She loved being the king, says Q about Rituparno Ghosh

By Q (Editor’s note: After Rituparno Ghosh, the first filmmaker to have shaken up the status quo in the Bengali film industry and excited film lovers across the country and abroad is Q. So we asked him to write something in memory of Ghosh. This is what Q, best known for his film G**du , wrote for his ‘Rituda’. ) It was all quite Victorian really. Well-groomed, cautiously flamboyant, frequently poetic. And cruel at the heart of it all. She rose through the ranks, within the ashes of a broken civilization, bereft of ideas, and became king. Her subjects rose and fell at every sway of the magic wand. I was never one of them. [caption id=“attachment_831029” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh. AFP[/caption] One fantasy after the other she crafted. She understood women. Women said so. She knew how to brew the perfect blend of nostalgia and the right amount of truth, of which Bengali women do know a thing or two. But she always had something else. It was that secret ingredient that gave her what she wanted. The crown was hers to wear. I was a boy in her land, and my mother loved her. I will admit, I have dwelled upon that secret ingredient. Briefly. Cluelessly. Like a lot of other people. And given it up. People who ruled through a projected reality were never on top of my priority list. It was only much later, when I finally met her, a few moths ago, that she finally got me. Much had happened. I had been bitten by the bug, and she had revealed herself to her world. Her world was shaken. Hushed whispers had been heard through the length and breadth of Kolkata. The secret was out. She was funny and smart and never looked more beautiful. She smiled at me, the same smile that had beamed out of television screens and magazine covers and had left citizens confused and caught unaware. She spoke to me gently, waving her hand and carefully weighing her words. She told me a tale. “There was a land once, where a tall dark and handsome man ruled. His voice was golden and his English was perfect. Since his passing, wails of intense sorrow were heard time and again, for long years, till this moment. They are waiting for that prince, if you are tall, dark and you know what, and you find yourself in that land with its loud wails; all you need is good English. And you can rule.’ She did the unthinkable. There were traders who built systems and ran everything, and they were rough. She convinced the rough traders of the joy in aesthetics. She knew she had the magic. She told stories that people could find comforting. And people did. The rough traders rubbed their hands. She wove her wand. She loved being the king. She loved the past. She rued for the time when within the prisons of tradition, transgression was celebrated. She was besotted perhaps, with the beauty of that hazy ambiguity. When the high walls of morality hadn’t been raised this high. In her fantasies, she built that world over and over, shaping stories by rearranging emotions. Emotions were the pillars of her creation, fluidly holding aloft those period dreams. She was a story. A story she would have wanted to tell. Rituparno Ghosh passed away on May 30, 2013. She won’t be forgotten.