Take one: Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore in Apur Sansar

Whenever a bunch of us film festivalgoers from college would train it to Kolkata for a fortnight-long splurge, it would be with a side-bar ambition of grabbing autographs from Satyajit Ray and his screen alter ego Soumitra Chatterjee.

They would be regulars at the Nandan complex, breaking for cigarettes in between shows. But none of us had the guts to approach either—least of all I, who was in awe of the tall and imposing master director and the equally formidable actor. Ray would look infallibly gloomy while Chatterjee would lighten up the scene with his playful gaze and what we used to call his ‘chameli’ smiles. Clearly, here were the yin and yang of unquestionably the best of Indian cinema.

That abiding smile—as well as those playful eyes—will always be the trademarks of yesterday’s dreamy-eyed actor who debuted as the emotionally-ravaged novelist of Ray’s Apur Sansar (1959), the concluding edition of the seminal Apu trilogy.

At long last, a couple of years ago, I was as nervous as an autumn leaf, with the prospect of coming face to face with Ray’s Apu, now an invincible thespian. The mission: an interview which had always been on my bucket-list. The venue was his stucco white bungalow in a winding lane of Kolkata’s Golf Green Urban Complex. Till he could build a home of his own, he had lived for years in one of Ray’s old, unoccupied apartments. Over the phone, he had warned, “Don’t be late, I have a jam-packed day, I’m in the midst of supervising a theatre production. And you know I’m not in the best of health… or mood nowadays.”

His grandson, actor Ronodeep Bose, had suffered a grave head injury in a motorbike accident at a bend of New Alipore, just a few months ago. Fortunately, the 26-year-old had come out of a coma, and was on the mend. I apologised for the intrusion, and that ray of smile reappeared as he said, “I hope this old man still has something interesting to say about cinema. I’m more inclined towards dabbling in painting and writing poetry nowadays. Acting… how should I say it?... has become clockwork. I just act for friends I can’t say no to.”

Soumitra—the name means a friend, alluding to Lord Rama’s brother Lakshmanwas an indefatigable film and stage actor, who had constantly underscored his lifelong debt to Ray. Theirs was a collaboration encompassing 14 feature films—including the widely-adored detective adventures Sonar Kella (1971) and Joi Baba Felunath (1979)—and two documentaries. Although he was saluted with a Padma Bhushan and a Dadasaheb Phalke Award, he told me that he had mixed feelings about such honours. “I did feel extremely humiliated,” he recounted, “on being given a Special Jury National Award for Goutam Ghose’s Dekha (2001) and conveyed my no-thank-you politely. Juries should give special awards to their friends and relatives, not actors.”

He could be acerbic, outspoken and yet realistic. In the course of our interview I brought up Uttam Kumar, who commanded the vote of the masses, while Chatterjee was the mandarins’ choice, the arthouse darling. To that his spontaneous response was that Uttam Kumar had a charismatic screen presence, a patented style. In the 1960s, he pointed out that Uttam, Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar were all fine actors… but Dilip Kumar was the strongest of them all. “As for myself, that’s for you guys to tell me,” he had shrugged. “All I can say is that I was a risk-taker. The way I looked, the wardrobe I was given, all those frills never mattered to me.”

Unlike most Bengali actors, Soumitra Chatterjee, who passed away yesterday at age 85, didn’t ever think of going Bollywood. It wasn’t because he wasn’t fluent in Hindi. It was because he didn’t wish to play “second fiddle”. Three of the projects he had rejected were Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964), the Dilip Kumar-toplined Aadmi (1968) and Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug (1981). Those roles eventually went to Rajendra Kumar, Manoj Kumar and Raj Babbar respectively.

Our conversation on a welter of topics had stretched on for three hours. At the end of which he wore his spectacles and asked, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” It was at the film festivals in Kolkata, I said, we fans always wanted to come up to him and ask for an autograph. To that he had laughed and signed my note-pad with the line, “Better late than never.” At that moment I once again turned into a college boy and requested, “May I have a selfie too, sir?” And that smile flashed once again, and always will for us.