Sumana Roy on Mahanagar, The Big City (1963) in her essay “City”.
My father, like many first time visitors, came to the city by train.
It was the only time, he tells me, that his dream had come true. He meant this literally – the long journey, squatting in the passage near the door, the smell of yawns and the sticky matted hair at the end of the journey, even the faces of his co-passengers and the ticket collector, he had seen them all in his dream, night after night. He hadn’t seen it in a film, not yet, only read about it in a few novels that had found their way into the village school library.
His first journey to the city was, he likes to romanticise, the opposite of Satyajit Ray’s journey to Nischindipur, the village where his film Pather Panchali is set. A stale joke about their common surname later, he tells us how, when he watched the film for the first time, he had repeatedly looked at the projector light in an old cinema hall to see whether that beam of light which contained in it the journey from the city to the village, could also hold its opposite – the story about a journey to the city.
My first visit to the city was through a film: Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (“The Big City”). I was, I must emphasise, forced to watch this film. At that age, black and white films signified boredom to me: they made my mother weep and my father garrulous. It was my father, with his eccentric ideas about a child’s education (he had once made my brother and me stand outside in the dark, moonless night for four hours to overcome our fear of darkness!), who made us watch the film. He asked us, my brother and myself, to “swallow” the film. He used that word often in Bangla, especially when he made us memorise the names of all the plateaus in Asia, or eat bitter gourd on Sundays, or watch Ray and Ritwik Ghatak….
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