Woman at the Window: The Material Universe of Rabindranath Tagore Through the Eyes of Satyajit Ray

Introduction

The Background

The modern world is as much globalized as it is materialistic, and flush with the dominance of commodities over people. Earlier, we would refer to commodities as objects. These were less demonstration-oriented and had values other than their physical existence or the price they were exchanged for. Even today, some people feel that some objects can become equally or more important than the subjects who own them or wish to own them, or are forced to part with them.

Where, in this materialistic world, does the ‘object’ fit in beyond its two basic, Marxist values—value-in-use and value-in-exchange? Do women fit into this scheme of objects when they are themselves considered objects? While we read fairy tales as children or listened to mythological stories from our mothers and grandmothers, children today are busy surfing the web and socializing on social networking sites. The more addicted they get to electronic and information technology for social and emotional support, the less they enter direct and active social relationships. So they almost do not notice the objects they are surrounded by or own, or are gifted with.

Over time, our lives have been redefined and reconstructed within a rapidly changing world on the information highway and communication technology. One of these changes is our marginalization of objects, to the extent that they almost become invisible. We concede to being ruled by a commodity-centred universe rather than by an object-surrounded universe. A commodity-centred universe is dictated by money, advertising, marketing, promotion and its associated paraphernalia. An object-surrounded universe reaches out to emotional associations, along with nostalgia, memory and a psychological urge to hold on to and belong.

When a family shifts from its ancestral home to a sophisticated apartment in the city with modern fixtures already in place, the last choice among the objects the family chooses to take along is old, sepia-toned photographs of its predecessors framed in glass, because these are considered unimportant and, therefore, redundant. Are the portraits really redundant? Does our past mean little or nothing to us? These are questions that raise further questions about the value of objects in our lives, in the past, at present, and in the future.

The Problem

When a lover of cinema in general and Satyajit Ray’s cinema in particular decides to write a book on his films, the writer is challenged by an encyclopaedic ‘library’ of books, essays, research papers and seminar reports already authored on the great master’s work. When the same writer proposes to study Ray’s interpretation of Tagore’s literary classics, the task becomes even more challenging because the world of scholars and academics is flooded with experts across the world who have dedicated their lives to studying Tagore from different viewpoints, adding their own perspectives, and giving new dimensions to their analysis, interpretation and research on Tagore. Even more difficult is wading through volumes of studies on the interconnections between Ray and Tagore, and sometimes, analysing the two together through the literature-cinema dyad.

The best part of this reading is that you evolve your own concepts and ideas, drawing from the work that has already been done; and from this, you can discover what has not been done and that becomes your focus. After considering various aspects related to exploring Ray’s interpretation of Tagore, specifically in relation to the gender issue in his celluloid adaptations, this writer found that there is one specific area that was waiting to be tapped. This writer chanced upon Jean Baudrillard’s Object-Value System and later, Igor Kopytoff’s interpretation and study, Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process (1986). This writer believes that analytical and interpretative readings of cinema can lend themselves to read, analyse, interpret and/or question the allegorical potential of the visual and narrative use of objects, not in order to marvel at their realistic description or cinematic detailing through tools of cinematography, lighting, sound and editing, but more importantly, to discover their purpose in the lives of the character/s in the film they are related to.

Just changing one word in a paragraph from Judith Fetterley’s Introduction on the Politics of Literature¹ will point out the possibilities inherent in hidden areas of cinema that could form a subject of in-depth study. Fetterley writes:

To create a new understanding of our literature is to make possible a new effect of that literature on you. And to make possible a new effect is in turn to provide the condition for changing the culture that the literature reflects. To expose and question that complex of ideas and mythologies about women and men, which exist in our society and are confirmed by our literature is to make the system of power embodied in the literature open not only to discussion but even to change.

Substituting the emphasized word ‘literature’ (italics mine) in the above quote with the word ‘cinema’ will open up the same channels of negotiation and interrogation within cinema. In other words, the same logic can be extended to include cinema within its scope.

The Motivation

This modest attempt at analysing Tagore’s works through Ray’s celluloid interpretations and the gender dynamics that emerge through objects that form the material universe has been informed by several triggers.

The first is a brilliant paper by film scholar Moinak Biswas² on the relationship between literature and cinema. Biswas’s essay is a historical analysis of the way literature and literary personalities played important roles in the evolution of Bengali cinema. In the third section of this three-section article, he looks at Ray’s Charulata in a different way. He explores the way Ray gave Charu her own point of view by handing her a lorgnette. It is a fascinatingly insightful interpretation of the lorgnette, an object, vis-à-vis Charu, the subject in the film. Biswas’s focus on the lorgnette is not on its values as an ‘object’, but as the director’s insight to give his protagonist, a woman, her individual point of view. For this author, the lorgnette assumed more qualities than being just a physical instrument in the hands of Charu. Slowly, the use of ‘objects’ in detailing not only the cinematic spaces but also the characters began to offer new possibilities of interpretation and analysis.

The second strong motivation for this work came from a foundation laid by this author some years ago. This was in relation to a presentation at a conference on ‘Tagore in Translation’.³ This paper tried to analyse French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator and photographer Jean Baudrillard’s object-value system and establish how this can be linked to Tagore’s literary works interpreted/represented by Satyajit Ray in some of his films, namely Charulata and Ghare Baire. The objective was to portray how literature does not mandatorily provide this space for analytical interpretations of concrete objects that present different modes of meaning in a film with respect to a given character, his/her lifestyle, interactions with other characters, and its use and positioning within the film. Contrary to the image of the object ‘exterminating’ the author, the films within the scope of this study reassert the director’s imaginative powers in ‘reclaiming’ his position as the ‘author’ of his work, adapted from another ‘author’s’ literary work.

The trigger for the gender dynamics of this study without entering into any feminist critique arose when this writer was reading Suranjan Ganguly’s work on Satyajit Ray.⁴ Ganguly’s observations on the use of a lantern in relation to Apu and his studies, his makeshift laboratory with his indigenous experiments, his use of two fruits not as items of food, but as an experiment he shows to his uncomprehending mother in Aparajito to explain the rudiments of the lunar eclipse,⁵ are classic examples. They offer gendered meanings to the objects that surround him, when juxtaposed against his sister Durga’s involvement in Pather Panchali with a bead chain, a worn-out half of a coconut shell where she hid her stolen bead chain unknown to all, the picnic with friends, savouring pickles, and so on.

The Proposal

For this analysis, I had to throw away practically everything I had earlier read and written and begin with a completely fresh angle on the significance of objects per se, objects with gender-specificity, objects used by Ray in his Tagore and other interpretations to focus on how Ray’s films adapted from Tagore’s works create the space for reading into and interpreting their ‘material universe’. They lend themselves to (i) the use of objects that might not be so important or significant in literature, or even in real life as they become in films; (ii) the way objects add social, personal, introspective and aesthetic value to the cinematographic space of the film in terms of the characters that people it; (iii) an exploration of the objects used by women in Ray’s Tagore interpretations, and/or the ones they are surrounded by and/or identified with; (iv) whether the objects make the women transcend their ‘object’ position in social and filial terms to become ‘subjects’ of their lives and life choices; and (v) whether a given ‘object’ actually ‘becomes something else’, with emotional, nostalgic and psychological values.

Baudrillard’s first full-length study, Le Systeme des objets/The System of Objects,⁶ was published in its original language after all except one (Ghare Baire) of Ray’s films that fall within the scope of this study had released. So, the analysis is ‘after the fact’, that could not be read/interpreted/analysed through Baudrillard’s theory as it did not exist at the time Teen Kanya and Charulata were released. In this sense, it offers several new ways of looking at these films that extend themselves to Ray’s Ghare Baire.

Baudrillard approaches everyday objects—clocks, cars, chairs, cigarette lighters—as an artist or photographer as much as a sociologist.⁷ Only in the final section of System is the system of objects treated in a critical and sociological fashion, which emphasizes their ideological role within an integrated consumer capitalist system. But the present study does not study objects on an ideological premise within an integrated consumer capitalist system.

This ‘integrated consumer capitalist system’ is taken as a ‘given’, and the objects in this author’s study are concerned only within the cinematographic space of the cinema of Satyajit Ray interpreting Tagore’s women, relocating them within and through the language of cinema.

Jean Baudrillard states that there are four ways for an object to obtain value: (i) the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes, and a refrigerator cools; (ii) the exchange value of an object or its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils, and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work; (iii) the symbolic value of an object, a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student’s school graduation gift or a commencement speaker’s gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love; (iv) the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, while having no added functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

A note of caution is called for here. Since Baudrillard evolved his theory after these films were made, it is rooted within a strongly consumerist world as obtains in the present. He states that while ‘mankind’, as a historical category, remains relatively stable, there are rapid changes in the world of objects and technology. Baudrillard argues that increasingly, objects have short lifespans: where pyramids and cathedrals saw the passing of many generations of human beings, today an individual will live through many generations of consumer objects. Objects are increasingly disposable; they are highly valued, prized and cherished—but only for a short time. We no longer seek a sense of the timeless in our objects; rather, our use of objects, and our objects’ use of us, binds us to a temporality of constant renewal. If modern man ‘finds his soul in his automobile’, as Marcuse claims,⁸ it is ‘a transient soul obliged to relocate every few years’.⁹

This elaboration by Baudrillard and its explanation by Pawlett do not apply to the present study. The logic is simple—the objects are ‘frozen’ in time within the films, and their ‘roles’ are limited by and to the films they feature in. Interpreted and analysed in retrospect, the same rule of fixed time would apply. Teen Kanya was made in 1960. It is being reread in 2016, and would still be read within the social and cinematic framework of ‘the-then-and-the-now’ in 2026. The original stories were created in the late 1800s, so Ray takes some liberties with the literary text to present Tagore’s viewpoint through his perspective as a man directing films in the 1960s. The rupee coin the postmaster tries to hand over to Ratan is not ‘disposable’ within the film itself. What happens to the coin after Ratan refuses it and Nandalal puts it back in his pocket is of no value to us. It does not, as Baudrillard suggests, have a ‘short life’ and does not ‘bind us to the temporality of constant renewal’. It binds us to the film and the interplay between the two characters in it vis-à-vis the coin. The ‘journey’ of the object beyond the film is of no concern to this study. These objects do not fit within Marcuse’s claims that they are ‘transient souls obliged to relocate every few years’. The ‘life’ of the objects within these films are fixed, limited and frozen in time and space within the spaces of the film and the characters therein.

In the latter part of his Systems, Baudrillard concerns himself mainly with communication languages that pertain to objects and people in a new world. His basis is capitalist society, and he diversifies into areas of the media like advertisements, television, and so on, which do not apply to this study. Towards the end of Systems, there is a lengthy discussion on advertising, which opens with a starkly oppositional stance: ‘Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe.’¹⁰ This theory would be beyond the scope of the present study.

This exploration will keep away from Charles S. Peirce’s Theory of Signs, where signs function as mediators between the external world of objects and the internal world of ideas. This would not apply to the present analysis of objects in cinema versus the absence of objects in the literature it is drawn or sourced from.

The primary purpose of this work is descriptive, exploratory and analytical. I have tried to explore the terrain of some films directed by Ray before arriving at specific films of Ray based on Tagore’s works. Within this narrow perspective, there is a tendency to focus on the use and function of objects Ray has placed within the cinematic text, which can be read into as elaborating on the women characters within them. Does this imply that men are not surrounded or defined by concrete objects? Yes, they are, such as Bhupati’s total involvement with his press, his newspaper Sentinel, and everything that goes with it; or Apu’s globe. But the women placed against the specific time and place setting in the chosen films for this research are trapped within inner and interior spaces, and are therefore more directly in relation with objects because of their relatively small world and their social conditioning to interiorized objects placed within the home, and their roles as housewife, mother, daughter, etc., that they are always linked to.

If and when the woman steps out into the outer world, new objects either add to or replace the old ones she was associated with when she was confined at home. Arati in Mahanagar was already involved in objects related to a middle-class urban housewife’s day-to-day household chores. When she steps outside, newer objects surround her and define her. The importance of the older objects decline either naturally or circumstantially, or both. Ratan in Postmaster is without house, family, or roots. But when Nanda, the postmaster, begins to teach her the alphabet, she slowly gravitates towards him. Two new objects enter her life—a chalk and a slate, followed by a notebook and a pencil—Nanda has taught her to read and write, opening a new window to the world for her. But does it really open a ‘window’ in her life? Or does it close the window after having opened it a little?

For Mrinmoyee in Samapti, the movement functions in reverse—she steps into the inner space of the home of her husband from a carefree life lived mainly in the open. From observation, in the opinion of this writer, concrete objects are a more integral part of the lives of these women than of the lives of men. The ‘objects’ themselves get ‘genderized’ naturally within the social system in which the men and women are socially conditioned to live. The mirror that recurs in many of Ray’s films is most often used by the women than by the men. But in Postmaster and in Samapti, the mirror is more in use by the men than the women. The men in the stories are urban, educated, and have developed an attitude about their social and intellectual premise which invests them with a slightly derogatory attitude towards rural men and women. Mrinmoyee in Samapti and Ratan in Postmaster are social constructs of the milieu they belong to, where the mirror is superfluous.

The ‘abstract’ notions of concrete objects in Tagore’s original stories are given physical and concrete shape in Ray’s interpretation of these in his films. When they are concrete in the literary source, such as in Monimalika in Monihara, who has an abnormal obsession with jewels, the cinematic realization of the jewellery and other physical art decor of the home she lives in give one a deeper understanding into her psyche and her tragedy. These are observations that might be overlooked when one is concentrating on the text, the characters and their interactions. But it is interesting to discover that when placed in the context of the objects the childless couple is defined by, a new perspective emerges from a holistic reading. While exploring gender perspectives, one is not concerned with any hierarchy between the genders. One is not involved with a study of gender bias or gender discrimination between men and women. But one is concerned about gender differences that result from individual mindsets of men and women in general, and from the social construct that results from the dictation and manipulation of gender differences in particular, expressed through differences in objects they are related to or, are inclined towards, or are associated with.

Bill Brown, in his famous Theory of Things, while elaborating on objects within the framework of literature—and sometimes philosophy—at one point writes, ‘The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.’¹¹ This is a partial truth where cinema is concerned with the presentation and representation of objects placed in juxtaposition with, or complimenting or backing and supporting, human characters. Sometimes, cinematic detailing through production design demands the use of objects that are not specifically related to a given character in the film, but reflects the social class the family belongs to.

This writer’s involvement is more with the concrete objects and less with the symbolism they represent independent of any character in the film. The object in the study is actually an object in real terms with qualities of physical dimension, size, texture, colour, etc., presented in different ways through the fluidity structured into cinematic technique such as script, cinematography, light effects, sound, editing, art direction, and so on, which establishes an object’s identity within the cinematographic space of the film.

The positioning of the object might change in relation to the character it is associated with, and its importance or otherwise within the content. An object’s significance can change in relation to the changes happening in the (celluloid) life of the character it is linked to. At the same time, the importance of the object becoming a symbol, or as symbolizing something when the object is or becomes at once an object and a symbol, cannot be negated completely. If this sounds like a contradiction in terms, the entire concept of object–subject relations within the framework of cinema is itself filled with conflicts and contradictions one must accept as a given, and read accordingly.

These objects, one would be right to emphasize, sometimes form a subplot to the main story without dominating the story or the character/s at any point. One does not see the lorgnette other than in Charu’s hand once she takes it out of a drawer in the first eight-minute, dialogue-free opening scene in Charulata.

The stick of lipstick Edith Simmons gifts Arati with in Mahanagar does not leave Arati’s possession till she throws it out of the window. The newspaper is presented in two different ways in Mahanagar. In one scene, we see Arati and her young sister-in-law poring through the classifieds of a daily newspaper after Arati has discussed taking up a job to tide over financial pressures. This going through the newspaper is imaginatively framed with a close-up of the two women exchanging jokes, while part of the open pages of the newspaper frame their smiling faces from below.

Later, we find the unemployed, frustrated Subrata reading the newspaper in a neighbourhood teashop. Suddenly, he sees Arati walk in with a man he does not know. He hides behind the newspaper by holding it up, and tries to eavesdrop on the conversation between Arati and this stranger who, we learn, is her friend’s husband. Instead of approaching her directly, he peeps from behind the newspaper to see them walk out, talking cheerfully.

The newspaper in the two different scenes is different by virtue of the fact that the day of the week is different. But one can, for the purpose of argument, club the two different but similar objects with identical functions and features as a ‘single’ object—the newspaper. It plays two different roles in the two scenes in relation to the characters it is associated with at two given points of time. In the earlier scene, it underscores the ‘bridge’, the bonding between two women of different ages and status, who share a joke or two on one of them taking up a job. They are scouting for advertisements in the classifieds of the paper. They are not reading the paper as such. In the latter scene, the newspaper, perhaps brought along by the husband to read over his cup of tea, becomes a subterfuge for him to hide behind so that his wife does not see him while he can spy on her. In the first instance, it strengthens and underwrites the bond between two women. In the second, it is a subterfuge that expresses how insecure the unemployed Subrata feels with a working wife who is enjoying her new life.

Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Mahanagar are not based on Tagore’s works. But together or taken individually, they reveal a ‘pattern’ in Ray’s treatment and approach that leads to a wider and deeper exploration of the characters that inhabit the cinematic space—not necessarily present in literature—where objects, if looked at closely, make their presence felt.

One important point to be noted while exploring and analysing the cinematic use, value, positioning and placement of objects is the film-maker’s creative designing of the entire mise en scène, premeditated and put in the script before shooting begins. Or it may be spontaneous at certain moments, improvised to enrich the scene at a given point. The art director plays a significant role in this scenario because he, in his interactions with the film-maker, decides what is to go in the mise en scène and what will be kept out. But when it comes to the establishing and sustaining of the relationship of an object with a particular character, it is the director who decides which object will be related to which character in the film, why and how.

As art director Nitish Roy says to his biographer Datta:¹²

Movie making is altogether a different ballgame. It’s all about light-camera-sound and action! Let us say if a movie is a human, then the heart of a ‘movieman’ lies in the script, the rest of the organs form its dressing. Light, cinematography, make-up, characters, interesting costumes are like colourful brushstrokes that could embellish the visuals. Then it starts to take shape holding the hands of art direction and set construction. And finally puts life into it.

Datta’s book on Nitish Roy has a chapter on Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, designed like the pictorial script of a film with shot details, sketches and photographs running alongside the dialogue and the shot-break directions. In an interesting dialogue between Mrinal Sen and Nitish Roy, Roy asks the director whether the lead pair in the film had a negotiated arranged marriage, or whether theirs was a love marriage. A surprised Sen asked what difference it made. Roy said that if it was an arranged marriage, the flat would have more furniture, which would all be traditional, whereas if it was a love marriage, the flat would be sparsely furnished and would have more modern and minimally designed furniture. Sen was flummoxed. The film fetched Roy his first National Award. This researcher will occasionally explore prop details used to establish the history, geography, language and culture of the subjects/characters, but the focus will be on object relations with given characters in the respective films.

Igor Kopytoff is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He suggests a model of studying the commodity as a ‘cultural and cognitive process’. In other words, not just as things, but as markers (of society, of a people, an economy, etc.)—as value-loaded objects that, when studied genealogically, can be decoded to access a variety of meanings. His interests include social and political organization, and his research has been focused on Africa and northern Asia.

Reading objects through Kopytoff’s theory, we find it expressed in Ray’s Charulata. The object use that defines Charu and her sister-in-law Mandakini underline the difference between the two women in terms of education, social status, level of intelligence and degree of happiness. Charu loves to read, can write very well, embroiders to fill in the vacant spaces of time, and so on. Mandakini is semi-literate, naïve and simple. She is as thrilled as a child while playing the simplest game of cards, or looking through the colourful designs created by broken glass pieces seen through a kaleidoscope, and folding paans; she is just as thrilled when she is able to see the clock on the church tower from the terrace of Charu and Bhupati’s rambling house. Mandakini is content with her state of being, in a manner of speaking. Charu is not.

There is little in common between Baudrillard and Kopytoff’s theories. Therefore, the writer has emphasized explorations of Baudrillard’s object-value system for film-specific readings, while Kopytoff’s concepts fit into the larger framework to offer a more holistic reading.

Rosebud and Citizen Kane

The best example of a material universe created for and around a single character within cinema is the unforgettable sled Rosebud in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). ‘Rosebud’ is the most important uttered sound in Citizen Kane, the dying Kane’s last word, the secret of his sorrow. It is the name of his childhood sled, ultimately thrown into the flames as oblivion sears through the film’s final scenes.¹³ What seems a fairy-tale simplification, a motif from the props department, opens up to become part of the film’s resonance. More literally, it is the bud that opens for the audience by being the bud that does not open in the film. On screen, ‘Rosebud’ tells us that Kane’s life was nipped in its growth by a too early rendezvous with wealth and destiny. But in the film, ‘Rosebud’ communicates the opposite. The spell of the word grows and grows. Like so much in the film, it starts as a hint, and expands by a process of change, association, counterpoint and contradiction into the holistic and all-comprehending.

In his waking hours, Kane had certainly forgotten the sled and the name which was painted on it. Casebooks of psychiatrists are full of these stories. It was important for me in the picture to tell the audience as effectively as possible what this really meant. Clearly it would be undramatic and disappointing if an arbitrary character in the story popped up with the information. The best solution was the sled itself. Now, how could this sled still exist since it was built in 1880? It was necessary that my character be a collector—the kind of man who never throws anything away. I wished to use as a symbol—at the conclusion of the picture—a great expanse of objects—thousands and thousands of things—one of which is ‘Rosebud.’¹⁴

This field of inanimate theatrical properties I wished to represent the very dust heap of a man’s life. I wished the camera to show beautiful things, ugly things and useless things, too—indeed everything, which could stand for a public career and a private life. I wished objects of art, objects of sentiment, and just plain objects. There was no way for me to do this except to make my character, as I have said, a collector, and to give him a great house in which to keep his collections. The house itself occurred to me as a literal translation in terms of drama of the expression ‘ivory tower’. The protagonist of my ‘failure story’ must retreat from a democracy which his money fails to buy and his power fails to control. There are two retreats possible: death and the womb. The house was the womb. Here too was all the grandeur, all the despotism, which my man had found lacking in the outside world. Such was his estate—such was the obvious repository for a collection large enough to include, without straining the credulity of the audience—a little toy from the dead past of a great man.¹⁵

In Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane dies saying the word ‘Rosebud’. The film, narrated in flashback, sends reporters flurrying with this scene to find out what he meant by that word. But there is an irony here. The irony lies in the fact that the reporters keep searching for what they think the word means, while Kane is the only person who knew what it meant and he is no more. We see what it means when the camera closes in on a shot of the sled with the word ‘Rosebud’ still visible. The sled resembles Kane’s innocence as a child. It has no use value for him once he goes away. But he carries faint resonances of the sled within his subconscious, which surfaces in his dying moments. The reporter searches for some deeper meaning when it just refers to a boy’s toy, and nothing more. But does the sled really suggest ‘nothing more’? Interestingly, the sled is ‘absent’ through the film, except in the beginning and the end. The first time we see the sled is in Kane’s flashback. The last time we see it is at the end of the film, being eaten up by the flames of the fire it has been cast into.

Parash Pathar

¹⁶

Parash Pathar was adapted by Satyajit Ray from a story by Parasuram, one of the greatest satirists in Bengali literature in the post-Tagorean era. The film was released in 1958. Ray made significant changes to the original story to fit the socio-political and economic milieu of the time in Calcutta. Paresh Chandra Dutta, fifty-three, a bank clerk in Calcutta, is served quitting orders from the bank. In the original story, Paresh Babu is a lawyer. But Ray made him a clerk to begin the film on his dismissal against the real backdrop of the escalating conflict between bank workers and their employers regarding an increase in their pay scales. The title of the film is named after the object—the magic stone. The graphic design of the film, conceived and executed by Ray himself, consists of two diamonds, one white and one black. This throws up the contrast between the two diametrically opposite values attached to black and white—evil and good—the basic ethical and universal values brought about by the magic stone in the film. The diamond shapes connote the concreteness of the magic stone, although the original stone is somewhat rounded, like a marble.

Paresh Chandra Dutta is returning home from work, passing the Raj Bhavan on his way. A heavy thunderstorm breaks out unexpectedly and Paresh Babu, whose umbrella has a hole in it, cannot