The retired detective, Inspector Mastan formerly of the Bombay CID. Must we expect something terrible to happen to him?
One last thing about Mr. Hitchcock. Yes, he liked to make cameo appearances in his films, he said it made people watch the movies more closely to see when and how it would happen, but also, very often, he got the cameo out of the way early so that the search for it didn’t become a distraction. I say this because I now have to record, as the auteur of the present work in progress (to put it much too grandly, considering that this is very much a rookie project), that as I watched—participated wordlessly in—the scene I have just described, something uncontrollable welled up inside me. In that time of spilling secrets, I let my own secret spill.
Yes: characteristically, I hide my feelings. I lock them away or I sublimate them into movie references. Even at this crucial moment in my narrative, when I step out of the shadows into the center-stage spotlight, I’m trying (and failing) to resist talking about Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece Ran, in which, so to speak, King Lear was married to Lady Macbeth. The thought was triggered by something Inspector Mastan said. He called himself fond and foolish and whether he knew it or not was almost quoting Shakespeare’s broken king. Pray, do not mock me, Lear pleads. I am a very foolish fond old man….And to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind. There he sat upon his sofa, his last throne, screaming senile hatred. The Ancient of Days, who had disrupted the lives of his three sons and was destroyed not as Lear was, by their hostility, but by their destruction. And here before him, as monstrous in my eyes as the Lady Kaede in Ran, Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth, stood Vasilisa Golden, mother of his fourth and only surviving—and only supposed—child, with a pistol in her pocketbook and fire blazing from her eyes. And I, the fool, beginning my soliloquy which would reveal the truth. As if I didn’t understand that mine was a supporting role. As if, like Inspector Mastan, I could be, at least for this one scene, the star.
I had come to despise the second Mrs. Golden for her airs, for the way she discarded me like a used tissue once I had served her purpose, for the gun in her handbag, for her sanctimonious worship of an imitation icon, for her fake babushka mother, for the undeniable truth that everything she did, every gesture, every inflection of her voice, every kiss, every embrace, was motivated not by true feeling but by cold-blooded calculation. The wisdom of the spider, the wisdom of the shark. She was loathsome. I loathed her and wanted to do her harm.
In the retired police inspector’s British-Indian delivery, in his rigid self-control, in his voice that was never raised even when cursing Nero Golden to eternal damnation, I recognized something of myself. Maybe Suchitra had been right when she said that everyone in my story was an aspect of my own nature. Certainly I heard myself not only in Mr. Mastan’s suppression of feeling but also, at this moment, in Nero’s impotent dotard’s shriek. I was no dotard, not yet, but I knew something about powerlessness. Even now as I chose to cast away the shackles placed by Vasilisa on my tongue I understood that the truth would hurt me most of all. Yet I would tell it. When Riya called me summoning me to the Golden house, something’s going to happen, Riya in her own state of distress and confusion, in which mourning was now mingled with dreadful knowledge, provoked in me a flood of feeling I didn’t immediately understand but whose meaning had now, abruptly, become clear.
The election was upon us and Suchitra in her usual indefatigable way had volunteered to work the phones and then on Tuesday do the legwork and get out the vote. She should have been the one with whom I first sat down, calmly, to confess, to explain, to express my love and beg forgiveness. I owed her that at the very least and instead here I was up on my hind legs in the Golden living room with my mouth open and the fateful words trembling on my lips.
No, there’s no need to set down the words themselves.
Near the end of Satyajit Ray’s sublime Pather Panchali can be found what I consider to be the greatest single scene in the history of the cinema. Harihar the father of little Apu and his older sister Durga, who left them in their village with their mother Sarbajaya while he went to the city to try to earn some money, returns—having done well—with gifts for his children, not knowing that in his absence young Durga has fallen ill and died. He finds Sarbajaya sitting on the pyol, the porch of their home, silenced by tragedy, unable to welcome him home or respond to what he tells her. Not understanding, he begins to show her the children’s gifts. Then in an extraordinary moment we see his face change when Sarbajaya, whose back is to the camera, tells him the news about Durga. At this moment, understanding the inadequacy of dialogue, Ray allows music to surge up and fill the soundtrack, the high piercing music of the tar-shehnai crying out the parents’ grief more eloquently than their words ever could.
I have no music to offer. I offer only silence instead.
When I had said what there was to say, Riya walked across the room to stand in front of me. Then, raising her right hand, she hit me as hard as she could on the left side of my face. That is for Suchitra, she said. Then with the back of her hand she hit me even harder on the right side, and told me, That is for you. I stood still and did not move.
What did he say? Nero, in the confusion of the morning, wanted to know. What is he talking about?
I went over to where he sat, got down on my haunches, and looked him in the eye, and said it again.
I am the father of your son. Little Vespa. Your only surviving child is not yours. He is mine.
Vasilisa descended upon me in Byronic fury, came down like the wolf on the fold, but before she reached me I saw a light come on in the old man’s eyes and then there he was, present again, alert, the man of power returning from his cloudy wandering exile and reentering his skin.
Bring the boy, he commanded his wife. She shook her head. He shouldn’t be a part of this, she said.
Bring him at once.
And when Little Vespa was brought—Vasilisa holding him, the babushka mother beside her, the two women’s bodies half turned away from the man of the house, shielding the child between them—Nero looked keenly at the boy, as if for the first time, then at me, then back at him, and back at me again, and so on, many times; until the child, unprovoked but perceiving the crisis as children can, burst into noisy tears. Vasilisa gestured to the older woman, enough. The boy was removed from his father’s presence. He did not look in my direction even once.
Yes, Nero said. I see. He said no more but I seemed to see, hanging in the air above his head, the terrible words once thought by Emma Bovary about her daughter Berthe. It’s strange how ugly this child is.
You see nothing, said Vasilisa, moving toward him.