To celebrate the centenary year of Satyajit Ray, arguably the most remarkable filmmaker born on Indian soil, Firstpost will explore the lesser known aspects of his life in our column Ray-esque.
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The world is more than familiar with Satyajit Ray, the movie auteur. But very few would probably be aware that the master, away from the shooting floors, and closetted in his famous Bishop Lefroy Road (south Kolkata) study, was also immersed in quaint passions.
“Father was deeply interested in word games, quizzes, and anagrams. He was also drawn to alliteration. These were just purely private preoccupations, and known to only an inner circle of family members, especially my mother (Bijoya Ray) and myself. Of course, sporadically, his deep interest in pastimes like word games and alliteration had also entered his films," says Sandip Ray, filmmaker and Satyajit's son.
"For instance, he incorporated a word game (the Memory Game) in the script of Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), and an alliteration in Charulata (The Lonely Wife) in a conversation between Charu and Amal (the two protagonists). Some of these elements, embracing IQ and personality games, were also infused in some of his sleuth Feluda stories. While dwelling on Feluda, it is essential observing that the author Ray unerringly incorporated his father Sukumar Ray’s Nonsense verses in his books hovering around his literary detective. But indulging in word games largely revolved around his personal life,” adds Sandip.
Among word games that Satyajit devoutly loved and relished playing were Accrossticks, Categories, memory games, crosswords, Scrabble, and Boggle. He particularly savoured the Scrabble and Boggle brand from UK’s Parker Brothers. He also devised a word game himself, which reflected shades of Scrabble, but left it unnamed.
“While travelling for shoots, on trains or buses, father would play some of these games,” recalls Sandip. “Categories and Accrossticks could be played with just pen and paper. One didn’t require any particular formal game tools. I remember mother and father sharing a few rounds of Categories while journeying in the train to the location during the shooting of Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress),” reminisces Sandip.
When he travelled overseas, especially to London, he would drop by at stores like Parker Brothers and Just Games. Just Games also displayed a journal called Games & Puzzles on its shelves, for word games, brain teasers, and magnetic games, to which Satyajit was a subscriber. Games & Puzzles kept him abreast of word games evolving worldwide. He would also pick up word games from Parker Brothers and Just Games if he found them fascinating, and bring them along with him to Kolkata. He was so avidly passionate about word games, he would indulge in them whenever he found elbow-room.
“If he was at home in between shoots or authoring a novel or novella, he would come across from his study, and spend a while playing a word game with mother. Mother was his prime partner in this pastime," narrates Sandip. “But occasionally, I recall Reena di (renowned actress-director Aparna Sen) visiting our home with her husband, and spending time with mother and father in a game of, let’s say, Scrabble."
Incidentally, Sen broke into filmdom with her debut film Samapti (The Conclusion), which was one of the three shorts in the maestro’s Teen Kanya (The Three Daughters), authored by literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore. In fact, The Three Daughters was directed by Satyajit in 1961 as a tribute to Tagore in the virtuosic litterateur's Centenary Year.
“It happens that Scrabble, which is an age-old invention, formed part of father’s life, too, in our earlier home on Lake Temple Road (in south Kolkata), and migrated to our present residence on Bishop Lefroy Road (also south of the city).” Sandip agrees that the roots of his great father’s fascination with word games lay in his supreme mastery over the English vocabulary. It must be documented, however, that later, the master film maker weaved puzzles in Bengali, especially in his Feluda writings.
Satyajit was also deeply interested in chess, and played games with himself on stray occasions. “But father acquired several chess books when he decided to direct Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players) to research into moves so that he got them accurately when the two unflagging chess aficionados in the film, Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, enacted unforgettably by the late actors Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey respectively, went about pursuing their chess bouts,” drives home Sandip.
Satyajit unfailingly, too, made it across to the Foyles bookshop in London, Winsor & Newton for art material, the HMV music store, and time permitting, to Selfridges for pens, refills, and cartridges. “When he fell ill after his heart attack in 1984, he would also instruct me to visit these outlets every time I went to London,” informs Sandip.
In tandem, back in Kolkata, he would be found, occasionally, at Kallicharan’s, Shukla’s, Khanna’s, and Tiwari’s in the undying New Market for books and magazines, the Oxford Bookstore on Park Street for books, notebooks, and stationery, and the over century-old GC Laha store in Esplanade (in central Kolkata) for art materials.
“He fleshed out concepts and ideas from everyday life. In the family magazine Sandesh, father posed puzzles to children. These included, for example, half of the famous Bata or Coca-Cola logo, a currency note or a match box label. Sometimes, the puzzles saw a portion of Rabindranath Tagores’s signature, which youngsters had to figure out in entirety. Sandesh’s quizzical section also carried silhouettes of well-known characters from my grandfather Sukumar Ray’s unmatched book of Nonsense rhymes, Abol Tabol, or famous landmarks like the Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar or the Machu Picchu. There were also a range of variegated games and competitions in Sandesh. Father never tired of fashioning these elements for Sandesh because he cherished them. Of course, he also penned stories and translations of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll for the magazine,” says Sandip.
From very early on in life, Satyajit used to also subscribe to comic books like Bino, Dandy, Chumps, and The Boys Own Paper, to mention just a handful. “In fact, hardly anyone would be in the know that a picture of my father on a shikara, when he visited Kashmir as a young boy, was published in The Boys Own Paper and won a prize,” reveals Sandip.
The intense interest in lapping up information from a variety of journals stayed on till the end. Even when he turned a filmmaker, Satyajit was a subscriber of periodicals like Omni, Scientific American, National Geographic magazine, Life, and Look (where the world famous British movie director Stanley Kubrick began his career as a photographer), and Heavy Metal and Argosy sci-fi magazines. On his trips abroad, he would pick up periodicals edited by Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, and Isaac Asimov. Amusingly, he did not fail to be bowled over by Herge’s Tintin comics, and read them till his last days. “Even when he was around 68 (just two years before he passed away), he had read Tintin and the Picaros,” reflects Sandip, betraying that tinge of emotion.
A largely unfamiliar face of Satyajit could probably end with an event which the maestro treasured. A favourite occasion for him was when Sandip’s birthdays arrived every year. This was, of course, till Sandip’s early- and middle-school days lasted. Kolkata sported a gamut of Hollywood studio offices at that time, which were armed with some of the most fabulous movie libraries. Needless saying that officials of all these film repositories were all in constant touch with the city’s grandmaster of the movies.
Sixteen mm cinematic titles, spanning Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello were sourced by Satyajit from movie libraries spreading across Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal Studios, and 20th Century Fox, and screened during Sandip’s birthdays. As Sandip grew up, Satyajit moved to films by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and other renowned movie masters. Thus, a twist to the conclusion of these birthday evenings in the Ray family household, was the unfurling of a film for the invitees. One retired at night brimming with thoughts laced with a memorable movie.
Ashoke Nag is a veteran writer on art and culture with a special interest in legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
All photos by Satyajit Ray Society.
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