Fake Anger

Drawing by Sukumar Ray

Sukumar Ray (father of  Satyajit Ray) was serious, lively and intensely curious, and a natural story-teller. He would show his brothers and sisters pictures of weird and wonderful animals from their father’s storybooks and invent his own stories about them. He created his own creatures too, with untranslatable onomatopoeic names – forerunners of the verses and drawings which today are loved wherever Bengali is spoken.

He also dreamed up a novel way of relieving frustration through story-telling – ‘Fake Anger’, as he called it. Like his son Satyajit, Sukumar was famously even-tempered from early childhood on. If one of his friends felt angry with somebody but could not get back at him, Sukumar would say, ‘All right, let’s fake some anger!’ Then he would begin spinning strange stories about his victim, with everyone else joining in. ‘There was no hatred or malice in them,’ recalls his sister Punyalata, in her memoir Chelebelar Dinguli (Those Childhood Days; 1957), ‘we only imagined the person in a ridiculous situation. We had to think of all the possible ways of making that person look foolish and of all the embarrassing positions he could get into. It soon reduced you to stitches, and the peculiar thing was, that in the course of all this giggling the anger just evaporated, leaving one feeling light and happy.’

Excerpted from Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye (1989) by Andrew Robinson