RED – A Filmmaker’s Script

It was a summer evening of 1968. A seventeen year old lad walked along with his father to an old Calcutta building in Chittaranjan Avenue. The father worked in government department who hoped and prayed that his only son would become an engineer or doctor – as was the common dream of the middle class society of those days.

The father and son duo reached the address of their destination and walked up the flight of wooden stairs and entered the chamber of the eye surgeon. The son had qualified in the entrance test for engineering and had to get his eyes tested.

The father was pleased, the doctor was pleased to get such a patient at the start of his evening and the boy had dreams.

The doctor started the tests and ultimately opened a book of dots in front of the boy and asked him to read the numbers hidden in the dots. The boy could read some and could not the others. The doctor’s face became grim to grimmer. The father’s eyebrows twisted in anxiety, seeing the doctor’s reaction, creating a deep furrow in his forehead.

Finally, the doctor rose and faced the father. The boy realized that a verdict was imminent. It was pronounced. The father was struck by a lightning shattering all his dreams. The boy heard and took it in his stride as the first bend of the river of his life. He had been declared blind to the colour red.

Forty years later, a middle aged man was driving his car and was held up by the red light in the street crossing. His memory cut back to that early summer evening. His father had by then passed away. He has seen many bends in his life and many reds. He has seen the bunch of red roses being sold on the busy thoroughfares of metros by the small children to the motorists; he has seen the red ‘palash’ in the spring of his life fall around his feet; he has seen the red lips of the many women who tried to entice on or off the celluloid screen; the red flag of the communists; the red blood of the naxalites –thus quiet flowed the Hooghly.

Cut to dream sequence. Thirty years later. An old man lies cold on a bed. His progeny stand sombre faced around the bed. People have assembled to bid adieu. He is still wearing his spectacles of red coloured frame and his body is covered by a red blanket like that of the hospitals.

A small child – possibly his grandchild – toddles in with a bunch of red flowers and places them on his bedside.

The red of life imprisonment turns to green of freedom from life.
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