazine, a handsome young Indian-born rake from New York, visits Paroma’s home for a picture story about Calcutta. This was a plausible enough development, and echoed what had happened in Sen’s own life years before. In the film, the photographer becomes the first person to treat Paroma as a woman independent of her family, one who is sexually attractive and interesting in her own right, and he inevitably draws her into a relationship forbidden by her culture and conscience. The affair erupts during Calcutta’s steaming summer monsoon, at a time when the withering heat that has been building with great tension for months finally bursts into showers—an obvious sexual metaphor Sen could not resist. The Calcutta of
Paroma
, though more textured than the city of
36 Chowringhee Lane
, nonetheless struck me as an almost imaginary playground for the two lovers, who discover its temples and charming alleys during their illicit afternoons. Paroma’s apartment evoked the languorous mood of a spacious home with high ceilings, fireplaces, polished black-and-white-tiled floors and verandas that looked out toward the falling rain.

At the end of the monsoon season, the photographer abruptly moves on to another assignment, cruelly abandoning Paroma. Months later, Paroma’s husband discovers the affair when he opens the mailbox and finds a copy of
Life
with a stunning full-page picture of Paroma, seductively drenched by the monsoon showers—a touch that was obviously inspired by Sen’s own photograph on the magazine’s cover twenty-five years earlier. A suggestive note scrawled by the photographer across Paroma’s picture makes everything clear.

Paroma’s husband, children and mother-in-law, horrified by the scandal in their household, virtually excommunicate Paroma from the family, bringing her to the sudden realization that all her relationships within the household have been based solely on the contract and structure of marriage, and not on an understanding of the person she
feels she is inside. In despair, she attempts to kill herself. While recovering in the hospital, she undergoes a small but profound change and takes a first step toward acceptance of herself, thus bringing the movie to a poignant and very real conclusion.

Such complicated women did not often appear in Indian films, and
Paroma
created a sensation. Some viewers were offended by its unusually explicit—for India—bedroom scenes. Others were confused about why a woman who was not desperately unhappy, and who had money, a nice home and a husband who did not beat her, would object to her life. At its core, the film questioned what Sen called “the very pillars of our society,” which were the family and a woman’s role within it. An especially subtle but revolutionary message was conveyed in an early scene, when the photographer was setting up his equipment at Paroma’s home. The photographer’s American assistant, hearing Paroma’s family referring to her by a number of different names, becomes confused, unaware that family members in India traditionally address the people within the household not by their given names but according to their relationships with each other. (The practice takes the use of “Mother,” “Father,” “Aunt” and “Uncle” in the West to an extreme. In Hindi, a child calls her maternal grandmother Nani and her maternal grandfather Nana, but refers to her paternal grandmother as Dadi and her paternal grandfather as Dada. There are specific terms for addressing siblings, parents-in-law, brothers- and sisters-in-law, and maternal and paternal aunts and uncles. Sociologists theorize that these titles bring order to the chaotic life of an extended family in India, but that they also impose limits, especially on the identity of a woman.) That was why the scene in the film was so powerful. The photographer’s assistant finally turns to Paroma, who until then has been addressed only in terms of her role as wife, mother, daughter-in-law and sister-in-law, and says:
“But what is your name?”

Scenes like that one had made Sen a favorite of Calcutta feminists, yet she refused to ally herself with any women’s causes because, like most serious artists, she saw her films first as stories about people and not as political tracts. She also turned down requests to speak to women’s groups, explaining, “I feel whatever I have to say, I have to say it through my films.” Despite the themes of her films, Sen insisted that none of their feminist spirit had been derived from any personal feelings of being repressed. “Somehow I never in the least felt fettered as a woman,” she said. “I felt that I was at an advantage, because I could either have a career, or get married and do nothing—whatever I
wanted. Either one was okay.” And yet, I felt her films were feminist in the very broadest sense, especially
Sati
, which she also wrote and directed. But when I spoke to Sen on the film’s location, she refused to see it as a vehicle for any point of view. “I really don’t like making statements,” she said. “It has nothing to do with a social message. Although I think it’s rather obligatory for me to tell my audience
why
a woman is getting married to a tree.”

This time we were talking in a rural northern corner of West Bengal, on a small boat that was waiting to ferry the
Sati
film unit across the Ganges to the banyan tree on the opposite bank. It was only seven-thirty in the morning, but the mid-May sun was already hot and high in the sky, and members of the film crew had not yet turned up. Sen was in charge of eighty people in all—actors, cameramen, production crew, sound technicians, makeup artists, seamstresses and caterers. “I’m officially responsible for everything that goes wrong,” she explained, growing impatient as the sun grew hotter. Since
Sati
was financed by the Indian government’s National Film Development Corporation, Sen was also forced to handle many of the film’s day-to-day business and accounting problems herself. Sen had spent five months searching riverbanks in West Bengal for the perfect tree, in essence her film’s leading man. She finally settled on an enormous gnarled banyan with a trunk, thirty feet in diameter, that split into three muscular main branches; the art department later extended its roots with plaster and paint for a more dramatic look. The tree stood at the edge of the small village of Neemtolla, about 150 miles north of Calcutta, but to enhance the atmosphere of isolation, the film crew had to demolish a large group of nearby huts and plant grass and vegetation in their place. The villagers were compensated, but seizing the opportunity, they also were charging the rich interlopers the equivalent of six months’ wages for any number of small tasks. “If we want two sailboats, they want a thousand rupees per day,” Sen complained, explaining that this was eating up her limited budget. “Then they want a thousand rupees more just to move out of a field.” Meanwhile, more than five hundred of the villagers had to be kept away from the shooting behind barricades erected by the local authorities. A few regularly slipped out to wander into shots and walk on the newly planted grass. “My precious grass!” Sen cried out at one point.

An even bigger problem, however, was the weather, which was showing no sign of developing into one of Bengal’s famous premonsoon storms for the climactic finale of the film. Sen had organized her
shooting around the storm’s expected arrival date of May 20, and in between shots she anxiously looked up toward completely clear skies. A few days after I left the location, a storm did come, but at seven in the evening, when it was too dark to register anything on film. The storm was so fierce that it blew down one of the tree’s branches, which fell on a member of the film crew, nearly killing him.

“Everything seemed to go wrong,” Sen said when we spoke again in Calcutta. Then she startled me by saying that, as a woman, she didn’t think she had the strength or the aggressive sense of command to direct a big-budget commercial epic like those churned out by the men in Bombay. “When I have to choreograph more than three people in a shot I start getting panicky,” Sen admitted. “Whereas I can see male directors doing it all the time with these huge vistas. I would love to do something like that, but what I think I can bring to a film well is intimacy.” She mentioned a scene that she had once conceived but never shot for
Paroma
, in which Paroma would have recalled in a flashback a time when she was giving her daughter a bath. “You know how mothers give their daughters baths,” she said, “and how they love to feel the softness of the child’s body, and how children like touching the mother, and smelling the mother. So these things like smells are very important, and I have never come across them in a man’s film.”

There was one particularly intimate moment that I remember from
Sati
, when Sen was directing Azmi in a scene in which the mute girl was weeping against the trunk of the tree. The girl had just been beaten by her aunt and had come to the isolated riverbank to seek solace under the banyan. As she lay among its massive roots, it was almost as if she were crying on the tree’s shoulder for comfort. Sen hoped the scene would help to build toward her nearly impossible goal of establishing a mystical kind of sexual relationship, using the heat and shadows of the riverbank, between the girl and the tree. Now I watched Sen step back from the banyan and look at the shot from all angles, studying it silently. It was dusk on the Ganges, and the light was softening the hard edges of what had been a suffocating day. Speaking very quietly, Sen asked Azmi to pull up her sari a bit tighter across the shoulder, then told her cameraman to stand aside as she peeked through the lens. “This just looks, I can’t tell you how it looks,” she said excitedly to Azmi. “I’m not even going to describe to you how it looks.” Sen had created this character and was now, despite the overwhelming difficulties of making a film, at last bringing her to life.

In the midst of her success as a director, Sen had surprised everyone
in 1986 by taking on another job, as the first editor of
Sananda
, a Bengali women’s magazine that combined beauty-and-fashion tips with more serious articles for the middle-class housewife. Feminists accused the magazine of catering to bourgeois attitudes, but
Paroma
had shown how well Sen understood the concerns of her middle-class readers. “A woman gives her entire life to bringing up her children and looking after the house, and then at parties, when her husband is asked what his wife does, he says, ‘Oh, nothing, she’s just a housewife,’ ” she said. “But being a housewife and a working woman, I know what it takes to manage both things at once. These men don’t seem to realize that, and it maddens me.” Interviewers from other Indian women’s magazines were always asking her how she managed to cope as a wife, mother and filmmaker, and her answer was that she did not cope very well. “If you asked what is the most important thing about me, the answer is guilt,” she told me. “Every time I am knitting I feel I should be writing a script, and when I am writing the script I feel guilty because I haven’t finished the cardigan for my father. When I am at work I feel, ‘Oh, my poor daughters, they are always deprived,’ and when I am looking after my daughters I think, ‘All these other people are working on their careers, and what am I doing?’ ”