The Rejected

I saw Kharij in a grubby, crumbling movie theatre near Sealdah station. It had discoloured corduroy seat covers with yellow foam poking out from numerous holes like adipose tissue and a projector running the movie in such dim light as if I was watching the movie wearing sunglasses. ’The near empty hall was a testimony to the fact that the movie, based on a Ramapada Chowdhury novel which came out a few years earlier in one of the puja editions of Desh or Anandabazar, was unlikely to give the two pennies worth of entertainment to the general public.  Furthermore, Mrinal Sen the auteur was an always uncompromising and frequently blatantly disdainful artist with his non-conformist leftist views on society, more often than not rather explicit in his depiction of those views in celluloid; which in turn made people very uncomfortable. 

The story had a simple premise. In an unusually cold winter morning in Kolkata, Anjan (Anjan Dutta) and Mamata (Mamata Shankar), a middle class couple find their eleven year old child-servant dead in a locked kitchen, apparently from carbon monoxide poisoning, by trying to keep warm from a open wood fire oven. What follows this tragedy is a masterful examination of the middle class emotive process in a crisis - guilt to self preservation and finally fearing retribution from the boys father who had left the boy to be looked after by the couple as their 'own'. The final scene of the movie is a masterclass of understated filmmaking by Sen - a significant departure from his style. The boy's father, wonderfully portrayed by Debatosh Ghosh, looks at Anjan and though his eyes asks the question 'why did this happen?' But simply states, Babu, Jai (Sir, I'll be on my way). I've never ever seen a movie end with such a simple piece of dialogue with such a devastating effect. And for this reason, for all the Mrinal Sen films which with overt and covert socialist overtures, none can come close to Kharij in terms of the lasting effect it has on your senses. 

Recently,  a fifteen year old employed as a helping hand to my mother, spent the very first night away from home. We wanted her to sleep on the bed but she declined saying that she'd always slept on the floor. The next day when I asked her how her sleep was, she said she was cold. The kitchen in my parent's apartment was small with a minuscule hole as a window but the saving grace was there was no wood fire; only modern gas. 

The next day, I flew back home and hoped that the extra blanket given to her would be enough as Kharij had been on my mind. Few days later, I got a ring from my mother. The girl was homesick and had gone back to her village.