SUDDENLY, ONE DAY
EK DIN ACHANAK
India
1989
105 Min
Color
Hindi
PROD N.F.D.C.
SCR Ramapada Chowdhury, Mrinal Sen
DP K.K. Mahajan
CAST Shriram Lagoo, Shabana Azmi, Uttara Baokar, Aparna Sen,Rupa Ganguly
MUSIC Jyotishka Dasgupta
Imagine, one fine day, the man of the house steps out in the evening saying that he would return in some time. He doesn’t tell his wife where he is going but tells her he will return soon. This man never comes back. He is neither reported dead nor there is any information about his location. He simply disappears from the face of this planet. Just thinking about this idea is devastating for someone who has lived in a family.
Mrinal Sen revisits this concept of a person not returning home after addressing it in a previous Bengali film. That film takes place over one night though and the conclusion as well as the ideas that it seeks to evoke are much different from this one. It is hence quite commendable that Sen could use a similar storyline and evoke some deeply affecting ideas by simply changing the missing family member.
After the old man’s disappearance, his family has various recollections and each one draws a certain conclusion about his behavior. The son feels his father was callous and that he didn’t care a hoot about what happened to his family. The younger sister remembers her father as an egotist. The elder sister feels her father tried to hide his ordinariness under a facade of egotism and that he eventually succumbed to it. His wife fears he had an affair with one of his students. These ideas appear to be supported by the memories of the family that we get to see in flashbacks. He seems to have been a person too much involved in his academic pursuits to pay much attention to his family. He has a turbulent relation with his son and feels ashamed that he couldn’t even graduate. His relation with the elder daughter is perhaps the only cordial one in which he happens to share some of his deep thoughts with her. In a telling scene he recounts to her his regret: “Everyone judges a person by how he succeeds in life; There is no value to dedication”. There is another scene where the old man’s student shows him criticism of his article in a journal in which he is accused of plagiarism and dabbling. Even she suggests that perhaps he was a bit careless. The old man gets riled up by the accusations but he has no answer to the critics.
The family members suspect that all these circumstances were behind the old man’s disappearance. In the final scene, after an year has passed since the man’s disappearance, we see each of the family members recounting their feelings about the old man. The wife reveals something he had said the night previous to his disappearance : " The only regret I have is that we live only once".
This film raises some strong questions about the mental tribulations of an intellectual and his desire to be recognized. These questions resonate strongly with me for some reason as I probably have similar doubts as the main character. The fear of being ordinary for an intellectual in this fiercely competitive world is a real one. In this particular case, it results in his literal disappearance from the world but I am sure there are thousands out there who virtually disappear from society by going into their shell. Life remains nothing more than a baggage of regrets in such a case.
