I Am an Executioner (24 page)

Slowly, her expression changes; she is on the verge of either laughter or weeping. She turns down, coolly caressing a silvery Cartier. Wary of spying eyes, she is trying to act like I am telling her nothing special. Now she motions to the sales assistant. “What is the cost, madam?” she asks her.

“You can tell him now. The deal is done.” I wipe my cheeks, because some premature drops of joy have fallen already from my eyes.

“Ah, Bibhuti,” Nirmala responds, finally turning partway in my direction. “Is it really so easy?”

“Just so. Now no one can keep us from enjoying, at long last, whatever time we have left.”

Nirmala bends away again, still fondling the watch, her eyes glistening like Ingrid Bergman’s, staring from the window with soulful passion (medium shot) as Cary Grant stands behind her, in
Notorious
.

“Why do things so abruptly?” she whispers. “Let me go back to India and tie things up. That way, the transition may be a bit smoother, don’t you think?”

Of course she is cautious. But she is also hopeful; I trust her appraisal of the situation. “As you say, darling. If you think so.”

“Sweet Bibhuti,” she sighs. My camera-eye zooms to her hands. She slinks the silver watch from one palm into another, tilting it here and there to catch the light. Three-quarters shot: She blinks her eyes clear. “So beautiful, nah?”

“By the way, sweetheart, I don’t wear wristwatches. They irritate me.”

She shakes her head, then unsnaps her wallet.

“You and I will be so happy!” I murmur.

“Shhh,” she admonishes, because now the saleslady is right
here. Nirmala signs the credit card receipt as the saleslady boxes up the watch. Camera goes high and wide (crane shot) as Nirmala walks with me out of the store, with the five-thousand-dollar timepiece weighing down her bag.

Sometimes life feels very long. What all I have come through! And other times, it seems as if it has all gone by too fast, and still I haven’t learned, and still I haven’t done anything. I feel strangely new to the world. When has one been alive long enough to draw some conclusions, to say anything intelligent about it?

In other words, what can I say about a culture that is not fully my own?

Every day, I am struggling to give the answer. Shooting is one horrendous ordeal. Being a director is not nearly as I had imagined, even having seen one hundred thousand film sets by this point in my life. Mr. Jefferson Bundy is far too intrusive, watching the dailies in the evening, then coming to the set groaning my name and shaking his head.

There are ninety-five headaches by 8:30 each morning, and another four hundred decisions to be made by teatime. (On my set, always we have ten minutes teatime.) The New York crew sometimes treats me like a bumpkin, as if they could make the film more quickly without me. In the night, I can hardly sleep for the pain in my neck and back and hips; I open my eyes every ten minutes with some newly remembered worry, another item to be scribbled urgently in my notebook.

But I am directing; I am plowing my own earth and seeing what springs up. The strange part is the loneliness of it. Every thirty minutes, the crew will dumbly stare at me, waiting for a decisive command—which they will then promptly dispute with a hundred contradictory opinions. Or they will simply hide on
the edges, smoking and gossiping like hourly workers, like this is not someone’s life’s work. When I told Jogesh the news at the closing gala of the festival, the bastard was an absolute gentleman. “Congratulations, Bibhuti. I always hoped you would direct a film one day.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “For a director, every day is a discovery. I wish you great success.” He was so unperturbed that I wondered if someone had told him or he had all along suspected; if he was inwardly laughing at some cool comeuppance that was in store for me.

Mr. Jefferson Bundy has brought in as cofinancers Prakash and Akash, the Arora brothers from Mumbai, meaning I have come to America only to make a Bollywood picture in the end. So be it. My story, somewhat revised, revolves about young friends visiting New York, one of them serious, one of them happy-go-lucky, their bonds becoming tested over an American woman they both fall in love with. That woman lives in Manhattan; her parents are highly skeptical of the foreign suitors. In one grand scene, all three youths dance arm in arm through the Lincoln Center fountain—boy, what a hellish time it is shooting that, with the midnight gawkers and grumpy cops. My two lead actors, those big-headed, carefully coiffed Mumbai boys, sometimes become impatient; they try to cajole and move me, making up their own dialogues whenever fancy suits them. “This line isn’t funny,” “This scene isn’t believable,” they calmly inform me when I challenge them. “This costume isn’t smart.” Neither impressed nor intimidated, they pretend not to hear me for the din of traffic as I scream instructions through my radio; in effect they direct themselves. Later in the film (as the financers insisted), the friends get caught up in the web of post-9/11, and the suspicions, and finally in the question, Will they make a home here?

I know enough. Even for all the acclaim that Jogesh’s first film earned, what did he really know about that village? He had grown up in a twelve-room house filled with books, and in his
film were mainly thatch-roofed huts. But what a moving thing we made, perfect in every detail, even if some of those details were of our own invention.

We are just visitors. None of it is our own. What did Jogesh and I know about the human heart? And still, we showed it.

“We have to rewrite the ending!” Jefferson Bundy yells, after filming is over. “We have to reshoot the love scenes. We miscast the leads.” And on and on.

Nirmala is slowly planning her move. When the servants answer the phone at her house, I use a clever pseudonym: “Mr. Shah from the grocers, regarding her order for Chinese apples.”

“Soon,” she says. “But Barun has had his second daughter. They need so much help around the house. I can’t leave just right away.”

“Soon,” she says. “But I am hosting a fund-raiser in my home for the Satyajit Ray Memorial Scholarship. How can I leave everyone abandoned like that?”

“Soon,” she says. “But … Jogesh is bringing me for two weeks to Paris. And then he has gone and hired me a third housekeeper, and somebody must stay here to train her.”

Finally she tells me: “I confronted him, Bibhuti. I told him everything. He was furious for two weeks, and I was about to leave. But now he’s contrite. He stays home on the weekends.”

And then, when Mr. Shah calls, Mrs. Sen has gone for her tennis lesson; Mrs. Sen is taking tea with her grandchildren; Mrs. Sen conveys her regrets but would like to cancel her order for Chinese apples.

The footage is an alarmingly tangled mess. I sit in the shadowy editing suite with the taciturn editor that Jefferson Bundy has hired for me. In that pristine, computer-filled cave, I force myself to focus on the film, to fight the nausea I feel, to postpone all thoughts of Nirmala, and stop rehearsing in my mind our every
moment together, every missed signal, my grand vision that lacked so much in the particulars. The impassive editor starts by shaving a moment here, a minute there; next, convinces me to drop entire scenes. I slowly realize I wasted whole days of shooting time; the editor discards them now with one awful click of the mouse. We examine dozens of takes of the same lines of dialogue, searching for hints of emotion, anything real or surprising; we order and reorder shots and sequences in endless permutations, struggling to sift out any story or suspense, to bring this inert thing to life.

After each day’s work concludes late in the night, I go walking, becoming lost in the big life of concrete and people. I walk gingerly, feeling an odd lightness in my feet, as if at any moment I might slip and go flying; until the sidewalks grow vacant, the checkerboard eyes of the buildings blink closed one after another. And then I take the train to the silent condominium towers of New Jersey, hoping for a little sleep; but usually end up by standing on the balcony of my cousin’s flat firing cigarettes, looking with queasy sadness out over the Manhattan skyline—straight-from-the-movies but somehow mysterious, this unreal view of the places I’ve just been.

Sitting on the train one morning, flipping through the
New York Times
for some distraction, I see a capsule review for a new film, Jogesh’s latest. I truly don’t have time for the two-and-a-half-hour movie; there are only precious days left in the editing room. Nevertheless, that evening I leave the editor with her takeout Thai dinner and go stand in line with the young stylish people outside of Film Forum and buy the twelve-dollar ticket. On a splurge, I purchase a cola and a chocolate brownie and popcorn, which I squirt with lime and cover with salt, and munching loudly, I watch.

Immediately from the opening title, I see that Jogesh has relied heavily on those storyboards I’d completed in the hotel room for the first half of the film (as I knew he might, for he
sent me a check in compensation). The art direction is sloppy, and he has made some poor color choices. But after several minutes, I stop appraising the shots because so caught up am I with the story line. The aging Kolkata painter is played by one of our longtime local stars. He falls in love with his young, aloof student, played by a newcomer. A new storyboarder must have taken over at some point, but I forget to notice where. And what does it matter, honestly? Because the film is beautiful. The choices Jogesh has made are good enough. The dialogues are smart, the performances very precise, very lively. It is the work of a craftsman in its own way. I use my chocolate-stained napkin to dab off my tears when the old painter returns all alone to his studio—wearing on his wrist the watch once gifted him by his outwardly passive wife—and despite the great mistakes and disappointments of his life, stoically picks up the brush, a slight tremble in his hand. The expression in the actor’s face is remarkable—pained but dignified and unlike any performance this star has delivered in the past. I have a big realization at that time. Okay, there is framing the shots and fashioning the sets. There is editing and makeup and lighting and props, and there is even writing. But the greatest challenge always lies in how one handles the actors.

I don’t have much time
²
so I must dispense with the obvious.
³
Helicopters clatter overhead, men with cameras
⁴
leaning from their open doorways. Their footage must be numbingly familiar to you, and might by now be all that remains of me. Please know that the contemporaneous accounts surely will be filled with distortions.
⁵
I write this in order to supply you with those crucial bits of history without which my story cannot be understood.

Before I begin, I want to make something clear: I am sorry for the expense and trouble I have caused. If I have hurt anyone, even unintentionally, then I can only hope for your forgiveness.
⁶
Many people have invested in my safety and comfort,
⁷
have felt that they’ve had my best interests at heart;
⁸
I have not intended to betray them.

You must believe that I never sought to draw this kind of attention to myself. I am just one elephant, and I did not seek it, but I can sense it: my story is destined to be a part of this city’s collective memory.
⁹
Perhaps, just perhaps, by the time you read this, my misadventure has inspired others to break free as I did.
¹⁰
Perhaps we live among you now as friends and neighbors.
¹¹

I have come far. This vast expanse ringed with trees recalls me to another green place.
¹²
My first memories are of green—the
rustle of green, its shift and sway, a thickness of thin blades that rise above my head—the grass we ate and lived in. Rushing through it, through the herd’s feet, massive, thundering feet, which in the vision-clouding dust and seeming chaos, balletically precise, never miss their mark. My elders sense my clumsy, tottering body somewhere in the dust and grass far beneath them, and always step around me. So: in, under, around the massive god bodies of my elders, I rush forward. My trunk rises up, groping for the belly that bears the odor of my mother, Amuta, her trailing milky, musky scent. I find her, and she reaches down for just a moment, to smell my mouth, touch me on the head, to reassure me and confirm herself of my presence, and all the while we thunder forward.
¹³
Prior, primarily I remember: Green.

During the wet season, our old leader Ania would guide us out of our valley to graze among the upland bark and bush, to feed on the brief tender grass that sprang up along the monsoon rivers in the hills. In the dry season, she brought us back down again to the valley, where the earth’s wetness contracted
to a small space of blue—our lake (I have never seen it, but I remember it)
¹⁴
—and where the grass was tough and tasteless but everpresent.

Life was full of change, but our home was neverchanging. Mother became our leader after old Ania died, a solitary grazer among hostile beasts. During our more difficult times, some would complain even about Mother’s wise leadership, saying that if Ania were alive we would never have suffered as we did. (The elephants spoke, I say, but of course they didn’t. Among ourselves, we elephants did not talk in words like those with which I now write this. We made noises, a broad range of them: grunts, whispers, low rumbles, ear-splitting trumpets, but we used them not as words. We made motions with our bodies as well—with our trunks, our ears, our legs, our eyes, with the angle of our heads—but these motions did not have distinct meanings. These gestures of body and sound were the stuff of our communication, yet they did not themselves constitute our speech. The source of our understanding, the substance of our message, lay in something broader and more round, a circle of intention that surrounded each of us and the herd. When we were together in the herd, we shared an understanding, concrete and actual; each of us felt with certainty what other individuals expressed to us, and moreover, we understood as a herd what the herd thought and felt.
¹⁵
)