Structure of stone For Padmini
The sweet dew of the morning summer rain with bitter tears mourned the glowing sensations of the beauty of the peaceful town of Barich, where the nameless tax collector arrived, the beauty of the surrounding nature, filled with the aroma of herbs and gentle murmur of river water, transparent as a mirror and icy as crystal, beauty, which will soon be replaced by routine, ordinaryity, habituality. But it is not this elusive beauty of the world around him that attracts him, but the abandoned palace of Mahmoud II. In its bizarre architecture, the obvious sensations of a particular era are erased; it is as if from a different reality, a different space, the product of a foreign imagination, inviting and fascinating, changing people around and changing itself. A palace, a long stay in which for the servant of the material spheres and the fervent materialist will turn into an eternal sleep, the awakening from which will be inexorably tragic, since it will be an awakening from reality itself - too prosaic to be worthy of even a reminder.
Tell me what your home is and I'll tell you who you really are. Any human habitation, its materialized shelter, its fortress, where one can remain hoc est quod, is akin to a mirror reflection of the human soul, thoughts, emotions, experiences, that becomes one of the measures of the human in man himself, for at home one does not pretend or indulge anyone. It's just your personal space, which is restricted by definition. Invading a house without an invitation is perhaps the most important and dangerous violation of the rules of universal existence and the inviolable balance of things, without which there can be no harmony. But what if the house itself calls the suffering? What if behind this exquisite architecture, the inventive structure of every stone, behind these eye sockets of windows decorated with carvings, there is a frantic desire to tell your story and hear someone else’s, looking into the soul of someone whose name is irrelevant?
And the nameless hero enters these enchanted palaces, succumbs to this call from the depths of centuries, and the ghosts of this ancient palace rose from oblivion double, become his personal ghosts, dancing Kathak in the dim glow of kerosene lamps. And here he is again forced to look for her, blinded by the beauty of her features, the fragility of her camp, the ringing crystal overflows of her laughter, the brilliance of emerald eyes, in which the whole world is reflected, and one, lonely and thirsty, his soul.
The house is like a living organism. This is exactly what Mahmud’s palace is at first from the 1960 film The Hunger Stones, shot by the Bengali master of great cinematic style Tapan Sinha based on the story of the same name by Rabindranath Tagore. Sinha, the second poetic realist and humanist after Satyajit Ray of all Indian, and not only Bengali, cinema, skillfully dissected the extremely poetic fabric of a literary work into something unique, authentic and fascinating, located at the intersection of genres as such, but sometimes simply rejecting and rejecting them. The film language is a sparkling pure poetry of not words, but images, which by the end are summed up in a single philosophical monolith of the author’s vision of human and spiritual. The metatextuality and intertextuality inherent in Tagore were brought by Tapan Sinha to an even greater totality, to perfection both at the level of external form and internal content. Poetry is transformed into a philosophical reflection on the essence of human life and the subtle connection of things in this vain world. However, the director leaves the fuss, maya and routine out of sight. There is only a palace, a man and their stories. . .
Hunger Stones is not so much about the palace as it is about the people who once inhabited it. An empty house is a shell without a soul; an abandoned house is a soul left arbitrarily, tormented in its uselessness but not insignificance. Equally lonely is the collector of taxes, a person burdened with knowledge, but deprived or not finally acquired his shelter, family. His history and the history of Mahmud’s palace are one and the same – in their existence there was a certain breakdown, breakdown, fall. His mind, which requires reflection rather than the automatism of calculation, releases in the twilight confines of the ancient castle, where the Indian and Mughal cultures are intertwined, their visions of the world, all that he was afraid to say aloud, but secretly dreamed. And their meeting despite superstitions is almost a long-awaited reunion of two lovers who have not seen each other for a long time. Here at first there is distrust, even fear, undisguised and inexhaustible, but then there is dissolution. Dreams in the time of thunderstorms become salvation, and every new morning - torment and awakening. But what if the dream is really so beautiful and sweet, because there is She, his devi, which, alas, it is impossible to possess, how to conquer?!