#three daughters

Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three daughters beneath the Aten (Shrine stela)

Time: New Kingdom, 18th dynasty, around 1345 B.C.E.

Archaeological site: Amarna/العمارنة‎  (Egypt)

Photo: svenson777 (taken on October 30, 2021)

Satyajit Ray made Teen Kanya (THREE DAUGHTERS, ‘61) to commemorate the birth centenary of the Bengali cultural giant—poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, actor, educationist, painter—Rabindranath Tagore. It is noteworthy that Ray, a polymath himself, decided to concentrate on the three female protagonists of Tagore’s short stories from the volumes of poems, novels, short stories, dramas, essays and songs that Tagore left behind. May 2, 2021 marks Ray’s birth centenary and studying the expansive creative careers of both men often reveals several points of intersection.

Tagore’s women, like Ray’s, are complex—independent yet bound by tradition; inhabiting, as women do, the in-betweenness within a desire for boundless personal freedom and the socio-familial space that denies it to them. Teen Kanya is an anthology of three films: Postmaster with the young, orphaned protagonist Ratan (Chandana Banerjee); Monihara with the childless wife of a rich jute plantation owner Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar); and Samapti with the shrew-like “wild child” teenager Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen). Incidentally, it is with Teen Kanya that Ray, too, found a seamlessness within his own creative pursuits, as he began to score music for his films.

Tagore’s “Postmaster”, written in 1891, tells the story of Ratan who works for her village’s Postmaster, the Anglophile Nandal from Calcutta (Anil Chatterjee). With Nandal’s arrival, Ratan, receives affection for the first time in her life. She learns how to read and write from him, makes him his meals and then takes care of him while he fights a bout of malaria. When, unable to tolerate village life anymore, Nandal hands in his resignation and Ratan’s world is robbed of the love she had begun to acclimatise to. While Tagore’s Ratan falls to the Postmaster’s feet, begging him not to leave her alone, Ray’s Ratan walks past Nandal and goes on attending to her household chores. Nandal breaks into tears as the potholed road ahead leads to his future back in the city; Ratan quietly lives out her destiny.

“Ray did not deny his women the right of choice. His women had agency. They were primary protagonists in their own right,” writes actor Sharmila Tagore who was 15 when she made her debut in Ray’s Apur Sansar (THE WORLD OF APU, 1959). Her words do not just ring true for Ratan but also for Manimalika and Mrinmoyee. The three women form the moral arc of the film, making the audience not just question the society but also the ways in which they, personally, inhibit women’s personal freedoms and ambitions.

Even within a horror story like Monihara, where the protagonist lives with a cavernous greed for gold and is probably unfaithful to her husband, Ray (and Tagore) divulge the psychology behind her greed. Manimalika feels judged by her in-laws because she hasn’t been able to bear her husband a child. As Sharmila Tagore says “Ray gifted his women protagonists the liberty which defied the cliché that the male desire is visual while the woman’s is sensory.” This obvious visual female desire, as heightened as it is in the protagonists’ sexual transgression in Charulata (THE LONELY WIFE, ‘64) and Ghare Baire (THE HOME AND THE WORLD, ‘84), finds a materialist incarnation in Manimalika’s unapologetic gold lust. When you reduce a woman to her womb, why should she find it in herself to be a holistic human being and not just a dehumanized, ever-widening lacunae of greed?

Her disappearance from her husband’s life does not leave behind a vacuum that he can fill with another wife who can perhaps bear him an heir. Instead, she haunts him, filling his existence with a hopeless wait and an obvious dread. It is not just a haunting of her husband’s life, but that of his ancestral home, the seat of long-standing patriarchy that perpetuates itself from one heir to another.

Aparna Sen, at 16, made her debut as Samapti’s Mrinmoyee, a bright-eyed, rebellious village teenager who wouldn’t toe the line of patriarchy and the way it expects “marriage worthy” young women to behave. When Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) marries Mrinmoyee, only with the consent of her parents, she lashes out, refusing to bow down to a life of servile conjugality. Not only does she have a mind of her own, but she also insists upon sovereignty over her body, which is only its most authentic self when running through fields and sitting on swings. She runs away from her husband on the night of their wedding and spends it outdoors, sleeping on her beloved swing.

"Shit," Nour cursed between her teeth as she felt liquid trickle down her legs. "Shit, shit, shit."

For the love of Primus, why now? This was the worst timing possible! Optimus went to the frontline half an hour ago and she knew Ratchet was busy repairing soldiers. She didn't want to bother him when lives were at stake but he insisted that she would call him under any circumstances. Yet the idea that he would abandon wounded people to help one frail human repulsed her. She was not above anyone. They deserved to live.

Then the pain came.

She threw her head back in a wordless shout as her insides were torn apart.

"Are you... fragging... serious..." she managed to gasp between two wheezes.

The sound of a door being opened made her realise she had closed her eyes. Opening them, she saw Ratchet's worried face.

"Nour, are you alright?"

Had her mind been not so fuzzy from the pain right now, she would have asked him what the hell he was doing here.

"The... The babies... They are coming..."

Ratchet's optics widened in horror. He immediately came by her side and scooped her in his servos.

He was rougher than usual, Nour noted distantly.

"We have to go. This place is not fitted for a delivery."

She nodded then bit her fingers to muffle her screams.

Ratchet's other hand covered her, shielding her from the outside world.

"What are you..."

"You need to stay warm."

She didn't object and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of his steps. He was walking quickly.

Then he stepped outside, looked around to make sure he wasn't followed, then activated his comm.link.

"I have her, Lord Megatron."

"Well done, Makeshift. Send your coordinates, we will open the groundbridge."

"Acknowledged, my Lord. But I have to warn you, she has gone into labour."

He heard orders being barked on the other end of the line, probably Megatron demanding the medics to be ready. Without doubt he must have been worried by the brutal arrival.

His sparkmate's life was in danger, after all.

The green portal opened. Nour recognised its typical sound.

"Ratchet? Ratchet what is going on?"

The shapeshifter stepped through and the air became heavier and Nour felt her breath caught in her throat.

She did not like this. She did not like this at all.

Then the fingers spread open and she could see large corridors dimly lightened. Not-Ratchet handed her to a familiar pair of clawed servos and she came face to face with a familiar silver figure.

"It will be alright, Nour," Megatron said softly, holding her delicately. "You are safe now."

Nour wanted to despise him. But at the moment the pain became too unbearable, silencing any curse she wanted to spit at him.

Red eyes would be the first thing her children would see when they would greet the world.

But at the moment she didn't care, for everything hurt so much.

Make it stop, make it stop, her soul repeated like a mantra.

And she screamed.

Nausicaa is the last person Megatron expected to see when he went to the mine to punish this treacherous Starscream.

Now he is trapped and can't move, so he cannot take in his arms the dusty, bruised human in front of him.

Nausicaa cannot move either, the rubble crushing her leg. It could heal if it wasn't buried under several tons of rocks. All she can do is stare back at the gigantic being lying down next to her.

He asks her why she doesn't speak to him. She coolly responds that she is terrified of him and doesn't want anything to do with him.

"Our mother told us about how dangerous you are."

He promises her he would never harm her or her sisters. On the contrary, he would treat them like princesses, like they deserve to be. He talks about the good days with the mech and the woman he loved and how he misses these days. He says he wishes he could have watched his daughters grow. It is a pity he couldn't raise them. It is not fair he was refused the joys of fatherhood.

Then Jack arrives and frees Nausicaa from the boulders. She is impressed by his choice to spare Megatron and leaves without giving him a glance.

The genetic material of both sires was mixed in the three children's own ADN, but not identically.

Nausicaa: 75% Megatron, 25% Optimus, 100% soft

Selene: 80% Optimus, 20% Megatron, 100% gremlin