One must read Bijoya Ray’s book if only to appreciate how monumental a diarist she was. Was, because, by her own admission, she stopped maintaining a regular diary after the death of her husband, Satyajit Ray, the great film director, in 1992, ending a practice she had followed, with a passion that can only be described as religious, since 1953, when son Sandip was born; monumental, because her daily entries were meticulous enough to produce a remarkably fat book that runs into 574 pages of text.
It’s a Mahabharata of a memoir, teeming with stories, sub-stories, people, relationships, events, and associations that might appear somewhat confusing at first but, as one goes along, produce an experience that’s tender, sweet, and absorbing. I don’t know if there’s another book like this in India, where a wife undertakes a journey of discovery around her celebrity husband with such love, honesty, devotion, and frankness. As a matter of fact, Indian wives are hardly known to be chroniclers of their husbands’ successes. Even elsewhere in the world, examples are not that many, and the one that I think would come close is Sophia Tolstoy’s My Life, a moving account of her life with Leo Tolstoy at his 4,000-acre estate at Yasnaya Polyana.
But while Sophia’s memoirs reveal a life filled with nothing but total loneliness — no contact with people, no art, no work — Bijoya’s expose one of total absorption with family, friends, and society, a fulfilled existence where tears and pouts and arguments are as much a part of the big story of living as love, affection, concern, and mutual respect and dependence.
It’s a joy to read her story, follow her through an elaborate labyrinth of family connections, events, and relationships, and track the first tentative sprouting of romance between her and Satyajit — Manik to her and his close friends — a romance made spicier by the fact that the two were closely related and affairs between close relations weren’t quite accepted by the social norms prevailing at the time. Bijoya has a homely style of writing, open and straightforward, which comes through just as well in Indrani Majumdar’s wonderfully racy translation, and interest in her narrative never sags.
Indeed, it reads like an absorbing, made-for-each-other love story as Bijoya Das, an accomplished singer herself, who also acted in several movies, becomes Bijoya Ray, the guardian angel of an acclaimed man of genius. But, to my mind, the real beauty of Manik & I lies in its clever weaving of the personal lives of two sensitive souls and the professional life of one of the world’s greatest movie directors of all time. The book follows Ray’s rise to fame every inch of the way and is so filled with rare insights and perspectives on the people, places, and events that constituted his universe that no study of Ray’s work would be complete without it. Since Ray has left us no autobiography, Bijoya’s book is all the more essential.
It’s a great human document and draws an intimate portrait of a man who was not only the genius we all know but was also a simple, unpretentious, friends-and-family kind of person who wanted nothing more from life than to be left alone with his work. Here was a man who could whistle any tune after hearing it once, hated big parties and vulgar displays of jewellery, never liked shopping but for books and Western music, wouldn’t carry any money in his pocket having twice lost his wallet, loved lavender powder and soap, was scared to change light bulbs or turn on the air-conditioner, liked beautiful shawls but couldn’t fancy wearing embroidered kurtas, and wondered if buying a new stereo for himself wouldn’t look like an unnecessary indulgence.
The book is full of sweet and touching vignettes of a loving couple growing old together. Like when, faced with family frowns, Manik wrote to Bijoya: “You know, I’ll marry no one but you. If that means never getting married, so be it.” Like his first reaction when Sandip (whom he wanted to name Dhiman) was prematurely born: “Just look at him! He is pint-sized!” Like the fact that, regardless of what he wrote, whether in English or Bengali, whether stories of scripts, Bijoya was always the first to read them.
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Bijoya’s accounts of Ray’s long struggles with his health and the circumstances surrounding his triple by-pass heart surgery in the US are particularly poignant. Ray never really fully recovered from that operation, and as he went through one serious crisis after another, her sense of helplessness deepened. One night, in early 1992, Bijoya discovered Manik couldn’t whistle any more. She knew it was the beginning of the end. Then he lost his speech, and came a time when he couldn’t recognise people any more, eating stopped completely, a ventilator was pressed into service, and the inveterate diary-keeper wrote no more. Only a laconic entry was made for 23 April 1992: “He is gone.” So laconic, indeed, that it comes through like a startled scream.
MANIK & I
My Life with Satyajit Ray
Bijoya Ray
Penguin Books
Pp 615; Rs 699