So who is Maya Barton?
- Jan 24
- 10 min read
Let your imagination move into unknown and mysterious terrains, like old-fashioned, unexpressed love, played out with old-fashioned jazz music, or blues, pulsating as slow music.
By Amit Sengupta
So who is Maya Barton of Bombay, riding a bicycle, at the end of the 19th century in colonial India?
Great filmmaker, writer, artist, Satyajit Ray had an instinctive premonition about the script, screenplay and set design. He lived, absorbed and assimilated cinema inside his kaleidoscopic mind. The cinematic language and visual was born and reborn in this mind-landscape, across the borders of time and space, and beyond.
Sometimes in the spaces, between the words and sentences, in the unstated sense and the sensibilities of the story, unfolded new stories; stories within stories; pausing only to compel the reader to go back.
In search for what?
This search is at once organic and obsessive. It’s like the addiction of compulsive nostalgia while time has refused to pass, that all that is ephemeral is slowly becoming permanent, melting from liquid to solid, water to ice, darkness to early morning winter daylight.
The shadows pass. New shadows arrive, only to inevitably go away. Rain comes and goes, drenching the flowers and the leaves, and the inner insides of the parched body and soul.
It leaves a delicious, unexpressed fragrance in the earth, soaked and satisfied; also, an unrequited, restless longing, and its seductive moistness, in hidden substances, skin and feelings, old shirts and old sweaters, fragrances, felt, forlorn, forsaken.
You can see the steam engine in close distance. Like a friendly giant rolling in from the horizon. Two kids, white, flowing kash flowers just before Durga Puja on the river shore, in a sublime Shonar Bangla of a pristine, untouched village landscape, where a little brother and his elder sister, born in stark poverty, can hear the iron hum on the railway tracks, ears pressed to the cold humming, like scientists discovering a sudden invention.
It’s all in the mind, Ray’s mind-canvas, brought to reality, sketch by sketch, script becoming the silence of sound, the stillness in a room and it’s still objects, all carrying meaning, perhaps a half-burnt cigarette, the ash has still not fallen, the smoke moving in a spiral, the seductive smell of tobacco filling the atmospherics in the room.
Ray would draw the sketch, but only after he had imagined it in microscopic detail, in synthesis with the script and screenplay, mostly, often daring to deviate and take the risk, which only a genius would dare to do. His script hence is already cinema, rough draft edited, sketched meticulously, scene after scene.
Pather Panchali did not have a script. The first drawings emerged as Ray travelled from London in a ship in 1960.
Like another great, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s scattered, meticulous notes on the side of a sheet of a paper – the drafting of the script.
Soon, the actors and the crew, all brilliant, original and humble men and women, would come by, many actors first-timers, untrained in any theatre or film school, like all the actors in Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film, the first world classic in the trilogy, adapted from Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhaya’s famous trilogy.
The film is in the mind, and the inner insides of the soul. It’s both a thought and a feeling. An emotion deeply felt. A thought, becoming other thoughts, growing into a story.
And a book of literature is different, is it? Is it really?
If you read Anuradha Kumar’s Love and Crime in the Time of Plague, in The Bombay Mystery series, located in Bombay 1896, you could sense how Ray would conceive one cinematic moment after another, the narrative and the plot unfolding in the imagined and real homeland of Maya Barton.
Every sentence and paragraph, every instinctive revelation and carefully crafted thought, about to be spoken, or half-spoken, or unspoken; every mystery and its mysterious unfolding, every sketch drawn on thin, old, old paper; every bird, rare, unseen in this land, sketched meticulously like a work of art, like a sculpture finely chiseled with its curves and curls; every sound of the street, the swish of the cycle paddle, the tinkle of the cycle bell, the smell of the sea floating in the wind, the quick, fleeting, pleasing touch of the salty sea-wind on the lips and on eye-lashes, the happy sounds in the distance, familiar sights and smells, whispers and unfinished sentences, the hustle and bustle of everyday live – all is cinema in this mystery book.
If you have read the literary classics, the murder mysteries of PD James, this book reminds you of this great inheritance. In James, it is a sensitive, ethical, intelligent and restrained, detective, well-known poet Adam Dalgliesh of the Scotland Yard, a man of few words. He is the protagonist who lives in a solitary flat overlooking the Thames in London; in Anuradha Kumar’s Bombay mysteries, it is Maya Barton. Instinctively intelligent, dignified, deep. Confident, unafraid, trusted. Explorer of unsolved mysteries. And we are still discovering her.
Your imagination is tested, sharpened, challenged by the author. And by Maya. You just can’t escape the slow motion of this imagined, transparent, manifest and hidden text, unfolding scene after scene, often with little connect, but always in a familiar backdrop – text as visual and dream, literature as cinema.
The cinema of Bombay, 1896, as detective fiction.
The past, as a lingering, dream sequence.
The past as a forever reality, its diabolical shadows still looming in contemporary India.
Both love and plague as metaphor. And realism.
Plague -- apparent and transparent. And, yet, unacceptable to the conformist status quo, who simply want to hide, hide, hide -- all reality.
Postpone the present.
Hide the past.
All future is predetermined.
Don’t see.
Don’t doubt.
Don’t wonder. Don’t wander.
Don’t ever dare to explore. Or, discover the bitter truth.
Love.
Love too as a metaphor.
Again, unstated and nuanced.
Unspoken.
A glance exchanged -- quickly. A word spoken, and, yet, camouflaged by the unspoken.
A gesture. A look. Deep, fleeting, look.
A touch -- gentle. Softened, by the originality of trusted friendship.
Love in a train journey. The window as cinema.
Love in a lecture hall, during a talk on birds, or a miscellaneous subject – plague as a catastrophe lingering as backdrop.
Love in quickly exchanged notes in the midst of a lecture. Writing is believing.
Love as hallucination. He sees her at midnight in a cycle, on the dark streets of Bombay; it was she, he says.
Mary Barton on her cycle, she loves the cycle he got for her from America, the wind touching her hair and face, she, inhaling the sea-tide wind and the strong smell coming from the fishermen’s wharf, observing every detail which she crosses, the cops, the coconut-seller, the holy cow.
Dreaming of her ‘cycle club’ for her girl students in a school, which, like the hospital her friend Dr Charlotte works in, is an eyesore and object of hate and derision for the orthodox Hindu (Hindutva of those days -- fanatic, illiterate, dogmatic, full of hate and bile, anti-modern, anti-woman, anti-education and enlightenment, anti-poor and anti-worker).
They just want to shut down the hospital, full of patients, ailing and suffering, where Charlotte and others are facing the perils of pain, tired but stoic dogged in their relentless commitment.
They also want to shut down the school – how can girls go out to study? Not done.
Hence, the threatening notes, written in wrong English, in a familiar notepad spotted casually by Maya in a newspaper office, for whom she writes. Bad English, badly constructed sentences, fake and real threats. Warning is spelt as ‘worming’, etc. The notes spread. Reach their homes. Placed in the nook and corners of the hospital. Arrives as a letter to the editor.
Sender: The Native Society. Anonymous. Invisible. Unknown.
In their warped, shallow, hate-filled fanatic minds, warning is worming. Like worms, and pests, they flourished even in 1896, so much so, they hate cycles, and more so, a woman riding a cycle as a public spectacle.
So who is Maya Barton, with her ancient sketches on thin, old, fragile paper, looking for the mysterious artist, searching for ancient routes and rare birds, and travellers of old times, who travelled across India and Afghanistan and Kashmir and the Arabia and Africa?
What is she looking for in the past which links to the unfolding of a Bombay Mystery in real-time city, still in the making?
Who is her mother?
Is Reverend Barton her father?
Was her mother a Kashmiri, the oblique reference point of curious looks directed at her?
Did her father, if yes, love her – he never showed it tangibly, but, yes, he gave her freedom as a kid, spotted her insatiable curiosity for distant stories from distant lands, allowed her to sit among adults, mostly men, many of them scholars, to listen to stories and complex discourses; sometimes she would hide behind the curtain to listen, as the governess, Ayah, who nourished her during her childhood, looked for her. So the reverend would discover her hiding place, and smile, and tell her to stay put, no worries.
With all his books, rare magazines and solemn, affectionate, distant countenance, was he really her father?
Is she a half-caste, as was the term used then, derogatorily?
So she runs away with a theatre company. And since then, she has never ever returned to Firozpur where she was born and brought up. She has no clue about her mother or father. Perhaps, this inherited vulnerability makes her innately stronger. And deeply sensitive to her surroundings.
In her mind, her mother looms, was she a Kashmiri, where did she disappear, and why?
And she would pick up paper and pen, wanting to write to the reverend, but ended up, crumpling the blank sheet, always in a dilemma. Did he know, or anticipate, that she would run away and never return to him, to her childhood hometown.
Who is she?
Maya Barton is a beautiful, brilliant, brave and deeply sensitive woman. She rides a cycle, which the cops, for no rhyme or reason, eventually confiscate. She misses her cycle.
She misses the wind in her hair, and the smell of the floating sea wind. She creates an underground network of secret messengers with her girl students. She is enlightened, progressive, liberal, modern and unafraid.
And she is now thinking of those threatening notes, in wrong English, anticipating the worst, in a poverty-stricken and polarizing backdrop, where hate-mongers are on the loose, often in disguise, and where child marriage is fanatically backed by male morons who want to crush, oppress and suffocate young girls and women, and turn them into domestic slaves behind the iron curtain. However, the point is, the school girls have already tasted freedom and the adventures of knowledge, and they are in no mood to go back into that rat trap. Maya is their mentor and buddy.
So what happens?
Why does the Native Society attack someone? What are the dangers lurking in the shadows? Who is Bhau the hunter who lives in an obscure house in the forest, and why are those paper sheets, hand-made with such precision and hard labour, so precious, like a sacred relic? What are those pamphlets doing in this reclusive house from where he routinely disappears into the unknown?
Is there a murder?
Who is the mysterious cyclist who disappears into a by-lane in the night?
What happens to their unstated love and friendship? Sometimes, Maya just cannot take her mind away from him, while Charlotte tells her, laughing, have you not noticed it -- he is besotted with you.
He is the American trade counsel who wants cycles and electric fans in Bombay. And no one wants them!
Well, as a reviewer, I will not tell you more than this. Like an authentic film critic, who can lead you on, but never really tell you the plot, let this Bombay Mystery, be unfolded in the pages of the book which you must read.
Yes, Must Read.
My only suggestion: read it slow. Slow. Very slow.
Go back to the pages you have read already. Linger on the images and instincts of the sublime, cinematic text. Let your imagination fly.
Pause, sip a cup of black coffee or hot, steaming, brewed tea, or the typical Indian street-side, extra-boiled, extra-sugary sweet, extra-milky tea, and reach out to the characters in the mystery plot, all of them etched like in Satyajit Ray’s sketch book. Made for the final celluloid immortality on the big screen.
I tell you, this book by Anuradha Kumar, should become a movie, with Maya Barton as protagonist and lead. Love and Crime in the Time of Plague deserves its discerning audience, and, indeed, the Big Screen in a popular cinema hall, across the cities and towns of the world. Including in India.
Till then, pick it up please. Or, order the paperback edition online. And let your imagination move into unknown terrains, like old-fashioned, unexpressed love, played out with old-fashioned jazz music, or blues, pulsating as slow music.
Love and Crime in the Time of Plague: A Bombay Mystery
By Anuradha Kumar
Speaking Tiger
Rs 499
Pg: 288
Cover illustration by Apoorva Lalit
Cover design by
Maithili Doshi Aphale
Also see, It takes a murder…
Anuradha Kumar in converstion with Amit Sengupta, Editor, independentink.in
Anuradha (Anu) Kumar is a writer and novelist. She most recently wrote, ‘The Kidnapping of Mark Twain,’ first of the Bombay Mystery series, a crime-historical fiction, and the non-fictional work, Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries: Early Americans in India, 1700-1950, ‘both published by Speaking Tiger Books. She lives in New Jersey with her family and is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program in Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Catamaran Literary Reader, the Common, the Maine Review, the Chicago Quarterly Review, Numéro Cinq, Past Ten, and elsewhere. She writes regularly for Scroll.in, an Indian digital magazine. Her books include One Man Many Lives: Bhagwan Singh and the Early South Asians in America (Simon and Schuster India and Yoda Press); The Hottest Summer in Years (Yoda Press), and a book for younger readers, Her Name is Freedom: 35 women who fought for India’s Independence (Hachette India).