My childhood and teenage years are rich with memories of theater, not merely of watching plays but of places like the wings and the greenroom, because many around me-members of the local community, family, and friends-were involved in different kinds of theater. So it is not a huge part, but, still, a very important part. SM: About 25 to 30 percent of the novel is rooted in a past that is personally real for me. KW: Where do fiction, history, and biography meet in The Firebird? Not just her actual moments in “false” roles but the lives carved around those moments: dressing up and leaving in the evenings for rehearsals and performances, home and family left behind, walking out beautiful and fragrant into the dusk, evoking the unspeakable. Is it, or is it not, he wonders, wrong of his mother to play someone else’s wife on stage? So this “childish” attitude is also a kind of microcosm of society’s attitude towards women in theater. But around him he sees a society that consciously nurtures this confusion, especially when it comes to women in performance. But this confusion is sustained, almost willfully, even when the child is older, old enough to understand the literal difference between life and art. The Firebird is rooted in this blurred zone between art and life that belongs to the child. I think it is a big part of growing up, the realization there is something beyond literal truth, and that it can even be, oddly, more beautiful than truth, and sometimes more dangerous. But when do children come to realize that art is, literally speaking, “false,” or crafted, but not quite a lie, either? This is the moment the child simultaneously moves beyond the simple binary of true and false, and the morality of this binary. Their literal faith in stories deepens the haunting power of fiction, whether expressed in oral storytelling, visual art, or, as in the case of this novel, live theater. Saikat Majumdar (SM): What intrigued me while writing this story was the relationship between art and childhood, how art comes across as doubly powerful to small children because they do not think of it as “crafted” or false in any sense. Needed to be seen through the eyes of a child? Keri Walsh (KW): How did you decide that the story you tell in The Firebird Sketch of iconic actress Binodini Dasi by filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
Majumdar’s latest novel, The Firebird (2015), set in the Communist-ruled city of the 1980s, tells the story of the vanishing world of Bengali popular theater, as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Ori and his actress mother, Garima.
Gifted with a narrative voice that brings the city to life in all its bittersweet complexities, and always with what might be termed a tragic affection, Majumdar is an empathetic storyteller who seems particularly drawn to the stories of women seeking to carve out creative lives against great odds. In Silverfish (2007), he presented the interlaced stories of two Calcuttans: Kamal, a young girl married into a family of feudal aristocrats in the late 19th century and widowed soon after, and a retired teacher in 1980s Calcutta named Milan, who comes into possession of a manuscript written by Kamal. He has been especially drawn to those voices, people, places, and popular cultures that are lost-or in danger of being lost-to official histories, political interests, or, sometimes, simply to the fortunes of time. Saikat Majumdar is the author of two novels that explore connections between the history and the present of Calcutta.
#ABSTRUCTION BOOK BY SATYAJIT RAY SKIN#
She was a playhouse with silver-streaked hair and skin beginning to wrinkle. That was the world that had made and nourished her. She reminded Ori of the dark theatres that were breaking off in flakes of plaster and cement, crumbling into dust.
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