1.
Death will come unannounced
like a sudden kalbaisakhi
in the month of April,
like plague in cold December.
It will go away too,
But it will come back,
it will come back as a person missing.
It will come back.
2.
It will come back as a memory
sharp as a blade
as it snows outside the British Library
after a day of research on the Bengal famine.
The memory —
the missing person’s head bobbing like a corkscrew in water,
his heart being pushed with all the strength in the nurse’s arms.
It will come back as a message,
confident as a sermon on the top of a mountain:
“Prepare for his death, it’s unlikely he’ll survive.”
3.
It will come back through the body and through sound archived on camera: Bijan Bhattacharya staring at the camera with a raised finger, saying “I accuse” in Meghe Dhaka Tara. The missing person will call from the hospital after his plot for killing himself has failed. “I accuse you,” he will say to his children, his wife, his in-laws, to whoever he can catch hold of; indeed, to the world. “I accuse all of you.” He will possess Kali’s wrath. His tongue is her fangs; he will say with clarity, perhaps in a moment of extraordinary clarity, “I accuse all of you.” Here he is, Lear-like, standing on his heath, — his bed in the hospital — giving his final sermon, “I accuse all of you.” The final sermon is body and sound.
4.
His wife will respond in body and sound.
She will cry almost on cue,
a cry that exceeds reality.
The calm, indifferent modernist lyric which escapes from emotion; the unobtrusive realist camera, the fourth wall of naturalist theatre, all will fail as forms to capture her cry. It needs a new form. For this is a cry that experiences pain over generations, not singularly; or perhaps experiences the singularity of a collective, generational pain. Synge’s keening women experience grief socially, collectively, after the waves have taken their men, brave riders to the sea, into the next world. Both Bijan Bhattacharya and Ritwik Ghatak were aware of this —
the form for the missing person’s wife’s singular, collective cry
is melodrama.
5.
How to give a form to collective grief is the question.
How to think of death as a collective feeling is the question.
Not death that comes with the stoic silence of modern elegies,
but death that bursts like water from an open dam,
destroying years of collective agriculture.
Not the singularity of death but its collectivity.
Not the death of a person but the death of a missing person.
Don’t worry, it will all come back.
Come back as a dream.
6.
Glimpse of Lakshmi in a dream. She says to a Binanda, a cowherd:
“Dear child, I understand your pain.
I have heard your cry as I was on a journey in the sky.
Narayan was also with me.
Here, take these seeds,
sow them when the rain sets in.
Fruits will ripen, become golden like my body,
will smell as lovely and as sweet as me;
my being will come out in the fruit.
No pain is everlasting. You will find abundance.”
7.
It will come back as the rain,
the abundant rain that will fall on your skin,
ailing from the harsh London winter,
and heal it as you arrive back home
and make your way to a government pension office.
On your way you will pass by the Governor’s residence in Dalhousie. And then it will come back as an image. During the famine dead bodies were perched on the high railings so that the government finally paid attention to the famine, not just to the war.
It will come back as a vision,
as a collective cry, phyan dao.
It will come back as the rain.
8.
Intermission:—
Long shot. Affluent government officers, both white and brown, stepping over bodies of the dead, to make their way to a restaurant.
9.
It will come back as an image from the shoshan ghat.
(Meet the dom, meet the Brahmin priest, meet caste in all its glory.)
Three dead bodies united in their communion for a final wail—
an internment of bones, skin, hair.
The missing person’s daughter stroking his feet,
weeping calmly in the long wait, saying, “Baba, tumi chole gele.”
Bijan appears here, looks at the scene and says,
“It may sound strange but I see a poignant hope here.
As his body is waiting to be burnt
he is waiting for his last meal.
His daughter’s nimble fingers,
trained for centuries to roll rice into balls,
will roll the grain with the crushed banana
and offer it to him. After his body is interred,
he will come back as a pinda, as the unburnt.
Perhaps he is hiding in the pond near the crematorium as we speak.
His daughter will go to the Ganga, get some gongajol in an earthen pot.
He will keep waiting until his daughter, pours water over the pinda,
turns away from the unburnt remains, and breaks the pot.
Now he will depart with the nameless blackbirds into the sky.”
O eternal sky, o eternal sky, o sky.
A note on sources, references and translation of Bengali words:
Section 6 is an imagined reworking of a Bengali folk story, “Goddess Lakshmi and the Cowherd Binanda.” The source for the image in section 8 is from the documentary, The Forgotten Famine produced by Channel 4. In section 9, Bijan Bhattacharya’s quote is a reworking of a point in one of his long interviews. Also in this section, the image of the dead waiting in a pond, as well as the final line of this section, is a reworking of a moment from a poem by Manindra Gupta that I have translated earlier as “Ashim Babu’s Story.” There are also references to Adil Jussawalla’s long poem-sequence “Missing Person” throughout the series. Meghe Dhaka Tara, officially known in English as The Cloud-Capped Star, is a 1960 film by Ritwik Ghatak. Bijanda of these poems is Bijan Bhattacharya, one of Ghatak’s regular actors in his films, but, besides an actor, also a playwright and novelist, the author of Nabanna (New Harvest), based on the Bengal famine, the most important Bengali modernist play, first staged in 1944.
Kalbaisakhi: a sudden, heavy thundershowers that comes in the summer.
Phyan dao: Please give us phyan. Phyan is additional water that’s usually thrown away after rice is cooked. During the 1943-44 famine, destitutes from various districts in Bengal begged for phyan in Calcutta.
Shoshan ghat: crematorium.
Baba, tumi chole gele: Father, you’ve left us?
Gongajol: Water from the river Ganga.
Pinda: Unburnt remains of the body after a cremation.
Souradeep Roy is a writer, translator and academic. He is currently working on a play based on the 1943-44 Bengal famine, How to Make Rice which is due to premiere in London in 2022. His earlier play and translation, A Brief Loss of Sanity, was published in the bilingual journal Kaurab. He is also working on his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he is writing a history of the Bengal unit of the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association in the 1940s and the group theatre movement thereafter.