I Am an Executioner (20 page)

“Is that all that happened?” [J] asked. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. I kept my eyes focused on the chopping board.

These are, I must say, the difficult moments in the life of an Agent. Maybe you feel like you need to talk, but there is only so much that can be said, and only so many ways you can say it. I have encountered these moments many times, in my relationship with [J], and even previously, in a different way, with [N].

But I have improved, since my earliest days—I believe I have. And I accept that being an Agent entails some cost in terms of personal life. But that cost is worth it, because I believe in the goals of the Agency, to the extent that I know what they are.

And another saving grace that used to occur to me is that perhaps it does not matter that I cannot say a lot, because we should be able to glean enough, for our purposes, just from observing.

I said, “Unfortunately, that’s all that happened. It felt important at the time. How about you? What did you want to talk about? What happened in your day?”

He turned around to put the roast in the oven to reheat it. He closed the oven and adjusted the knob and came back. “My day? You know how disorganized the shipping lines are. And the telegraph wires are always under repair. I spent all day just
trying to reroute a shipment.” Then he took a knife out of the drawer and began to help me with the chopping. “Same old story,” he said. “Hardly left me time to get any real work done.”

When the roast was warm, we ate dinner. It was a nice dinner—[J] always does a good job with the roast. We even opened a bottle of wine. In the end, it turned out to be a very relaxing evening.

The filmmaker Jogesh Sen, preeminent art-house director of India, whose memorable first film,
Calcutta Nights
, earned the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1975, will debut his twentieth film this evening on the opening night of the New York Film Festival. Accompanying him on Jet Airways to JFK are myself (Bibhutibhushan Mallik, his longtime production designer) along with the cinematographer and two stars of the film, plus Jogesh’s wife, Nirmala Sen. It is only my second time in New York City; Jogesh has visited numerously. In the morning, Jogesh and actor Satyadev and cinematographer Anant attend without me the welcoming breakfast. (“Only three tickets, old chap,” Jogesh tells me, by way of apology.) Later, Jogesh and Satyadev and Anant conduct some tedious interviews with American magazines. (“You never enjoy such things anyway, Chotu, eh?” Jogesh reassures me. “Dressing up, yakking, mugging for photographers.”) Not missing the bore of an interview at all, Mrs. Nirmala Sen and I sit high atop the rooftop parapet of the double-decker sightseeing bus, cruising along First Avenue like a maharaja and maharani atop the royal elephant.

We pass by United Nations—location of such magnificent
scenes in
North by Northwest
, that triumph of production design: the smart suits, distinctive colors, and stylish sets. I imagine myself a Cary Grant, the bus in long shot; and next to me, my own double agent, older and achier than Eva Marie Saint, perhaps, but no less divine.

Mrs. Nirmala Sen and I have been lovers for the past nearly two years. We are old people, with saggy bellies and fat grandchildren. Our hair is less and our backs give enormous pain. It must go without saying that our love affair is not some hot-blooded whim or youthful indiscretion. It is a weighty matter, for it will surely mean not only the imminent destruction of our marriages but moreover a complete end to my thirty-five-year collaboration with Jogesh Sen, for whom I toil as exclusive production designer, art director, as well as storyboard artist. I create the entire visual concept for Jogesh’s films; the public little suspects that by himself, great Jogesh cannot draw a human figure with pencil, nor propose a color palette, articulate a costume idea, nor properly frame the characters in the shots without consulting my storyboards.

But all that is nothing as to this: quiet, unassuming Nirmala Sen, in classic red sari and blue cardigan, plus a clear plastic poncho to protect against the spitty drizzle. She burrows her cold hand into the warming embrace of my own. With her sweet, sad face, Nirmala is looking down upon the pizza shops and sweet shops crowded like a family into narrow Bleecker Street, and she is sighing with a thoughtful and rueful detachment.

Mrs. Sen receives all the wondrous sights of New York City with the same deep sigh, a benign world-weariness, as if to say, what do these man-made things mean to me? These tall buildings and cones of colored gelato? Not that she is haughty, nor is she simply anxious about what we are about to do. Rather, Nirmala Sen possesses the profound knowledge that all monuments and pleasures in life are brief; she has the perspective, in other words, of a woman who has suffered.

This I am trying to learn from her. These last two years with Nirmala—coming toward the end of life—have been as the beginning of my life.

“Nirmala,” I tell her after we return to the hotel in the early evening, “after his interviews, Jogesh is meeting with his distributor. It will take time. Why not you come in to my room?” In the solitude of the hotel hallway, I hook my finger inside of one of Nirmala’s golden bangles.

Mrs. Sen grew up in a good and sophisticated family; she is well educated, has fine tastes and normal values. I find myself moved that such a woman would even dream of deviating from the regularities of married life for my sake. But some flicker of hesitation is there in her angel face. She looks down at her watch; she glances along the hallway. Like one of the lonely housewives so sensitively portrayed in several of Jogesh’s early films, Mrs. Sen struggles daily with her unhappiness, although life is slowly coming around.

“That sounds lovely,” Nirmala Sen finally sighs, as if I am the microphoned fellow at the front of the bus, urging her to get down and admire the view of some bridge or glassy building. She scrutinizes the wallpaper, while allowing her soft shoulder to lean against mine, and my heart explodes in bliss. Even after two years, I am overjoyed each and every time she accepts my embrace.

Only people the age of sixty-plus can properly enjoy love. This I have recently concluded. Fools in their twenties run behind firm little girls with no thoughts and no experiences, as foolish as I was myself, even paying good money to have my way with the poor prostitutes. My wife—yes, she was pretty, in the photograph, but we had no concept of how to please each other. We each grew accustomed to our mutual sourness—I even used to blame it on how old her flesh had become.

How wrong of me. Now see—I cannot resist Nirmala’s drooping parts, the globular expanses and scored surfaces, the sinking into. Now see how I like to fall down with flesh my own age! I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t. Leave it for the youngsters the skinny and smooth and indistinct each-others.

With one necessary condition: if the old person is someone with whom I am soul-catchingly in love.

“In two days,” I remind Nirmala, later in that evening. “In two days, we will not be required to hide and skulk.”

Nirmala is hurriedly wrapping herself again in her red sari, carefully fastening her diamond earrings. She combs her thin white hair and ties it, then corrects her makeup in the mirror.

In two days I meet with Mr. Jefferson Bundy. Mr. Jefferson Bundy is a film producer working in Hollywood, California, and on Saturday he is flying across America to meet me. Quietly, over the last two years, I have written a screenplay, a true labor of love, which the wonderfully named Jefferson Bundy, it seems, has read and admired. I have wanted to write a screenplay for my whole life, but it has taken Nirmala to give the motivation and courage. It is a classic story: love triangle. Presuming I secure financing from Jefferson Bundy, I will no longer be beholden to Jogesh for my livelihood, and Nirmala and I can finally proclaim our love. I will become a filmmaker in my own right here in the U.S., and all will be thanks to Mr. Jefferson Bundy. Mr. Jefferson Bundy: how I love repeating that hearty name; it may hold our future, our abundant American future.

Now Nirmala turns to me, a note of worry in her voice. “But who knows what he will say? He might have discouraging news.”

“Please don’t worry, Nirmala. All signs are pointing in the other direction.”

I recline in the bed and flick the remote—it is Wyler’s
The Little Foxes
: look at the funny shaving mirrors, the unusual, well-chosen props.

Before she steps out the door, Nirmala places her eye against the peephole and mutters a brief prayer.

“Simply come back to bed.” I mute the television and flop onto my belly. “No need for prayers.”

She turns, offering me a longing and a worried gaze—how she would love to return beneath the covers. “There is a need,” Nirmala says softly. “Very big need.” Then she slips quietly out the door and into the hallway.

That evening, Jogesh Sen’s film is premiered. Before the screening, Jogesh’s American publicist has arranged for all attending crew and cast to join together for a photo session outside of Lincoln Center. We stand in the stiff wind and grin and mug for some god-awful thirty minutes. Jogesh repeatedly rearranges his British houndstooth muffler, smoothes his oiled silver hair against his head.

“Damn wind, Chotu, eh? Isn’t it bothering you?”

“Luckily, I don’t have any hair for the wind to bother it.”

“It must be cold for you poor bald men in this country. Look, you are getting goose pimples on your scalp.”

In this way, we mock and banter, while in my stomach, I almost cannot stand it anymore. Like Jimmy Stewart to John Wayne in
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, why not tell Jogesh everything, plainspoken American, and simply have it out?
Dear Jogesh, I am in love with your wife. Plus I hope to quit you to stay in U.S. and make my own film, taking Nirmala with me. How do you like them mangoes, old friend?
But some element of Nirmalite prudence restrains me.

“Hey, Chotu,” Jogesh continues, as the photographer replaces her lens. He presses his long fingers into my shoulder. “Thank you for keeping company to Nirmala these past two days. She would find it very difficult to see the city on her own. What a shame I don’t have the time to enjoy it with her.”

Jogesh has always called me Chotu, although I am six years his elder—it is because, at five feet and six inches, I am somewhat small.

“It is nothing to thank me, Jogesh,” I assure him.

Now he leans to my ear. “Hey, Chotu. This afternoon, I asked the valet to deliver my new screenplay to your room. When you have extra time, can you please read it over and begin sketching up some storyboards? Some people here may be interested in it.”

A new screenplay, so quickly? I am stunned, although by now I should be long accustomed. It has taken me two long years to craft the single screenplay of my life. It will probably be the last screenplay of my life, as I put all my available materials into it—a triumph, but a bloody difficult one. And meanwhile, fresh from his latest success, Jogesh is delivering to me the seventh screenplay of last four years—the twenty-oddth of his career—completed, it would seem, in the midst of his travels.

To calm myself, I fire a cigarette, causing fastidious Jogesh to take one step away from me. “Must you, Chotu?” he asks.

The publicist also chides me. “Sir, could you please put that out?”

“Just two puffs,” I promise, rocking my head affably. “Please-please, continue photographing.”

But the photographer has pulled her head away from the camera. Everyone is waiting for me, and Jogesh clucks his tongue impatiently.

“Oh, very well,” I cry, stamping out the cigarette in the red carpet beneath my feet, and grinning as per the photographer’s instructions.

There was a time when I was taken with him, just like everyone was. What, after all, was life before I met him? Hunched over my easel under the ceiling fans in the ad agency, at the old-already age of thirty, one of dozens among rows and rows
sketching soda bottles and biscuit tins. Each of my concepts had to be redrawn one hundred times to answer the whims of this foolish client or that imbecile executive. Why should they respect my opinion? My parents had come to Kolkata straight from the village; I drank home brew at the dhaba, not G and Ts at the Tollygunge. To save myself, I removed my emotions from it, making the work mindless, so that the main challenge lay in calculating my movements to avoid any drop of forehead sweat or cigarette ash from falling on the drawing paper.

I would have liked nothing more than to be a Gauguin and say: To hell with society, I create only for myself. But I had to be practical: at night I went home to my wife and mother and younger sister, all of us living together in three rooms, all of us relying on my job. What a noisy flat that was! I didn’t know yet what a life I was missing. Those three women were tasteless, tactless, strewing their knickknacks all about the house, kitten posters and stamp-pressed Ganeshas and little plastic boys whose penises spout water—mass-produced doodads as are found in city bazaars. “Don’t remove them; it is our house, too,” they would insist to me.