‘Never understood romantic notions of addiction in artists’

He was always surrounded by friends though the nature of the circle changed over time In the early days they were all fellow travellers equals with similar views similar ambitions similar trajectories Many from that group drifted away over the years for various reasons Tapas Sen was the only one who stayed close all through my fatherrsquos life Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Salil Chowdhury moved to Bombay and became part of the commercial film world Though every time they met my father which was no longer very often I could still see a spark of the old camaraderieWhenever Salilkaka came home he and my father would ask each other about common friends from the IPTA days Sometimes Salilkaka would sing songs from their activist past But it was also clear that they lived in different worlds now that the only common thread was the nostalgia for their time together when they shared the dreams of a revolutionary futureMrinal Sen and Satyajit RayMy father would sometimes stay with Hrishikaka in Bombay Once when I was four or five my father took Ma and me to Bombay and we all stayed at Hrishikakarsquos Andheri home Later Hrishikakarsquos son became a good friend of mine through a shared interest in electronics and Irsquove stayed quite a few times at their beautiful seafacing bungalow in Bandra However my father and Hrishikaka were making different kinds of films and slowly it was but inevitable that their intellectual lives would drift far apartRitwikkaka stayed in Calcutta and though he and my father were both trying to make films with the same objective another force was pulling them apartmdashRitwikkakarsquos severe alcoholism I donrsquot recall ever seeing him sober No one in my immediate surroundings drank Therefore as a child I was both curious and afraid of drunkenness Whenever he came to our house he would be senselessly drunk and abusive often accompanied by people who could hardly stand straight I donrsquot recall a day when he and my father had a normal conversation During my highschool and early college days on numerous occasions local boys would knock on our door and report that theyrsquod found Ritwikkaka lying drunk somewhere It was then my job to organize a rickshaw to take him home I was afraid of him if he visited us when my father was not home he would engage in incoherent and dismissive conversations about my education Unfortunately Ritwikkaka and my father who could have had the most meaningful conversations never did so in their later years They occasionally met there were casual exchanges of information but those lacked any kind of depth The constant veil of an alcoholinduced haze made impossible any meaningful communicationKunal Sen and his wife Nisha RuparelSen with actor Shabana Azmi during the shooting of Khandhar PICSUBHASH NANDYIn the winter of 1976 after many such incidents Ritwikkaka was admitted to the hospital for what would be the last time My father was beside him when he died His wife Surama taught in a school far away trying to protect her three children from the chaotic life he had created All of them came to Calcutta and stayed with us until things settled down It was as if we were one big family What his addiction took away it tried to return on his death When my mother died I found a tattered letter addressed to her from Surama Ghatak in which shersquod written about the deep bond between the two families My mother for some reason saved the letter in her handbag I will never understand why we have such romantic notions about extreme addiction among artistsIt is nothing but a disease that destroys families destroys integrity and ultimately destroys humanity Even though his earliest circle dissipated over time my father continued to surround himself with friends My earliest memories are from the early sixties when we lived in a tiny tworoom groundfloor flat on Manoharpukur Road The living room was small almost entirely occupied by a sofa bed and a few low cane stools or moras And by visitors who came to my father throughout the day friends as well as coworkers from his latest production The friend circle in those days comprised people connected with the filmsociety movement writers family friends and artists As far as I remember the topics of their conversation spanned cinema politics literature and everyday banter My father wasnrsquot that successful yet so there were no fans or admirersThat changed after his success in the late sixties and early seventies I was older by then and since that small living room was also where I was supposed to study I became a silent participant in those conversations There was a growing group of visitors who admired his work Some were genuine wellwishers but an increasing number hoped to benefit from the alliance or simply enjoyed belonging to a polarized camp I am not sure my father could distinguish these factions as easily as I can today in hindsightPraise can be a potent tool to blunt onersquos ability to judge the real intent of people Bengalis have a strange propensity to split any position into two opposite camps Be it the support for a football team or the way a particular dish should be cooked or how a song should be sung we indulge in strictly binary choices If you belong to one side you must oppose the other with all fury The same thing happened then people would champion my father while being unnecessarily critical of Satyajit Ray with the reverse happening in Rayrsquos circle A few people had access to both households and they carried the conversations from one living room to another They enjoyed the reactions they provoked I think both Ray and my father were very respectful of each other but this poisonous atmosphere did stain their thinking Such is the power of sycophancyExcerpted with permission from Bondhu My Father My Friend by Kunal Sen published by Seagull Books