In case you are expecting this to be a review of Teenkahon that premiered on Thursday, let this be a disclaimer. One who was part of a preening quartet applauding the very appearance of the director’s name on the title card does not qualify to be a fair reviewer. Cheerleader? More like it.
After all, it was our own Bauddhayan who was making his big screen debut; Bauddhayan Mukherji, the boy from South Point who sat next to me in Class VII and VIII in Section B (morning); the boy who always had to be on the alert so his name was not misspelt; the boy who had an excellent singing voice; the boy who was a nifty all-rounder on the cricket field.
I remember him asking me to umpire a cricket match between Section B and C played at Vivekananda Park where pitches were rented out for Rs 30 in three-hour slots. In the late-’80s, when I cut a solitary figure in the Eden galleries, calling a girl to a para match was not an out-of-the-box move. It was out of the packing case.
We were avid quizzers, though I don’t recall him talking much about Satyajit Ray, whose influence is so rivetingly obvious in the first film of the triptych — Nabalok, shot in black and white, and taking one back to pastoral Bengal of the 1950s, which forms the stage for the play of a child’s infatuation, jealousy, mischief and comeuppance. At the interval, when we were debating how such complex emotions could be wrung out of a child, Bauddhayan supplied the answer. Barshan Seal, then seven-and-a-half, was asked to look at the older and taller Ananya Sen and think of ripe mangoes on a tree! Yes, the boy loves mangoes.
When Bauddhayan was himself the boy’s age, he was a great raconteur, telling stories in class with vim and vigour. I have that on authority from our mutual friend Subhadip Basu who was with him in junior school. By the time I met Bauddhayan, his family had shifted to north Calcutta and after school he would catch noon and matinee shows in Radha (Hatibagan), alone.
In Class IX, our ways parted but only just. I was in D1 and he in D2, across the corridor. The break came after Madhyamik, when he shifted to St. Xavier’s to study economics. He wisely did not say then what he says now — that he was following in his idol Ray’s footsteps. Classmates can be ruthless. None of us could have imagined a career in films for him, leave alone official selections to 39 film festivals and 22 awards and nominations for his debut effort.
In the intervening years, he started his own production house and became a successful ad filmmaker. We had renewed contact and it was in The Telegraph that some of his initial successes were chronicled — his Nokia ad campaign with the Kolkata Knight Riders team, his Bell Bajao campaign against domestic violence that won him his first Silver Lion at Cannes Film festival in 2010…. He won his second Lion earlier this year (for an ad film on a fileria-free India).
Bauddhayan is not the first director from our batch. Q is. But Kaushik Mukherjee has never worn his Pointer identity on his sleeve like Bauddhayan does. When our first batch reunion was being planned last year, he is the one who convinced me to attend. “If I can fly down from Mumbai why can’t you come?” he urged me over dinner at his Goregaon home. In fact, he called up each of the other fence-sitters.
That is why our batch WhatsApp group has been agog with the release of Teenkahon, cheering every step of a friend’s journey to his dream — Imtiaz Ali coming on board as presenter, the launch of the trailer, the first song and now the release….
But nothing had prepared us for what we witnessed on Thursday evening at INOX, South City. If Nabalok was a delightful tale of innocent infatuation, post-interval it was a twin saga of obsession of the experienced. So intense was the meeting of the two men the night after one’s wife and the other’s lover has committed suicide in the second film Post-Mortem that the only time we spoke was when Rupa whispered that she had recognised Bauddhayan’s voice speaking for Joy Sengupta (“He had dubbed in Patalghar too”) and Rina and Mahua seconded that. Sabyasachi Chakrabarty, the cuckolded husband, just took our breath away.
The third film, Telephone, had reason for extra cheer. The story too was written by Bauddhayan. Rituparna Sengupta and Ashish Vidyarthi were so real as the loyal wife and the straying husband that the end — oh, what a twist! — had the audience stunned into silence on the way out.
Bauddhayan’s call woke me up on Friday morning. “Kemon laglo re?” was his impatient query. Sorry, my friend, I made you wait this long for the answer which I wanted to give in writing.
Proud of you, Buddy!
Sudeshna Banerjee
What is your message for Bauddhayan? Tell t2@abp.in
