Based on your understanding of the passages given below, answer the questions that follow.
Reading Comprehension:
“But have you been to Nimtita? Have you been to the palace there?” asked the old man in the tea shop, with the thatched roof. We were in the village of Lalgola, 150 miles from Kolkata, and we had just seen our 13th nobleman’s palace and found it unsuitable.
“Nimtita? Where is that?”, we asked without much interest. We had never heard of the place. “It is 60 miles to the north of here. You drive up the highway. Then you come to a river which you have to cross. A ferry will take your car across. Then off the highway again for 20 miles. A sign tells you where to branch off. It’s on the river Padma, on the eastern bank. It’s the palace of the Chaudhary’s. I’ve been listening to your talk, and I feel you ought to see this one before you give up.”
We were not very hopeful; we had enough trouble taking free advice from people who had no idea of our needs. Anyway, the question was: do we or do we not undertake this last trip? If we did not like the palace, it might mean either giving up making this film altogether, or seriously changing its nature. We tossed a coin to decide whether to go or not. The coin said ‘go’, and we set out on our 60 mile journey.
It was when I was in bed with my right leg in plaster that I had decided the film on Tara Shankar Banerjee’s famous short story, ‘The Music Room’. A nasty fall on the stone steps at Banaras had brought about a serious knee injury. I lay in bed and read all the Bengali books I could lay my hands on. Just then, the film distributors were not too keen to take my film for distribution and may be this was one of the things that made me choose ‘The Music Room’.
Here was a dramatic story which could naturally bring in music and dancing, and distributors loved music and dancing. But here, too, was a story full of feelings. So, it would be satisfying for me as an artist. I would cast Chabi Biswas, our greatest actor, in the leading role of the zamindar – the zamindar whose love of the big musical entertainments brings about his ruin. But, the most important thing was to find a palace. As we had a low budget, there was no question of having studio-built sets. I knew that, if we had the money, my art director could easily build a set which looked like our old palace with the right style. But we just did not have the money for it.
Nimtita turned out to be everything that the old man had claimed and more. No one could have described in words the feeling of utter sadness that surrounded the palace. The river Padma had changed its course over the years, so that now there were endless stretches of sand where once had been villages. The palace itself – greek pillars and all – was a perfect realisation of my dream image. It stood looking out over the stretches of sand with a sad dignity. It had somehow escaped being totally destroyed when the river changed its course. The river had reached within 10 yards of the front of the palace – having swallowed the garden – and then stopped. Karan Inder Narayan Chaudhary, who is 70 and owns a British title and the palace, told us how it happened: “We were having breakfast one morning when we heard a low rumble. We went out to the veranda and saw a big chunk of our estate-almost a square mile of it – going underwater, disappearing forever. It all happened in a few seconds. Padma’s appetite is legendary.”
“But aren’t you afraid that the river might encroach further?”
“Oh yes, the rains bring with them the usual fears”
On returning from our first trip to Nimtita, I telephoned the author, Mr Banerjee. He had been just as anxious about the location as we were.
“We have found our palace at last, Mr Banerjee”, I said.
“Have you? And where is it?”
“At a little-known place called Nimtita”
“Nimtita?” There was a note of recognition in his voice. “You do not mean the palace of the Chaudhary’s, do you?”
“That’s the one.”
“But that is extraordinary! I have not been to Nimtita myself, but I have read about the Choudhury’s in a history of Bengal zamindars, and it was the music loving Upendera Narayan Chaudhary who served as the model for my Rajah”