Lopamudra Banerjee
Motionless, she lay, her crushed visage, the swollen flesh and cartilage of her nose adorned with cotton balls, blocking the air that she will never again inhale. The air of her moist, trampled desires, the putrid air of falsehood and her fallacies that she has inhaled many times over, spilling herself over the cold, relentless roads of a tinsel town.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
She had stood in its fringes, day after day, picking up her shards, serving those bits and pieces piping hot, sweet and tangy, till the vain tinsel town became a shrine, housing her triumphs, the blood and phlegm of her anguish, her dark silhouette in the powdered nights.
She knew all the cycles of mad mirth, the full moon, the foliage, the harvest, the queer machinations and the oppressing nights of a shadowed celluloid world that had opened up to her in spurts, bit by bit, layer after layer in a hungry urge of surrendering, threadbare, demonic.
The tilt and sway of the nose, the fire burning in the pores of the skin, the soft, fleshy curve of the lips, the curves of the blossoming, ripening womanhood have sought an anchor, at times in the rustling manhood of her paramours, at times in the surgeon’s scalpel, at times in the silver screen that lapped up her tidal waves.
Sometimes, amid the daily rigmarole of mingled songs and make-believe romances, she gazed at the steady influx of starved, swooning onlookers taking in spoonful’s of her waves, mumbling about her twirling and swirling, their leftover desires, piled surreptitious at the shore. The roles she enacted, pretty damsel, amnesia-stricken child-woman, the funny diva with startling histrionics, the docile lady and the feisty concubine, found their moorings in their masked morality. She thrived one pinch of the colour earth, one tinge of their drowned sorrow, one splash of their juvenile Holi. There was a time to embrace it all; there was a time to sever it all – the arc lights and the frenzied bytes of the camera had taught her all.
“One smile of her, worth ten lakhs.” Some said.
“The twinkle in her eyes. Worth twenty.” Others jeered.
“One slanting move of her waist, the ethereal song of the moon-woman, worth a million!” Others joined in the jubilant repartee.
The small screen, a household jewel, hailed her song and dance sequences, a ‘camera obscura’ of her twinkling stars, the chaos of the world tamed in a narrative of surrendering.
The world ceased to exist, locked in the silver screen, feeding into the drip-drop of human fantasies. She walked the earth, a part of its dust and trails, revelling in its mortal exuberance.
Had she turned towards us, the voyeurs, or did she turn away? Or did she relish doing both in the same breath, turning towards the mad mirth of the onlookers and ready to look away, the melancholy of the moment in the twinkling eyes, in the parted lips bursting forth in melodies, in the pearls and kundan dangling from her ears?
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
An on-screen fling, where narcissism sang its own delightful symphony, the ‘solah sringaar’, where her bosom heaved, shivering in the fine art of sighing, panting in the throes of desire. A diva, flawed, yet persistent in the songs of her curves, a birdsong, a quivering evening raaga, the constraints of her mortal body threatening to curb her spirit. And yet, we see her floating with the clouds, flying with the birds, enraptured, oblivious. Love bloomed, broke open the shackles, soared and then plummeted in a downward spiral, resting on one shoulder to another…the grapevines churned the stories, wandering in print, her heart blazing, dancing in the precarious flames.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, how much of botox? How many nose-jobs, lip-jobs, how many surgeries, how much of cosmetic invasion? How many weight loss pills, how many beauty secrets, ripping off the layers, constructed, deconstructed?” The stares, the ogling, the voyeuristic delights resurfaced, fueled by remembered winds.
“How much of light in her, the pure, invincible light that flickers and blazes, glitters still?” Her light, her histrionics, now placed within the crests and rims of domesticity, a perfect closure to an odyssey of storms, bygone, winds of her juvenile wants, now buried, in the quicksand of time.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, what a perfect staged comeback!” A resurgence of the spring in her footsteps, the splash of colours around, the flickering lights of a ritual of pride and the strength of a ripened woman, uncaged, unbound, yet again.
The motherhood quotient, soft, yet unyielding, exploded in a maturing, pregnant cloudburst, refracted through the roles she enacted. The second innings served her well, isn’t it, as she fed the unsettled magma between her desires and the realities of the relentless showbiz? The girlie pangs, the summer smiles, the pastures of a young girl, all history now, taken over by the thriving surge of womanliness, jagged, yet whole, inexorable. Half a century, making love to the arc lights, half a century, burning in the flames of a star-stricken tinsel town.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose bloated body, whose crushed contours lay amid the herd of news-hungry mass, hanging in a limbo between disbelief and the eeriness of bare skeletons of truth?”
Or truth, is it, the dissecting of the gay abandon of the days and nights of a big fat wedding, away from home, the dissecting of the beaming moon fading away with unforeseen closures, the dissecting of simple, homely ‘surprises’ and the overwhelming baggage of truths, spilling over, like unwanted seeds? Truth, is it, the viral spreading of the bare details of an accident-prone evening, a fateful night in morphed images, sensationalised captions, concocted videos and debates, conjectures swelling like unwanted broth?
Motionless, she lay, the body was flown back from the alien shores, the body, bearing the remnants of all that had sustained, the remnants of all that had gone awry. Motionless, yet taking it all in a larger-than-life funeral, in a tinsel town where her world had crumbled and restored, restored and crumbled, cocooned in the spell of beautiful lies.
[A prose-poem was written in memory of a Bollywood Diva, my poetic tribute to a tragedy that had soon become fodder for a ruthless media.]
