Come back soon...

What I’m feeling today is strange. Why I’m feeling so I don’t know, and I can’t explain it to anyone. Today I feel stabbing pain deep within. Today no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop myself from breaking down in front of others which is making me feel stupid. When people around me are asking me what’s wrong, I’m just smiling and telling them ‘kuch nahi bas aise hi’. How can anyone understand the sense of void and loss I’m feeling?

Rituparno Ghosh, the man who made me fall in love with Bengali cinema, is no more. Rituparno Ghosh, whose cinema unknowingly changed my whole perspective towards love, relationships, emotions and undisputedly broadened my limited outlook towards sexuality and in the process made me a better human being, is dead. Today, in grief when I pondered, I realised I owe this man a lot, a lot that I never realised when he was alive. The news of his demise left me in a state of denial for a long time and somehow it has still not sink in.

I might again sound stupid but I knew you personally Rituparno. I knew you through your movies, I knew your heart, so many times I lived the characters of your movies, felt the tenderness, the mystification and love – wasn’t that a glimpse of you? Wasn’t there some part of you in those characters? So I knew you personally. I can moan your death like the way we moan the departure of people we know and love.  

Yesterday, I broke down several times. While reading about you, while seeing you lying peacefully on your death bed, I deeply wished I could do something to make you talk again, to make you again go back to directing movies. The movies which have been an integral part of my youth days and helped me to shape up my thoughts and ideas. I never knew I loved you so deeply Rituparno and I never ever thought I will miss you so much. I so much want to see more of you, what you have left is incomplete. The uneasiness I feel today is like somebody has abruptly stopped the movie which was so beautiful that it was turning out to be my favourite and now there is no one in the world who can tell me its climax.

I always had this beautiful dream that what if one day miraculously I get a call from somewhere asking me to act in your movie. Maybe just a two minute thing and that would be the opportunity for which I could keep everything at stake, shed any inhibition and simply act. Now, as you are not there, my most beautiful dream has also vaporised. Now, there will be no Rituparno movie I’ll go running to get the passes for. No more ‘Chitrangada’, no more ‘Memories in March’, no more ‘Dahan’. You left a void in my life that is never going to be filled. Today all I pray is that you quickly take rebirth and come back again, again make cinema and again create more hope for a better world.