Eugene Datta is the author of the poetry collection Water & Wave (Redhawk, 2024) and the story collection The Color of Noon (Serving House Books, 2024). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in publications such as The Dalhousie Review, Main Street Rag, Mantis, Common Ground Review, Hamilton Stone Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Stiftung Laurenz-Haus fellowship, he has held residencies at Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, and Fundación Valparaíso. A native of Calcutta, he lives with his wife and two children in Aachen, Germany.

They said he was a movie star. And every time you saw him, you thought, Of course! How could he not be one? That height, those looks! He was six foot something, taller than everyone around him, and had the most handsome, perfectly chiseled face anyone had ever seen. Plus the clothes he wore—always stylish and well-fitting, and freshly ironed, as if he never wore anything twice before sending it to the dhobi. And the way he carried himself, the way he walked, and talked to people. The voice he had, and the smile. The way he smelled—it was so good, you wanted to stick to his side, or walk behind him as long as you could.

He had to have been in the movies!    

But did anyone ever see films in which he’d acted? Could anyone name a picture? That no one could, didn’t matter. Not to us, anyway. We were—how old were we then? Eleven, twelve? I was eleven, give or take a few months, and so were Andy and Mush (short for Mushtaq). Raju and Bapi were slightly older, twelve or thirteen, and Rustam and Bob were younger. To us, these seven kids—two Anglo-Indian (Andy and I), one Bihari (Mush), two Bengali (Raju and Bapi), one Parsi (Rustam) and one Chinese (Bob)—Sikandar Khan was…forget movie star, he was bigger. He was God! And we worshipped the man. He was different from everyone we knew, whether in the neighborhood or anywhere else. There was nothing about him that was ordinary, including his name. He was no one’s uncle, or chacha, or bhaia, or anything of that sort. He was simply Sikandar Khan. You called him either Mr. Khan or Khan-sahb, depending on who you were. Bob’s father, John Chung, who owned a shoe shop on Bentinck Street, called him Mr. Sikandar Khan—Hello, Mr. Sikandar Khan, he’d go.      

This was ’75 or ’76. And it wasn’t as if Sikandar Khan had just moved to our neighborhood. His family had been living there forever. Khan Furniture, which his father owned, was one of Janbazar’s oldest establishments. The family lived in a big old house on the corner where Temple Street met Chandni Chowk Street. And everybody knew them. Especially his father, who’d been one of the most prosperous businessmen in the area. I used to hear my dad and his friends, most of whom either owned small businesses or worked in them, mention the Khans in their conversations, although I never cared about exactly what they said. I wasn’t interested in their gossip. Until one day I heard Dad say to Mum, “Really sad what poor Mr. Khan (Sikandar Khan’s father) is going through. First his wife and now a son!” His voice was different. It didn’t have the usual tightness of envy when he talked about the Khans. Apparently, the man had just lost his older son. His wife had died less than a year ago.

None of my friends knew any of this. Except Mush, who also knew that the dead man’s younger brother, Sikandar Khan, who spent a lot of time in Bombay, would permanently move back to Calcutta. “Shut up!” Andy would bark. “Don’t pretend you know people you don’t.” Mush would stutter and stammer in protest, but would get shouted down by Andy and the rest of the gang, myself included.

Then I saw him one day. Sikandar Khan! He was walking down Madan Street. I was on my way back from school. I recognized him right away because I’d seen him before—not too many times, but often enough to know who he was. Although that was the first time I really noticed him. Because of all the stuff I’d heard about him and his family just a month or so ago. And Mush had mentioned him a few times since then, saying he was coming back from Bombay. “Hey, Mushy-Mush was right, man,” I said to Andy when I saw him that afternoon on Shaheed Minar Ground. It was a Saturday. Andy, Raju and I had gone there to play cricket with a bunch of other kids. “Sikandar Khan is back from Bombay!” I said. Raju said he’d seen him too. Later, we found out that Mush knew everything because his father, who had a tailoring shop on Bertram Street, knew the Khans. They’d been his clients for years.

That was how our fascination with the man had started, replacing all our old obsessions—cricket, kites, fish tanks. And it had also made us more interested in the movies. People said Sikander Khan had a great future in Bombay. And that, if he wasn’t forced to come back, because there was no one to look after his father and his business, he’d have gone far. We believed that without bothering to find out if it was true. We never asked questions. After all, didn’t he look just as good as Vinod Khanna? Or Shatrughan Sinha? “Far better, man,” Andy would say. “Look at him and look at them. Heaven and hell, man! They can’t hold a candle to him.”

None of us disagreed. We were star-struck. And what helped us stay that way was that, almost every day, at least one of us would spot him somewhere. Now that he was back for good, you ran into him all the time. The other thing that helped was gossip. The things people said about him, good or bad. Before Sikandar Khan came into the picture, I’d never paid attention to what the grown-ups talked about. My friends hadn’t either. But now we were hungry for stories. We pricked up our ears whenever there was a hint of gossip.

And it was everywhere. In that strange world of shops and homes, where businesses and families flowed into one another like muddy streams in the monsoon, everyone knew everyone else. Including the fruit sellers, who sat on the footpath, and the men who sold syrupy, red and green soft drinks on that bustling stretch of Madan Street. Gossip hummed like flies on the piles of mango and papaya. If you were in the right place at the right time, you heard all kinds of juicy details about people who lived and worked in the area—what they were up to, who was fleecing their customers, who was going around with whom, and so on. As for us, we had no interest in stories about other people. They all went in one ear and out the other. But the moment we heard anyone mention the name Sikandar Khan—or Khan-sahb, or just Khan—our inner tape recorders got switched on. Like that! It was automatic. We didn’t have to do anything ourselves. His name always pressed the right button in our heads.

Soon, each one of us had their own bag of Sikandar Khan stories. Some of which were similar, some not. Sometimes, each one had a different version of the same story. Like the one about the man’s affair with Salma. The widowed daughter of Mansoor Khairullah, another big businessman in our area. In Andy’s story, she’d eloped with Sikandar Khan, and had a child who was being raised by a distant aunt of hers somewhere in Gujarat. In Mush’s version, they were only good friends, because their families had known one another for years. Mine and Bapi’s were the most exciting of the lot. They were also quite similar, although we’d picked them up from different sources. I’d heard (from the son of one my father’s friends) that Salma had gone missing for months after her husband’s death. He’d died in a car accident. This was sometime in the late ’60s, when we were too young to know any of this. Sikandar Khan had already been living in Bombay. He’d arranged for Salma to go there on her own so that they could get married. Apparently, their families were against their wish to be together. Bapi said, “He’d come to Calcutta secretly to take her to Bombay by car.” I never found out where he’d heard the story, but it matched some of the details of mine: Salma had fled to Bombay to be with Sikandar Khan. But they never got married, and never had a child.

Even if only a small part of the story was true (although we believed a lot of it was), it was a huge thing. The Khairullahs were not just wealthy, they were also an educated lot. Salma, the only sister of four brothers, had graduated from Loreto College. And she was the prettiest woman anyone had seen in that part of town. Although I thought Christine Rogers was equally pretty. She taught at Loreto Dharamtala, and lived not far from where the Khans did on Temple Street. But anyway, Salma Khairullah was drop-dead gorgeous. “She’s as sharp as she’s pretty,” I’d heard Mum say about her once. All of that just made Sikandar Khan look larger than life to us. Who else could do such a thing in real life? It happened only in the movies!

But there were things we’d found out about him that we knew were true. Things about how kind and generous he was. Bob said Sikandar Khan bought all his shoes from his father’s shop, and paid for each pair even though his father hadn’t returned the money he’d borrowed from the man years ago. “Last year he gave my dad more money because business wasn’t good,” Bob said. We knew—again, thanks to Bob himself—that Mr. Chung hadn’t managed to pay Sikandar Khan back.

Meanwhile, our curiosity about the movies he might have acted in kept growing. Every now and then, someone would say they’d seen him in a new film. And that would make us go completely mad with excitement. We’d go see the film as soon as we could. Rustom and Bob couldn’t always come with us because they were younger, but the rest of us would no matter what. We’d cut school and sneak into a noon show at Elite, or Paradise, or wherever else the movie happened to be playing. Only to come back disappointed, and angry at whoever had spread the lie. But we never learned our lesson. Every time we heard a rumor like that, we thought, Maybe this time it’s true! If it is not, we won’t listen to such rubbish again.

The strangest thing of all was that we never managed to ask the man himself if he’d really acted in a film. Andy, the bravest among us, had tried to do it a couple of times, but backed down at the last minute. The aura of the man was too hypnotic—you just stood there staring at him, and got tongue-tied if you tried to speak. Even though he was right there in our midst, it seemed as if we were separated by an invisible distance, which we didn’t have the courage to cross.

+++

Life went on. Things happened around us, both good and bad. Raju, who went to St. Mary’s, made it to his school’s cricket team in ’78. He was an allrounder, but his bowling—man, the boy was quick!—was better than his batting. Thanks to his performance, St. Mary’s, which never had a good team, went quite far in the summer school cricket tournament two years in a row—’78 and ’79. And in both seasons, Raju’s name appeared in the papers. Unbelievable! One of our names in the papers? Who would have thought it was possible? The first year he took 7 wickets in a match, which included a hattrick—three wickets in three consecutive balls! The next year, he did great with the bat too, and got written about twice. Andy was sure Raju would’ve made it to the Bengal under-16 team if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a bit older. “But you wait and see,” he said, “he’ll play for Bengal in a few years.” I was also convinced that he would.

The same year—’79—Bapi lost his mother. Strangely, we didn’t know that she’d been sick for a while. We used to go to his house a lot when we were younger. The attraction was this huge fish tank they had next to the tube well behind their kitchen. It was full of all kinds of plants and fish. We’d crouch down on the ground, put our chins on the tank’s low cement wall and get lost in that magical world. For whatever reason, he never took us to his room, or to any other room in their house. He’d let us into the building through a side door, and lead us down a narrow passage past the kitchen and into the tiny backyard. The death of his mother changed him. He wasn’t the boy he used to be.

Around the same time, we started to hear that Bob’s family might leave for Hong Kong. “Dad is tired of borrowing money to run the shop,” Bob said. “The Puja sales were terrible this year.” The months before Durga Puja were when the shoe shops on Bentinck Street were the busiest. All shop owners counted on business around that time. “No one buys Chinese shoes anymore,” he said. “Everyone wants Bata. Dad is saying we should leave.”

One afternoon, Bob was waiting for us in his father’s shop. Raju, Andy, Rustom and I were on our way there. The plan was to go to the Maidan after that. Rustam was talking about his uncle’s friend who worked in a production house in Bombay. And thanks to this friend, he—his uncle—had met a few stars. “Zeenat Aman, Shashi Kapoor, Helen, Dharmendra,” he said. “They even invited him to their parties—not my uncle, of course, but his friend.” So Rustam was saying that this friend of his uncle’s, whatever his name was, knew Sikander Khan. “‘Sikandar Khan from Calcutta, right?’ my uncle’s friend said, ‘Of course, I know him’ he said. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘he had so many affairs here with all these stars!’” The story was that one of these stars (Rustam couldn’t remember who) would’ve married him if he hadn’t left Bombay all of a sudden. “All rubbish!” Andy said. “I don’t believe any of this.” “Maybe it’s true, who knows?” I said. “Of course, it’s true,” Rustom said.

We were in the middle of this, and were about to turn right on Madan Street, when we heard some hullaballoo on the other side. “Look, Sikander Khan!” Raju said. There was a crowd in front of Ram Laha’s crockery store. Sikander Khan stood out because he was a foot and a half taller than everyone around him. We ran across the street, dodging taxis and motorbikes. A man lay on the footpath, groaning and bleeding from the nose. Ram Laha’s son (we never found out what his name was) was screaming at the top of his lungs. “How dare you do this inside my shop?” he said to the man. “Calm down,” Sikander Khan said to him, grabbing his arm and guiding him back into his shop. “How much did he take” he asked. It was a hot day. Sikander Khan’s forehead was beaded with sweat, his white kameez stuck to his body. “One hundred and twenty-five rupees, sahb,” one of his employees said. “It was my money,” he said. “Did you get it back?” Sikander Khan asked. The man said he’d searched the thief’s pockets and found the money. “Next time I see you around here, I’ll break your legs!” Ram Laha’s son screamed out of his shop. “Khamosh!” Sikander Khan said, raising his voice. “Enough! Get back to your work now.” No one had ever heard him sound angry. Everyone shut up. Including the thief. “Where are you from?” he asked the thief. The man mumbled something, which Sikander Khan didn’t understand. He looked around and motioned to a rickshaw-wallah he knew. He asked him to take the thief to his house so that his servant could give him something to eat. He said he would be home shortly.

The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. But we kept talking about it for days and weeks after that. What blew our minds was not how he’d stopped the quarrel, which wasn’t difficult for him anyway. But the fact that he’d sent the thief to his own house. Knowing that he’d stolen money, and had been caught red-handed. Who would ever do such a thing?

We found out later that he’d given the man a job in Khan Furniture.

+++

“Mr. Khan passed away,” Mum said as soon as I walked in.

It was a Sunday. I’d just come back from the Maidan. Raju and I had gone there to watch some kite-flying. We’d stopped flying kites ourselves, but liked watching others do that now and then. “What are you talking about?” I almost screamed at Mum. She explained that it was Sikander Khan’s father. He’d been sick and was in a hospital. “They’ve just brought the body home,” Mum said. “Dad’s gone there to pay his last respects.”    

What we couldn’t have guessed at the time was that this would be the beginning of a new chapter in the Sikander Khan story. Suddenly, he wasn’t that visible anymore. And if you ran into him somewhere by chance, he avoided eye contact. He looked more distant than before, and rarely stopped for a chat. Mush said his father thought Sikander Khan was suffering from some disease. “Man, he looks so thin, doesn’t he?” Andy said one day when we spotted him getting on a rickshaw. We all agreed. And we suddenly realized that, whenever we saw him now, we saw him on a rickshaw. Also, people weren’t talking about his acting career anymore. New pictures came from Bombay without any rumor of Sikander Khan being in them.

What people talked about now was what was happening to Khan Furniture. Instead of running it himself after his father’s death, Sikander Khan had put one of their old employees in charge. His name was Rashid, who had been a favorite of Sikander Khan’s father. But the man was too old to manage the business, so before long it was his son, Aftab, who was running the show. And the thief, whom Sikander Khan had rescued from Ram Laha’s shop, did all the physical work. He was from a village in the south. “A good man,” Mush told us. “If it wasn’t for him, Khan Furniture would be empty by now.” What he’d found out was that Aftab was selling stuff off behind Sikander Khan’s back, and pocketing the cash. And this man (his name was Kanu) would count every piece of furniture when the shop opened and closed every day. So there was a constant battle between him and Aftab. “Kanu is repaying his debt to Khan-sahb,” Mush said. “He’s doing his best to protect his boss’s interests.”

Soon, it became clear to many in the area that poor Kanu was fighting a losing battle. One day, Dad got so worked up he went to see Sikandar Khan in his house. Apparently, the man listened to my father patiently and thanked him for his concern, saying that he knew everything but couldn’t say anything to Aftab. “Rashid is not well,” he said to my dad. “And I don’t have the money to help him.” So, allowing Aftab to do what he was doing was the only way he could offer some help. “They need the money more than I do,” he’d said. “But Kanu doesn’t understand. He fights with Aftab all the time.” He asked Dad not to worry. “The inventory is large enough to survive this crisis. Aftab won’t be able to sell the whole shop.”

The man’s image changed in our eyes. He was no more the hero-like figure he’d been. The luster had gone. He looked old and weak.

We, too, had changed. For one thing, we’d suddenly become embarrassingly hairy. All of us, except Bob. Even Rustam, who was younger, had a thin moustache now. Raju had started to shave. The first time he’d done it he looked like a shaved cat. Our reaction made him laugh, which made him look worse. The fear of looking like that kept me away from the razor for a long time. Besides, I had a thin face, and the downy fuzz that covered it now made it look a bit fuller. So I didn’t mind it all that much. But I’d stopped wearing shorts, except when I was playing football. Apart from hair growth, there were other things happening in our worlds, which pulled us in different directions. The focus of each one of us had shifted from Sikander Khan to whatever was new in our lives.

In mine it was Shibani Banerjee. A Class XI student of Loreto Dharamtala, and a favorite of Ms. Rogers’, who’d become the school’s new principal. She’d said yes to me; I couldn’t believe my luck. We went to the movies. Globe, Light House, the New Empire, wherever they played Hollywood films—Shibani hated Hindi cinema. We ate papdi chaat, and listened to the Bee Gees and Nazia Hassan. She was crazy about disco music. A Bengali Brahmin, she went to church with us. She knew the Lord’s Prayer by heart, and sang all the hymns without looking at the text. Mum started saying, “She’s not an Anglo, but I wouldn’t mind having her as my daughter-in-law.” “Too early, Linda, too early,” Dad would say.

I’m grateful to God for this, I’d say to myself. I don’t want anything more out of life! I couldn’t imagine being happier than I was. I was my parents’ only child; we were a solid trio. And now there was Shibani.

Before I knew it, almost two whole years had passed. I finished my first year of B.Com. at St. Xavier’s, and she ranked 7th in her ISC exams. She’d been talking about applying to both Presidency and St. Xavier’s. She wanted to study mathematics. “Please come to St. Xavier’s,” I’d plead with her. Although now, with those results, she could get into any college she wanted. And Presidency might in fact be better for her. “My uncle teaches math in the US,” she said to me one day. “He wants me to go to his university.”

This was toward the end of May, a week or so after her results had come out. We were walking around the Victoria Memorial gardens. The sun was about to set, but it was still very hot. I was sweating badly. My heart skipped a beat when I heard that. A university in the US, my God! That would be so good for her. She was a star student, and deserved the best higher education she could get. But on the other hand…. I couldn’t think anymore. I wanted to change the subject, talk about something else.

“Andy’s band is playing at a classmate’s birthday party tomorrow,” I remember saying. “If you have time, we could go there.”

We’d spent the rest of our time that evening talking about Andy and his band.

Meanwhile, Rustom and his family had left Calcutta. Which had come as a big surprise because, unlike Bob, he never talked about leaving. His family, unlike the Chungs, didn’t have any problems, at least not any we knew about. So we weren’t prepared for the news, which made it doubly sad. And I was sure that if it had happened a couple of years earlier, when we were younger and closer, before Shibani had come into my life, it would have been devastating. Raju and I talked about how quickly our life had changed. I missed Rustam.

Shibani got busy preparing for her GRE and TOEFL. Whenever we met—which, all of a sudden, was not that often anymore, because she was busy—she talked about all the stuff she was hearing from her uncle. America, university life, how hard she’d have to work if she got admission. And of course, financial aid—she said she couldn’t go unless she got a full scholarship. Secretly, I started to hope she wouldn’t get one. Please, please, God, I prayed. I also felt guilty and miserable for doing that, and begged for forgiveness. Mum caught on to what was going on, and asked me what the problem was. I told her everything. Which made her cry.

One day in early January, 1985, I stood on the visitors’ gallery at Dum Dum airport, waving goodbye to Shibani. It was a cold morning. The sky was overcast. She’d stood on the jet-bridge for a long time, waving and wiping tears. Then she’d turned and disappeared. 

We never saw each other again.

+++

Bob’s father wasn’t the only one who’d borrowed money from Sikander Khan. While almost no one ever paid him back, Mr. Chung had. In ’89, he sold his shop and emigrated to Canada (instead of Hong Kong). And before leaving, he’d offered to repay the loans he’d taken from Sikander Khan. Sikander Khan accepted only a fraction of the amount Mr. Chung owed him, saying the family would need the cash to start their new life in Canada.

Khan Furniture had shut down by then. Rashid had died years ago, and Kanu had returned to his village. Sikandar Khan had invested whatever he was left with in a few rickshaws, a dozen or so, which he rented daily for a few hundred rupees. He’d lost all his savings, and depended entirely on the money his rickshaw-pullers fetched him. Which they gradually stopped doing.

He passed away in ’91. The local doctor, who wrote his death certificate, knew Dad. He told him that Sikander Khan had died of starvation.

+++

Years passed. Bombay became Mumbai. Six years later, Calcutta became Kolkata. “When the name of a place changes, a bit of its character changes with it,” Mr. Mahapatra used to say. He taught us history in XI and XII. Of all our teachers at St. Anthony’s, I liked him the most. He didn’t live long enough to know his own city would prove him right one day. Calcutta had changed. It wasn’t what it used to be. But it was still my home—I didn’t know any place better than this city. And no city could be more suitable for someone like me, a boring, potbellied, single Anglo-Indian accountant without any goal or ambition in life. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. In ’96, when Uncle Roger, Dad’s younger brother, and his family moved to Australia, Mum and Dad had asked me to join them. They had a chance to migrate as well, but they didn’t want to go. “We’re too old,” Mum had said. “But you should go. Unless you want to be the last Anglo-Indian living in Calcutta.” “Why not?” I’d laughed, annoying her. “There’d still be plenty of people here, right?”

I’d moved to Uncle Roger’s Elliot Road flat after they left, but kept going to the old neighborhood at least twice a week as long as Mum and Dad were alive. They’d stayed put in that dingy old place on Madan Street. After Mum’s death in 2009 (Dad had gone five years earlier), I hardly ever went to the Chandni Chowk area. Most of the people I knew there had gone by then—either left the city, or died. Like Andy. He’d become a good musician and had a busy schedule of gigs, but drank too much. He died a year before Dad. Within three years, Mush was gone—a heart attack. He’d taken over his father’s tailoring business and had been doing well. I never heard from Rustom and Bob. And no one knew where Bapi was, or whether he was even alive anymore.

So Raju and I were the only ones left. And we even managed to stay in touch, and see each other once or twice a year. Mostly around Christmas. He’d call and come over with a big plum cake from Nahoum’s (our old favorite), and we’d have a drink at my place if he had the time. Raju was a busy man, the owner of a travel agency with offices everywhere, plus a big family with old parents, wife and three children.

Last Christmas, he brought me a DVD along with the cake. “Your Christmas gift, Bertie,” he said, handing it to me. Grand Trunk Road, a Hindi film from the early ’70s. “Call me when you’re done watching it,” he said, “and let’s meet in January.”

Sikandar Khan was in the film. In a song-and-dance scene, he smiles, holds the heroine’s hand, runs half a circle with her, then letting go of her hand he gets out of the frame. Just a few brief moments. But there he was! I’d rewound and played that part many times to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake.

It was Christmas Eve, around 7 in the evening. I pressed rewind again, then pressed pause. Silent Night was playing on the radio somewhere. I went to the fridge and poured myself another beer. I imagined the faces of Andy, Mush and Bapi, and those of the rest of us, as we were all those years ago, in that lost life. I imagined us watching this together and being happy like we’d never been.

I took a gulp of beer and wiped my eyes dry. Then I pressed play.  

Copyright Credit: Eugene Datta, Movie Star from The Color of Noon. Copyright © 2024 by Eugene Datta.  Republished with the permission of Serving House Books.