The face behind the mask
THE title of this column derives from a 1941 Hollywood movie in which Peter Lorre plays a kind, happy man whose face has been disfigured in a fire. Rejected by his girlfriend and despaired by his condition, he turns to a life of crime. But further agonies await him after he wears a mask to hide his disfigured features and falls in love with a beautiful blind girl. He tries to go straight for her, but can't escape his life of crime or his hatred of his own scarred face.
I thought of this movie plot when I recently stumbled on page 216 of the memoirs of P.A. Nazir, a former bureaucrat, nearly 16 years after it was published. Nazir recounts his experience with a college principal. This teacher of English literature badly wanted to leave his post in Barisal and get reassigned either to Dhaka or Mymensingh. For that he managed an appointment with the provincial governor.
During the appointment, the governor sat on a sofa and the principal, to the shock of many, sat down on the carpet. Then the visitor in the earnest submission of his plea touched the governor's feet. The governor sprang up in surprise, and expressed his disdain that the principal should have done something so silly for the sake of a job transfer!
The book doesn't reveal the name of the feet-clutching principal, but the description meets the profile of a man who is a leading light of our intellectual world. Now, it's not my intention to single out and embarrass him. But he is an excellent case study of a genre of men and women in this country whose faces have long since vanished behind their masks.
Of course, I would give these people the benefit of doubt. Their faces got burned in the fire of necessity. That college principal stooped below his dignity out of desperation so that he could move to a new location for whatever reasons. People do stupid things when they are constrained and confused. It disfigures their self-esteem, and then they are left with no choice but to repair that damage by wearing masks.
The problem is that it doesn't diminish their desire to love their country, the beautiful blind girl of our story. In fact, this desire torments these souls. They at once have to grapple with the shame of their stupidity and the pain of their inability to overcome the horror of their own deplorable pasts.
So, it's only logical that they would try to hide their faces behind their masks, as if to sweep their past under the rug. I don't know if the college principal is ever racked with guilt for clinging to an iconic image, which doesn't go with that embarrassing episode of his life. Is he ever pricked by moral compunctions that, once so condescending, he allows himself to be considered a wellspring of righteousness?
This is where we are stuck today, in the interstice between face and mask. This is where our minds fester in the decomposing heat of hesitations as hypocrisy consumes our good judgment. Nobody is taken at face value. Everybody is taken at mask value.
James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, has written that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check an obnoxious individual." What it means is that a government of the people, for the people, and by the people isn't entirely possible because all the people aren't equally sensible. The real world always falls short of the ideal.
It's a similar problem with our patriotism. There are those amongst us who sacrifice their lives for the country, and there are those who sacrifice the country for their lives. How do we tell who is who? How do we separate these two opposite types?
That makes the mask relevant for us. How do we handle those obnoxious patriots, who pretend to love the country after having done everything to hurt her? Where do we draw the line between the face and the mask? How do we separate the imposing from the imposter?
In this country one can't stretch one's leg without poking a hypocrite in the groin. A person may be notorious for plundering the country, but nobody can question his love for it. A person may be most unscrupulous in private life, but he ascends to become a role model in public. Every face is tightly ensconced in his mask.
This two-faced traffic has created an inexorable gridlock on our moral lanes. The college principal is a classic example of how the mask takes over the face. I thought of something else when I read about him. What about his conscience? Does it keep him awake at night? How does he hide from himself what he has hidden from others?
Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
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