[Rajat Neogy Remembered]

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When I was sent on an errand to get cigarettes, or something, in Ghana in Rajat’s Peugeot 405, I had never driven at night. I backed into a pillar in the driveway. Shaking, I went into the house and told him I wasn’t ready to drive anywhere. He insisted I get “back on the horse.” Dutifully I went out and promptly drove the car into someone else’s. Rajat wasn’t mad about the cars, just disappointed that I hadn’t mastered my fear. He even asked me if I wanted to try again. I declined.

Other memories: Running to Rajat when he was in hand-cuffs being led into his trial for sedition in Uganda. His silent loving eyes telling me I wasn’t allowed to talk to him. The little pencil-written messages on cigarette wrappers that his ear doctor smuggled out of prison to my mother. Tiny micro-dot writing, yet precise, legible. Unraveled at sunset and read staring from our house to the prison where he was locked up, five miles away down below the hill, glowing red in the setting African sun.

He told me that film poetry is always to be found in the silences. Something I’ve said many times to many people for many years. I was surprised to hear this from him. Had he told me this secret long ago? I always knew the reason I did films in some way was because Rajat was passionate about them and had wanted to do them himself after Uganda. He and my mother had taken me to see many films as a young boy. They fired my imagination then as they do now. I’d like to feel the silence of Rajat being gone as another moment of life poetry. I wish I could feel it that way. It just feels sad. Perhaps it’s like ripe fruit that falls off a tree and rots. At first, it seems like such a waste, but then the seeds in the fruit sprout and new life is created. Perhaps his death will bring new life to us all that remain behind. [End Page A-21]