THE CHILD IS MOTHER OF THE MAN
After exploring female divinity in the film Devi, Satyajit Ray continued his exploration of the female experience with Teen Kanya. An anthology of three short films based on three unrelated stories by Rabindranath Tagore, it is an eclectic bunch of stories all connected by remarkable women.
The first of the films, Postmaster, is about a young and newly-appointed postmaster in a quaint village and how he comes to depend upon a little girl to make it through his posting.
A Room Of One’s Own
Nanda is a typically self-insufficient young urban man. He has likely never lived on his own, not even in Calcutta, and cannot carry out basic tasks like sweeping his room clean. Luckily for him, his quarters (a hut) comes with a staff of one – a young girl of barely ten years called Ratan. She lives alone behind the hut and does the cleaning, cooking, and overall care-taking of the Postmaster’s lodgings.
From the first day itself her responsibility stretches to include the care of Nanda, when she has to step in and rescue him from a mad-man. Nanda is frozen with fear when he encounters this man, but Ratan is unafraid. She knows he is harmless even if he behaves erratically.
As it turns out Ratan is an orphan and lives alone, something that is quite unthinkable for us in present times. Nanda on the other hand is so coddled that even as a healthy and employed young man he depends on his family to take care of him. This is revealed through his mother’s letters to him and also his constant incapacity to do much at all for himself. He only know knows how to work at the post office, which is frankly rather repetitive work and not challenging in any manner.
Ratan, on the other hand, can cook, draw and carry buckets of well-water, and still has energy left over to learn reading and writing from Nanda. Her tasks require much greater strength and skills than anything Nanda is up for.
The crucial phase in their relationship, at least for her, comes when Nanda is struck with malaria and needs the constant care of this child to recover. Stranded away from his family, he is tenderly cared for by someone less than half his age. Like in Devi, here too the child is Mother to the grown man.
Nanda is actually a rather unremarkable man. He is envied by everyone in the village because he comes from Calcutta and they infer he must be much more cultured and educated than them and used to carrying out big tasks. In truth he demonstrated very little curiosity about the world, learns nothing new from all the eager people surrounding him, and is happy enough to disregard this entire phase in his life as nothing but an inconvenience.
What, then, is his claim to being a grown, responsible adult? Is that just a matter of getting a job and paying some bills? When faced with the most minor inconveniences he seems to want to skirt around them rather than to face them head-on. This could possibly be because of a combination of privileges in him – he is male, educated, city-bred, upper caste. Each of these gives him a cushion against the trials of real life. To remain a child for so long requires a long list of privileges.
On the other hand, Ratan has nothing to shield her from the world. Growing up as an orphan girl-child, uneducated, villager, she has nothing but obstacles in her path (not a dissimilar situation to Durga). No matter how sweetly she sings, nobody will applaud her. She has been thrust into the deep end of life and has taught herself to swim. It’s very rare that she reveals the child behind the fortitude, but when we catch a glimpse we can see how much different she is from any typical child of her age. She has been put through the wringer and has come out at least thirty years older than her actual age.
How much easier life is for some over others. By being born in the city, the chances for Nanda to have at least one parent live up to old age is quite high. On the other hand Ratan has lost both her parents while she is still in pigtails. Nanda stamps a few envelopes every day and counts the money, and for this he gets a salary and a quarters. Ratan not only looks after herself and Nanda, she is also dragged into doing errands for others in the village. For all her efforts she unlikely gets any payment except occasional tips. Nanda is admired by society and invited to participate in musical evenings. Ratan likes to sing but is never taken along to those gatherings. Nanda has a family and can exchange letters with them. Even if Ratan could read or write she would have no one to communicate with.
Such a difference there is between the child and the adult – so much so that we can hardly tell which is which.
It Takes A Village
Like Ratan is the child who behaves like an adult, Bishu Pagla is the adult who behaves like a child, or sometimes a dog, and occasionally a soldier. They both seem not to mind each other.
There’s a lot in common between them, unlike what at first meets the eye. They are both without guardians, alone but also free (one is freer than the other). Neither is safe on their own in the world and yet they are thrust out into it every day.
The thing about society, any society, is that it is supposed to be a network of dependability. When we say humans are social animals it means that we thrive in social units, like families and communities, and not solo. It gives us safety in numbers, food and protection from the wild when we’re sick, and the strength to achieve in numbers what we cannot do alone.
Yet, every single day human society fails in its mission to help the helpless. Whether it is by leaving people out of economic well-being, or by abandoning old and handicapped people from the mainstream, or even abandoning a child and a mad-man to fend for themselves.
Compared to them somebody like Nanda, fully fit and capable, is offered so much help and company that he never has to grapple with any form of disenfranchisement. He is so used to being protected that the mere sight of Bishu is enough to send him into a faint. It’s tragic that the one who he is afraid of is the one who needs protection.
Even if we leave alone the man who scares him, when Nanda takes his chance to leave the village he cannot even momentarily entertain the thought that it is in his capacity to do something transformative for Ratan. That child came to depend on him for his studies, he could offer to pay for a school education. Or he could find a way to become her guardian and send her to a boarding-school. Or even just take her back home as a ward and helper, give her room to stay with his family and set her on a path to empowerment at par with his own sister.
[Just to be clear, these suggestions are based on her given condition and the time period of the story. There is nothing generous about child labour, and in present times the solutions would have to be different.]
Every day we see so many children and people with physical and mental disabilities begging on the streets and each one of them could have the same story as Ratan or Bishu. While the enormous scale of these problems is difficult for any of us to grapple with or significantly impact, if we can meaningfully engage with one person’s well-being our actions can make all the difference.
There’s a story about a child who sees hundreds of beached starfishes and starts picking them up one-by-one and returning them to the water. When asked why she was attempting such a vast task where she could hardly hope to make a difference, she replies, “It makes a difference to the ones I can help.”
Ratan (whose name means jewel) and Bishu are among millions of such starfish around us. Can we be like that child and try making a difference in even one of their lives?