May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (38 page)

Sen’s married life had been disordered. At the age of nineteen, she had fallen in love with the nephew of a family friend, and against her father’s advice she skipped her final exams at Calcutta’s elite Presidency College for her wedding. A year later, when the young wife had become a star in her first commercial Bengali hit, the marriage began to falter, although it officially lasted ten years. Sen seemed to feel that the marriage died a natural death because of a loss of romance. “Maybe I became a difficult person after my success,” she said. “But you see, I feel a marriage and a love affair are two different things. I tend to get confused between the two. Marriage and romantic love don’t necessarily go together, except in the first few years. I think being married is like being able to get on with your sisters and your mother. You have to give each other a lot of room and space.” When I first met Sen in 1985, she was living with her second husband, the magazine editor and columnist Mukul Sharma, whom she had cast, after a fruitless talent search, as the roguishly good-looking photographer who opens up the world to Paroma. “I was really desperate,” she told an interviewer after the film was released. “Of course, this decision to try him out was very painful—I took photographs, made him diet, the works.” Sharma turned out to be a fine actor and perfect for the part,
but the last time I saw Sen, two and a half years after the film was released, she and her husband were living separately and Sen was talking in the abstract about the problems of women who are more successful than their husbands.

“You can idealize about a man who is kindly and indulgent about his famous wife,” she said, “but it doesn’t happen often in real life. And it’s difficult for the wife because women like me are conditioned into wanting their husbands to be more successful. And you’re constantly trying to contain yourself. Ultimately, it ends in fights, because if you are married to an intelligent man, he can see through it all, that you are underplaying yourself. And so it’s a mess.” The social conditioning about men that she had received as a woman in India was, she said, “very, very contradictory. Sexually I like to be dominated, but intellectually I like to be at par. That creates a tremendous problem inside me. I am attracted when I can depend on someone, because I think everyone has some sort of child in them who wants to be cosseted and pampered. But when you have someone who pampers and cossets, he also wants a certain amount of obedience.” She said she wasn’t sure she would ever marry again but added: “I’ll tell you something—it’s very difficult to live without a man. Very difficult emotionally, physically, socially.” Directing small-budget films every few years did not provide enough income to support her and her two daughters, the elder of whom wanted to go to college in the United States. Sen was forced to take roles in a traveling theater group to make ends meet. “I am doing these awful plays,” she said, complaining about how her daughters’ education was entirely on her shoulders. “My daughters feel that they have no one to fall back on but me,” she said. “Though I don’t manage very well as a mother and a housewife and a career woman, I feel that in one area I have been successful. And that is that my daughters have complete faith and trust in me. I am so terrified of falling in their esteem.”

At the end of our last interview, I asked Sen once more about the city that had shaped so much of her work. “I hate Calcutta,” she said again. “I hate the traffic, I hate the fact that the phones don’t work, I hate the power cuts. These three. And the lack of dustbins.” But was that all there was to it? No, it seemed, and Sen’s tone softened. “I don’t want to get sentimental,” she said, “but it’s really like hating your own family. You can have a nasty mother, or a nasty sister, but they are still family. I don’t think I could live away from it without a lot of pain.” The film she wanted to make next was based on a gruesome
Bengali short story in which three college girls on a picnic end up murdering a schoolmate. Like
Sati
, this story would not be set in Calcutta, and Sen did not know if she would use the city again in her work. “I think I have exorcised Calcutta, really exorcised it,” she said, laughing. “Now it’s art.”

VEENA BHARGAVA’S PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH
the leafy courtyards and spacious interiors of Aparna Sen’s early films. Instead, they evoked the urban disaster that had been created by the millions of refugees who flooded across the border during the 1971 Bangladesh war, and by homeless and impoverished peasants driven by desperation from villages all over India to seek some kind of job in the city. In the “Pavement Series,” a collection of thirteen large oil canvases and forty pen-and-ink drawings that received great praise when it was exhibited in 1976, Bhargava captured, in a way that photographs could not, the wretched lives of these immigrants who lived on the city’s streets. There were no faces in her paintings, only tense limbs stretched across broken pavements. In the accompanying catalogue, Bhargava wrote that her work was meant to explore “the underlying estrangement of man in a city” and his responses of “hope, despair, tolerance, indifference, frustration, apathy, acceptance, and, at times, a contentment that ignores the reality around him.” She was determined not to shrink from the reality that she saw every time she walked out her front door. “In Calcutta, nothing is tucked under the carpet,” she said. “The well-to-do and the poor are living side by side. It’s all out in the open, and you can’t run away from it.”

Bhargava was one of Calcutta’s most sensitive and socially conscious painters. Although not a Bengali—her family came originally from the province of Sind in what is now Pakistan—she had enormous compassion for those who suffered in the city. She was also one of the angriest voices I encountered in India, even though her medium was pictures and not words. Her paintings were like screams of pain, brutal in their honesty; this was how she related to her urban environment. But I felt there was also an anger that derived from her struggle to become an artist and discover her own identity in a world of men. She did not call herself a feminist and was restrained and even resigned about the conflicting pressures that she faced as a woman. But the rage was there for anyone to see, boiling over in her uncompromising work.

Her first exhibition, in 1972, had included “Victim,” a pen-and-ink
drawing of a corpse, inspired by a newspaper photo of seven dead bodies discovered during the reign of terror of the Naxalites, the Maoist peasant guerrillas who murdered and pillaged across West Bengal in the sixties and seventies. After gripping the Indian art world with her “Pavement Series,” Bhargava built on the same themes of alienation and despair six years later in a show that included “Man on a Bench” and “Onlookers,” two large oils of faceless, listless forms that seem lost in the world around them. This show also introduced the beginning of a feminist consciousness. In “Woman on a Lounge Chair,” a desolate, older female form, a widow perhaps, slumps on an old wooden chair, one bare foot resting on a black-and-white tiled floor. The picture evokes a sad feeling of time past. Bhargava took her explorations of the female sensibility a little further with “A Man and a Woman,” completed in 1986, in which a silent couple sit back to back on either side of a bed. There seems to be an invisible wall between them, and the woman’s stomach and womb are both empty.

Toward the end of my stay in India, an art critic I respected told me about Bhargava, so I telephoned her and asked to see her work. Bhargava was agreeable, and soon I arrived at her apartment in a group of three buildings called Roy Mansions. When I first walked in the door, the high ceilings and formal dining room gave me an odd sense of déjà vu. It turned out that I had seen the flat before, in the interior scenes of
Paroma
, shot in a neighboring building in a flat identical to Bhargava’s. The artist had grown up in yet a third Roy Mansions flat, with the same floor plan; she was living in this one with her husband, a senior partner at the Calcutta office of the Price Waterhouse accounting firm. Although Bhargava’s physical setting resembled Paroma’s to some degree, the artist’s flat was distinguished by the signs of a quiet rebellion. “Victim,” her pen-and-ink drawing inspired by the Naxalite killings, put a damper on any conversation in the sitting room, and in the apartment’s entranceway stood a dark, ominous assemblage that Bhargava had constructed out of a shuttered, dilapidated window roughly nailed to some old pieces of wood.

Bhargava herself was a tall, angular woman, self-contained and serious, although in later conversations I uncovered a warmth and a wry sense of humor. She had short hair and was dressed in slacks, definitely not the traditional look of a Calcutta businessman’s wife. “You came to see my work, so should we go have a look at it?” she said right away, abandoning the usual half hour of small talk and tea. Bhargava led me to her studio, a spacious room in which stood a large
oil painting in progress. Entitled
“Baarat,”
the term for a groom’s wedding procession toward the home of his bride, the work was in the style of a lurid Hindi movie poster, but devoid of all happiness. The groom was faceless, and a musician joylessly played his trumpet, as if he wished he were elsewhere. “I find this sort of celebration very forced,” Bhargava said. “You have to perform, you have to dance, you have to let your hair down whether you like it or not.” She next showed me “The Sun Moon Beauty Parlor,” another large oil, depicting an overfed middle-aged woman in a gauzy green sari, leaning back to have her hair washed in the beauty parlor chair as if submitting to something vaguely sexual. She had an air of hopelessness about her. “In this woman, I see a great deal of pathos,” Bhargava said. “At this age, you see women wanting to transform themselves into something they’re not.”

There was little in Veena Bhargava’s background to suggest that she would develop into an artist whose work would question some of the more fundamental social mores of her class. Her father had worked as an executive for the Indian railway system under the English, and Veena, the second of his three daughters, was born in the British summer capital of Simla. After living in Delhi, Karachi and then Lahore, the family settled in Calcutta shortly before independence in 1947, when Veena was nine. Her father eventually became the general manager of the Calcutta-based Eastern Railways, culminating a career that had ensured Veena a place in elite English-language schools, tennis and piano lessons, and summers at fashionable resorts in the Himalayan foothills. After college, she entered medical school in Calcutta, thrilling her father by training for one of the few professions then acceptable for girls from good families. There she particularly enjoyed the dissections—her knowledge of anatomy would later turn up in such works as “Victim”—but quickly realized that she was not meant for medicine. She dropped out of school and took an examination to enter an art college, which devastated her father. “That was a difficult phase for me, because art has never been considered one of the more stable careers,” she said.

By the time she completed her five-year course of studies, including one year spent in New York, she had married and had given birth to a daughter. When her second child, a son, was born, Bhargava turned her back on her art and settled into a “domestic hibernation” lasting five years. “It was not that I did nothing,” Bhargava said. “But I feel it was a total blank as far as my artistic career is concerned. I don’t
really know why it happened. Possibly because of the children, but I had no one to blame but myself. I felt very frustrated by the end of it. I realized a lot of time had been lost.” I asked her if she didn’t think of her “hibernation” as natural when her hands were full with two children. “No,” she answered, “I think I could have done more with myself during those few years.” She had found it especially difficult to work at home. “It’s not a healthy arrangement,” she said. “The house is like a public thoroughfare, friends drop in, the family is there and no one takes you seriously.” Things finally began to change after Bhargava ran into a young woman who had just graduated from art school. “She was full of beans, and only a year younger than I was, and I felt, What have I been up to?” Bhargava said. So she collected her courage and, with another friend, called on Paritosh Sen, one of the city’s most celebrated painters, to ask if they could study with him. “He didn’t know us, and we didn’t know him, and he wasn’t too keen about doing it,” Bhargava said. “But it worked wonderfully, and it was a real springboard into finding myself.” Two years later, Bhargava had her first show.

Bhargava and I talked again on a mild winter evening a week later, sitting in her flat next to some enormous old windows opened to the roar of traffic, honking horns and shouts from Calcutta’s streets. The sounds made me think of one of Bhargava’s paintings, “Chowringhee Crossing,” in which a massive, angry bull surged forward across the city’s busiest and most famous street. Bhargava described the work to me as “an anthropologic reaction to the aggression of the city.” But I saw that the city wasn’t the only source of conflict in her life. We were frequently interrupted by phone calls, questions from servants, and, at seven, Bhargava’s husband, a mild-mannered man who quickly passed through on his way to change for a wedding that evening. Bhargava herself wasn’t going. “I have never been one for socializing and I don’t have much patience with it,” she said curtly, acknowledging that she had “developed a bad reputation for being antisocial and cutting out people, but it was the only way to do it. You have your own career, your own personal views on life, and at the same time your social setup demands other things from you. This is expected, or that is expected. Either you conform, or you don’t conform, or you strike a balance. I try to strike a balance.”