 |
| Debjani Ray with her store of letters from Satyajit Ray in her CB Block home. Pictures by Sanat Kumar Sinha |
When she was in Class X, Debjani wrote a letter to a person she had never met about a film she had recently seen and loved. She got a reply, which prompted the beginning of an epistolary exchange that lasted till the person passed away 21 summers ago.
On the eve of his 92nd birthday on May 2, Debjani Ray, a resident of CB Block, proudly sifts through the collection of 73 letters that she received over 16 years. The name of the sender is Satyajit Ray.
“Seeing Sonar Kella as a teenager was a momentous experience. I could not sleep that night. Every time, I shut my eyes I would see the camel chase or Lalmohan babu’s face.” Yet it took a while for her to muster courage and write to the film’s maker. “As a subscriber to Sandesh, the children’s magazine he co-edited, I had his address a turn of a leaf away. Having sent the letter, I had even forgotten all about it.” So it was a shock when her father handed her the mail on July 31, 1975. And there it was in that famous cursive hand, “Sneher Debjani, Tomar chithi peye khub bhalo laglo....”, going on with his comments on Debjani’s comparison of Anandamela with Sandesh.
 |
Though thrilled, she had taken the reply to be a one-off gesture. So when the reply came to her second letter on October 8, she was so excited that she tore the envelope by hand without waiting to fetch the page-cutter. The letters carried reflections on his own films, his shooting plans, information on other assignments taking up his time like judging film festivals, worries about mounting costs to keep Sandesh afloat in the face of competition from Anandamela.... In one letter, he even expresses irritation about the new practice of the press reaching his home with camera whenever someone died.
“I used to write whatever came to my head. He treated me as an adult and took my comments seriously. Perhaps he found an exchange with a youngster refreshing,” she says.
Yet he was alive to the age of his penfriend. When he writes of Jana Aranya releasing, on November 28, 1975, he adds: “...censor-er bicharey praptoboyeshkoder jonyo. Tomar shey boyesh pouchhechhe ki?”
When Debjani enrolled in Shri Shikshayatan College, he asked her to drop by at his Bishop Lefroy Road home in the neighbourhood on the way back from college. “I was so diffident that I replied that I preferred to remain his penfriend. He replied that it was unfair as I knew who I was writing to and he did not. From that letter, the 11th in the series, I became ‘Bhai Debjani’, which was the address he maintained till the end.”
Debjani did visit him eventually, in her second year of college, accompanied by her father. “It was such a sight —- the huge door being opened by the tall man himself. He was working on Hirak Rajar Deshe costumes then and kept doing the sketches as he chatted with us.” She would visit him about half a dozen times more.
Despite his busy schedule, Ray wrote an average of six letters a year. “Except in one letter, he used fountain pen all along. Every letter had a new stamp. And on the envelope, he would usually write my name in Bengali and the address in English. That is a habit I also acquired.”
Ray sent her an autographed copy of Our Films, Their Films. “Manikda called to say that he had left word at Oxford Bookstore to send me a copy and within a day it reached our doorstep.” Soon after, Debjani was invited to the shoot of Hirak Rajar Deshe. “My mother ruled that Tollygunge was no place for a girl to go alone. So my brother was sent as an escort.” The scene was of the king handing diamond rings to guests in the courtroom. “It was a very hot day and we got bored pretty soon. He was surprised and told us that a song would be filmed next. It must have been that Eshe hirak deshe song. But we had had enough.”
Later she was also invited to the press show of Sadgati and Piku, held at Gorky Sadan. “There he was at the gate and inside, a constellation of stars — Smita Patil, Mohan Agashe, Aparna Sen, Victor Banerjee... It was a different universe.”
He also came to her wedding. “The moment he set foot there was a power cut. He had another wedding to attend and just had an ice cream. Though my brother took some photographs using a flashbulb, in that confusion, I forgot to get a picture clicked with him.”
The last time they met was when she visited him with her five-year-old son and husband. “My son soon started bothering us, wanting to sketch. To our consternation, he started looking for paper and not finding any, ended up giving him costly art paper. My son drew what he called a village and gifted him. ‘Let him draw what he pleases. Never enrol him in an art school. That would kill his originality,’ he told us.”
In the last letter received in December 1991, he talks of ill health. His handwriting too had borne the brunt. He would pass away the next April.
Debjani, one of the librarians at the block’s library, rues how difficult it is to make people read books today. “When the habit of reading itself is under threat, it is no surprise that the culture of letter-writing has died. It is unlikely that such a relationship can bloom in today’s world,” she says, putting away the album containing her treasured mail.