go look

at the 4 boys on my Kaphal blog

here we are

Back to yellow and green walls.

And an intent crow, who has been checking me out through each window, by turn.

And Dhanno, who needs to know that the children in the village have not displaced her.

And fish, and FaceBook, and air-conditioning, and network signals, and face-cream in plenty, and a new lipstick from Dhanno, and bookshelves, and the TV, and Teja’s sofa.

And yellow and green walls.

 

iron peas don’t count as food

Even as we lumber through labs, stock, rate cards, costumes, actors, props, and Dhanno slogs away at drafts, drawings, models, falling off to sleep on her drawing board, we must still maintain the regiment of tiffin boxes. Since Dhanno still has to gain some weight, the little time we get together is often spent in discussing food. But her college routine is not always conducive to eating.

Her teachers and class mates often wonder why she cannot survive on coffee like everyone else. Her nutritionist said that at a recent training program, her fellow nutritionists too did not stop for meals. It seems to be a sign of dedication to your work, to go hungry.

After a few tiffin boxes came home undemolished, Teja texted Dhanno:

“Eat. If teachers say no, still eat. At least pretend. Laugh at them and eat. Tell them you don’t believe in art to the level where you can go hungry and work. Tell them you love food, and given a choice, you will select food over art. Tell them you love to burp after over-eating and you don’t feel ashamed of it. Tell them your hips don’t lie.”

of love and muddy shoes and hard work

For the last couple of weeks, it’s been all excel sheets, phone calls and meetings. No, there hasn’t been a leopard in sight. On a commercial film, you would have a casting director, production manager, travel agent, accountant, and several, several assistants and personal managers. But ‘Kaphal‘ is a tiny, tiny film in comparison, and most jobs need to be done by Teja and me, as they come up. One of the jobs that really drains me of energy is rejecting actors, and I wish I had other people doing the dirty job.

On a rare evening off, we wander off to see ‘Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya’. We are so tired, we are sure that any of the more ‘illuminating’ fare (‘The Artist’, ‘Moneyball’, ‘An Evening with Marilyn’) will put us to sleep. At a party recently, Skp said, “When you sit in a car with a good driver, you can go to sleep, knowing you are in good hands. I think a few minutes into a good film, you are reassured that the film is safe, in good hands, and you can go to sleep. A bad film keeps you on the edge of your seat.” A young teacher and I laughed. She said, “I don’t think so. You go to sleep in a theatre because it is dark.” “And cool,” I said, “and your mind says it is time to go to sleep.”

Genelia does ‘cuteness’ with grimaces. They work at times, and then, you wish she’d look for a different expression, now and then. I liked Ritesh in ‘Bluffmaster’.  But here his hands and legs seem out of control. “You are no Salman Khan”, his father tells him in TNLHG. Yet a lot of him in the film comes via Salman and more than that, via Shahrukh. The stretching out of the hands is totally passe, particularly after Shahrukh himself makes fun of the gesture.

Teja watches ‘Daata’ in fast-forward, but I cannot sit down to it. I worry though about Prem Chopra being dragged behind a horse. Later, in ‘Blackmail‘, we watch Raakhee and Shatrughan Sinha rolling and sliding down grass and pebbles, and I squirm with pain.

‘Pal pal dil ke paas’ is of course, a favorite, though Teja laughs and says it is because it is so easy to hum. But it’s the background song ‘Mile, mile do badan’ that squirms its way into my brain. Raakhee and Dharmendra hide under a pile of logs in the forest while Shotgun and his men look for them. After all the misunderstandings between them, from their wedding night until now, and the consequent celibacy, they now lie next to each other, heads opposite each other. They start with caressing each other’s legs. Dharmendra kisses her bare foot, which seems quite ‘modern’ to me, as opposed to the idea of a woman’s place being at a man’s feet. Then Raakhee kisses his sock and muddy shoe. (No, no, I don’t envy an actor’s lot.) Then, they slide down against each other, until their faces are close to each other. Then, somehow he sits up and lies down beside her. The space under the logs miraculously changes dimensions to accommodate each move. But who cares, the song is sizzling hot. And as Teja points out, unlike any other climax song in a villian’s den.

Later, after the mandatory fist fight, and moral resolution, Dharmendra and Raakhee walk off into the sunrise. (Shemaroo however having tele-cine-ed all ‘day for night’ scenes as day, we move from day to evening to morning to night, in the most confusing way.) Teja says, “But what about Ganga Ma? She hasn’t been punished at all.” Ganga Ma, introduced as a faithful servant of the household, someone who has looked after Dharmendra since he was a child, had gone on in the very next shot to betray him, by passing on information to Shotgun and his associates. She is not caught, and we can imagine that she continues working in the household, a potential hazard for future times.

Sated at the end of the evening, I conclude that making films is hard work, it is much more fun watching films and talking about them. You can get in some popcorn and chocolates and cuddling up too with the latter.

another kind of sighting

The daily hour and a half journey to Rudraprayag from Ghimtoli was accomplished in the dark. I was not car sick this time by virtue of sitting extremely still in my seat, and looking into the far distance, as Teja advised. Makar in the front seat had his eyes glued to the road, and looked unhappy most of the time. Sikander’s mischievous prattle and childish demands for ‘bhang’ did little to comfort him. Sikander may have been stoned, Teja thought, but he was a good, safe driver, nevertheless.

The road into Rudraprayag descends parallel to the river, where I look out of the left hand side window, carefully keeping my eyes averted from the looming cliff beside my own window. Our car’s headlights head towards the lights of Rudraprayag. The last 15 minutes of the car ride seem the longest. Suddenly, I see the cat’s head, peeping above the edge of the road, coming up the cliff on the side of river. “Cheetah!”, I scream, as the car moves ahead.

Later, Dhanno would admonish me patiently, “Mom, cheetahs are extinct in India. What you saw, must be a leopard.” “I know, I know”, I say, “but you know, I saw the cheetah through Teja’s window, not even my own.” I go on and on about the cheetah for a few more minutes, until she says, “Enough, Mom, with your cheetah stories.”

At the time, however, Sikander, Teja, Makar understood what I meant by ‘cheetah’. Sikander did a quick U-turn, a feat on the narrow hilly road, and headed back to the spot. The cat was still sitting by the edge of the road. Sikander switched off the car, but kept the headlights on. We looked at the animal for 5 minutes or so, and the animal looked at us. Another car passed us by. Sikander took the car ahead and did a slower U-turn to head us back to the hotel. When we came back, the cat was still there. We stood there again, and looked at it for a few minutes, while it looked at us. Sikander said, “It must have gone to the river to drink water, and now wants to go back home. It’s waiting to cross the road.”

Both Sikander and Makar were keen that Teja take a photograph of the animal, but Teja was reluctant to waste time getting his camera out, and adjusting the settings, when he could be sitting in the silence, just looking at the cat.

Makar, who is only a token villager, having lived in the city for the last 30 years, moved to throw some tissue paper at the ‘cheetah’, in a bid to make the story more dramatic, and increase TRP ratings. Teja scolded him, and decided it was time for us to move on.

A couple of motorbikes passed us (and the ‘cheetah’) while we exchanged looks, and we wondered at their safety. Righteously, we stopped a man crossing the road with a lantern, and informed him that there was a ‘cheetah’ on the road, and he should be careful. He nodded, and said, “Oh, OK.” He did not seem very worried.

At the hotel, we told the manager we saw a ‘cheetah’ just outside Rudraprayag, and he said, “Oh, OK.” He did not seem very excited.

In Ghimtoli, earlier that evening, an old man made me lemon tea, and said, “It’s good you big people from the city come here to the mountains.”

I asked, “And what makes us big?”

Kailash, Makar’s brother, who is not easily intimidated by generalizations, said, “Kaka, don’t we go to the city too, to look around? So what if they come to the mountains?”

Another young man pipes in, “We go to the city and feel fascinated by the rotis made on gas, because they are so soft. They come to the village, and like the rotis made on wood fire, because they smell different. But in the end, we all eat rotis.”

The difference of course, is that in the city, we have the means to earn our rotis and more, and in the village, they don’t.

The young man says, “Everyone leaves. Once they get a job in the city, they take their families. Only old men like these, who feel they cannot leave their land, stay on.” But more about this, in another post.

For us, seeing the leopard by the side of the road was an event. For a villager from the hills, seeing the local train is. Or the sea.

And we say to each other’s excitement, “Oh, OK.”

In the meanwhile, in absence of a photo of the leopard, here is a photo of our driver, Sikander, who I thought was very fashionable, and except for the pink, quite appropriately dressed for the jungle.

shall we bare our bums then?

A first class AC coupe does not ensure a clean toilet. Within the hour, someone had done their big business for the day, and failed to flush away. The coupe was connected on one side with the second class coach, and on the other side, with the engine room, which did not bode well for sanitary conditions through the journey.

After lunch from miniature sized foil boxes that ensured maximum spillover, I walked into the corridor looking for a dustbin. The attendant said there were no dustbins, I could throw the boxes on the tracks from the gap between the two dabbas. I looked at him incredulously. From behind me, Teja asked, “There are no dustbins in the coach?” He shrugged his shoulders and said, “There is one in your coupe.” He came to the door, and pointed to one, in a dark corner, under the seat. I said, “Then why did you say there were none?” He said, “You asked me if there were any in the coach.”

At night, Teja said, “Use the toilet on the left. The one on the right is being used by the attendant and the people from the engine room to smoke beedis.”

The lobby near the left hand side toilets was covered in daal, banana peels and what-not. The attendant passed me red-eyed, and went off to sleep, waking up only at 10 am the next morning, to collect our blankets and pillows.

Later on our road trip, up into the hills, at Dev Prayag, the toilets were refreshingly clean. In the hills, I went under cover of the forest, mostly. Im Ghimtoli, at Makar’s house, the toilet is outside the house, but spotlessly clean.

Back from Rudra Prayag, at Haridwar, the toilet attendant looked at me sleepily when I walked in. After I had peed, there was no water in the taps, flush or basin. One of the toilets was disgustingly dirty. As I walked out, the attendant opened his eyes wide enough to ask me for money. I scolded him for the state of the toilets and the lack of water. He said, “Oh, if one toilet was dirty, you should have gone into the second one, or the third, or the fourth. And if you needed water, you should have asked me.” He got up to start a tap high up on a wall, at which all the taps in all the toilets started gushing water. I failed to make him understand that I could not go into a toilet, discover it does not have water, and then ask him for it, with my pants down. He did not look like he cared, anyway.

In the car, I described to Teja, the state of the toilet in graphic detail. “Why do you need to share this with me?” he grumbled. “The next thing I know, you will be showing me photographs.” I said, “Just. The curse of being a woman. In India.”

I shall refrain from sharing the details here.

A couple of hours later, at a dhaba in Muzzafarnagar, I did the crouch, my face and nose all puckered up. I went up to the proprietor and said, “Can’t you keep your toilets clean? How are women supposed to go there?” He said, “Oh sorry. It must have been those people before you. Should I wash it with water?” I could not explain to him, that a toilet needs to be clean before someone enters it. After a 2 or 3 hour drive, I am not going to wait for someone to clean down the toilet before I go.

I came out to Teja, standing in the sun, braving the wind, muttering under my breath. “Who are you abusing now?”, he asked. “No one”, I said. “Yes, you are.” “Men, in general”, I said. “Just because they can pee anywhere, standing up, they just don’t care about what happens to women.” “Why don’t you start a campaign?” he says. “Women should start peeing anywhere and everywhere. Men do it. They don’t feel ashamed if a woman is around. Then why should women be the only ones to feel shame? Let the men worry that if they want to ‘protect the honor of their women-folk’ they had better take care of them.”

There was a tree just before us, between the highway and the dhaba, and a clean patch of ground around it. I wondered what the men in the dhaba would think of me going there.

Maybe they would start scurrying around to clean the toilet, which they had not done, even after my complaint. Or would it just be titillating for them?

So, anyone ready for some monkeying around? I am certain that we would soon have the morality police down on ‘shameless women’.

haridwar super fast

We are finally on the train.

I don’t mind travelling once I’m pushed out of the house.

It’s going to be a 29 hour journey if the train runs on time.

For the first time, we are in a First Class AC Coupe. The two of us alone.

The coupe is spacious but not exactly clean. I had to brush off dust, lint, crumbs before perching.

I don’t think any hawkers will visit us. There are only 11 stops where we can get off. There’s going to be too much Teja and Banno.

Maybe we will finally work.

For now, we have our smart phones.

this ullu wants to be an owl

Last night, outside a friend’s house, an owl was stuck in a tree.

The boys playing volleyball on the street called the fire engine. The fire officers parked the engine outside the gate just as we drove in, and marched in purposefully ahead of us.

The owl hung like a bedraggled sepia tinted kite by the tip of its wing, a remnant from Uttarayana.

We did not stop to watch the rescue, certain the officers would accomplish it in a few minutes. The boys went back to their game of volleyball.

Later that night, as we drove back home, the owl was not there. I assume it took its rescue in a matter-of-fact manner, and without thanking the boys or the fire officers, or regretting those minutes of distress, went its way.

Ullus, on the other hand, take much pleasure in entanglement.

Boys playing volleyball would be rudely dismissed to mind their own business, shouted at for playing on the street. Fire officers would be treated with stony silence, disapproved of for not taking care of more important disasters. Curious passersby would get a taste of spit, venom or deadly smiles. A few may find some unbidden tears fall on their shoulders.

“How dare you rescue me?”, ullus say. “I am happy, I am fine, stuck in this tree.”

All my life, I have resisted advice. Teja on the other hand, asks too many people for their opinions. This used to irritate me. “Why do you give the impression to others that you don’t know anything?” Teja would answer mischievously, knowing I would be annoyed, “Research.”

That conversation is over now. The next time, I am stuck, you are welcome to come and untangle me.

sweet love

If there’s something that can completely unhinge me, it is a tin of rasgullas. I might crave for khichda, or saat-handli-pav, or patveliya-kheema, foods of my childhood, which are almost completely unavailable to me now, but sit me down in front of a plate full of the said foods, and I’ll tuck in only as much, or just a little bit more than I would my maid’s gavari-aloo-chapati. There may be times where I turn into Ms. Congeniality on beer, but for the better part of the year, I can look at an array of liquor bottles with complete indifference. I could have chocolates in the fridge for months, and never go beyond eating a piece at a time. I love hot jalebis like anyone else, but a couple can sate me.

And then, there are rasgullas. It must be the tins my father brought back from his business trips to Calcutta with stories of trams. My parents had travelled in trams in Bombay, but they had been discontinued a year before I was born, just another one of those things I thought I had missed by not being born earlier, like the chocolates Mummy ate when she was a child and which melted as soon as you put them on your tongue, or the handful of sweets you could buy for 1 paisa, or the bicycle rides my parents took when they were engaged from Khadki to Khadakvasla and the picnics they went for.

Tins were anyway, novelties. The only other tin we got at home contained baked beans with a sweet tomato sauce. And the rasgullas were unlike any sweet I had eaten. No ghee congealing in one’s mouth, not extremely sweet, not vilely colored, they were pristine white, round, chewy.

My father must have made one or two trips to Calcutta, and I think I did not taste any rasgullas for a few more years after that. Not from the tin, that is. We would be able to order a plate of rasgullas at a restaurant, but where was the pleasure of several, ‘uncountable’ rasgullas bobbing around in their sugary syrup in a staid plate of 2?

One day, a maid came to our house with a  familiar looking tin. Another employer had given her the tin as a gift. She was confused about how to open it, and about what was in it. My mother opened the tin for her, while my sister and I looked on excitedly, for the beloved sight of those white, sweet balls. ‘What are these?’, she asked suspiciously. ‘Rasgullas’, we piped up. She did not seem enamored of them, and asked us to keep them if we liked. My mother politely refused, while I writhed in silent protest. The maid insisted, so my mother kept a few rasgullas for us, and returned the tin to the maid. A couple of days later the maid told us that she had thrown the sweets away, no one in her house had liked them. I was aghast. To this day, when I eat rasgullas, I think of the ones that were thrown away. And I feel compelled to finish all the ones before me.

As far as rasgullas are concerned, I’ll start decorously with 2. Then another 2 because I love them. Then another 2, because heck, why not, I love them so much. And then, someone who loves me, will say, go on have another. And I shyly, will.

On my one and only, very short visit to Calcutta, I found the time to eat rasgullas in the evening at a small corner shop. The hot rasgullas disconcerted me, and unfortunately I did not stay long enough, to get used to them.

Recently a friend has started making frequent trips to Calcutta.  He says, the tins are bakwaas, you must get the rasgullas fresh from a shop, in a bottle. So he brought me a bottle last week. Should I call him a friend? He has undone a month’s diet.

I thought I’d have one a day, then reasoned it would mean cheating on my diet for a month, which would be extremely bad for my morale. Anyway, if the contents of the bottle were going into my stomach by the end of one month, why not by the end of the week? Might as well get the evil over with sooner, and get back to my diet.

Whatever.

The bottle is empty now.

There is one rasgulla waiting for Teja, however, who was away for 2 weeks.

He doesn’t even like rasgullas much, though he loves watching me eat them. But I thought it only fair to leave one for him. This could only be love.

you are better off buying, borrowing or stealing

You click on a link and move on.
In the next few minutes, you get a sales call based on that click.
The sales representative lures you with an offer.
You, hardened, say you were only surfing.
Later you give in and join up for a 6 month scheme.
The customer representative says if you take an upgrade you will get ‘x’ discount and ‘x’ gift.
You agree since there can never be enough DVDs in your life.
All this takes half-an-hour.
Your DVDs come in regularly for 2 weeks.
You are happy.
The 3rd week, the delivery guy disappears for 4-5 days.
You complain.
You get an apologetic mail from the support team.
The ‘x’ gift meanwhile has not showed up even after almost 6 weeks and 3 reminders.
The 6th week, the delivery guy disappears again.
The customer care representative says that your movies have been dispatched, they are on the way, you will receive them in the evening.
The next day has arrived. Your movies have not arrived.
This is SeventyMM.com.
Then there is BigFlix.
It cheats customers in a Bigger Way.
One day you renew your membership.
The next week, the company announces they have stopped home deliveries.
Viewing will now only be online.
They have not seen fit to give notice of their plans on their website.
You are stuck with a membership for 6 months. Even though you don’t want to watch movies online. And the selection of online movies is not large.
In the two months before they shut down home delivery operations, you have been having trouble with deliveries.
The customer care representatives do not tell you, of course, that they are in the process of shutting down the next month, the next week, the next day.
They send you 50 used DVDs as compensation for the inconvenience caused to you.
The DVDs don’t reflect a single choice in your rental queue.
Someone has just picked them haphazardly from the nearest godown and delivered them to you.
You complain.
You get a standard formatted answer in reply.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood video rental shops have shut down.
Unable to compete with the cut-throat prices and the larger stocks of the bigger companies.
Unable to pay exorbitant rents on shop space.

buy it

I’m not happy with the synopsis. Why, oh, why, the sad story of a happy film?

I guess I won’t be able to crib about Shemaroo anymore.Though the good news is they haven’t mastered this, Reliance has. Shemaroo is only distributing it. Several friends from FTII were involved in checking the technical quality of the DVD mastering, so I’m hoping it won’t disappoint.

A friend saw it at Crossword.

You can also buy it at Flipkart here. You get 2 bonus movies with it.

It comes with Tamil, Kannada and Bengali subtitles. Need to confirm whether it has English subtitles or not.

[Edited to add: Yes, it does have English subtitles. The Flipkart page makes it seem as if it doesn't.]

Please ignore the synopsis, and write your own reviews.

[Edited to add: The DVD also has some great archival footage of Chacha Nehru at the inception of CFSI with lots of kids.]

waking up

I have been watching films.

Reading.

Living, sulking, spending, brooding.

Christmas, New Year.

Comings, and going away. Travelling, being nowhere.

The clamor did not bode well for melodies.

I stayed away from the computer screen. It demanded too much coherence.

I felt flimsy.

This morning, then, there is a tune.

I don’t go to the window to look for the flute-seller.

It is enough that his music reaches me on the 13th floor, despite the insistent growling from the highway.

Maybe someday I’ll meet him on street-level. Maybe I’ll be bold enough to thank him for wandering our streets.

Maybe I’ll say nothing. Maybe he’ll know anyway.

i’ll definitely post a photo when it’s done

A DIY husband, however talented he may be, can be mortifying and exasperating.

He can also teach you a thing or two about stoicism.

Any job around the house, even if it is replacing a flush tank, involves not only research, but contemplation, discussion, designing, argument and deep contemplation again.

A sofa in the study can take over a year to materialize. Even so, fate must reconcile with Teja’s mood at the time.

Measurements of the space available to us are taken several times. Our requirements are enlisted several times, do we need to lounge on the sofa, do we need storage space under it, how will we open the drawer next to it, so on and so forth. The designs are then put into a drawer, we forget all about the sofa for several days, and after a month or so, the discussion begins again.

One day, when he feels specially indulgent towards me, particularly after I have nagged and nagged for 2 days, and added some tears, we go to our favorite store and look at the designs. I say, “We may just find a sofa we like, which fits into our space, and we can buy right away.” He nods.

We do find a sofa we both like. I also find a small coffee table with four pullout stools that fits into the study perfectly. I reach for my credit card. Teja says, “We’ll go back home and take the measurements of the space.” I know it is futile to argue.

In the car, Teja says, “I could make a better sofa for you at half the price. Forget the money, but we could make it exactly as we want. Of course, if you like the sofa, let’s buy it. I’d like you to be happy. It’s just that I like making furniture, you know.”

The man has learned feminine guile.

I say, “But I want a wooden one like the one we saw. Not a ply box.”

He says, “Of course. Look I have found a wood cutting mill near Valsad. They have all the machines I require. I can take the exact measurements, mark the cuts for the joints and have them give me the finished pieces of wood. Then all I have to do is nail them together at home.”

I say, “Really?” No sawdust flying around, no instruments lying around, no general mess around the house, for weeks.

He continues, “If you like that coffee table, you buy it. It’s really nice, and I couldn’t make anything like that, at that cost.”

I say, “Really? You mean that?”

He says, “Yes, I like it too.”

I test him out, “Should we turn back and get it right now?”

He says, “Now?”

I say, “Yes, why not? We are still close by.”

He says, “OK.”

I cannot believe my luck. This means he really likes the coffee table. I’m already planning the room around the coffee table, on our way back to the store.

I look at the coffee table proprietarily and tell the attendant, “I want that.”

He looks confused. He makes calls. “The Set-of-5 is discontinued, Madam. And this piece is sold. The website is down, so I can’t check the stocks in other stores for a week. But maybe, after that …”

I leave my name and number and sulk all the way home.

Teja says, “If they don’t get it for you, I’ll make it for you.”

Then, we stop to look yet again at TV sets. Teja cannot put together a TV even if he would like to. So, for a year, we have stared at TVs every time we have passed an electronics store. For hours, Teja has researched various TVs, brands, costs, technical specifications on the Internet. Dhanno and I can now answer all his questions on the differences between Plasma, LED and LCD TVs. We finally deserve to buy one. Teja makes the calls, books a deal. We wait a day, 2 days. The day our TV is meant to be delivered, is an all-India bandh.

Teja says, “It will come in a day or two. Maybe, we should re-paint the study before we get the new TV. Plus we need to get that wall water-proofed. And we will need a new DVD player cabinet. Let me make the designs. I should also check out the options for wall mounts.”

There are times when the little green elves have it in for me. Or maybe it is Miss God. Or maybe my long-departed Maaji who was not at all what grandmothers should be like. And to whose mind, I was not the granddaughter I ought to be. It is times like these when I wonder if I ought to be wearing some lucky stones or magic bracelets.

But the research involved in procuring these, defeats me.

hum hindustani (1960) – for bombay buffs

‘Hum Hindustani‘ was made in 1960, and it strikes me that this was the year my parents married. My father was 27, my mother 20. The film reflects the still-upbeat Nehruvian philosophy of the time, the concept of a new industrial India, that would conquer all the problems besetting the country until then, the faith in a youth that was charged with idealism and hope.

The film begins with a montage of ‘Incredible New India’ stock shots, including Nehru at a public gathering and construction work at the Bhakra-Nangal dam, over the famous song, ‘Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat puraani, ..’

Sadly however, the film seems to come together in flashes. The movie is a bit of a ramble, not leading up to anything much.

Sukhen (Sunil Dutt) and Satyen (Joy Mukherjee)

are the two older brothers of a large family, with a younger sister, and two other very young siblings and a mother (Leela Chitnis) in full red lipsticked-glory

and a father, Amarnath (Mubarak) in a wheelchair, in a huge house falling to pieces.

It does have a lovely Saraswati on stained glass across its stairway though.

The family is embroiled in a court case which Amarnath refuses to give up on, even if he has to lose his wealth, because he believes he is right. Sukhen and Satyen are both engaged, the first to Sudha (Asha Parekh) and the second to Kalpana (Helen). Sudha has been studying abroad, and her father breaks the engagement while she is away once Amarnath loses the court case and his wealth. Of course, Sukhen and Sudha have never seen each other.

Sudha comes back from abroad, and subjects her family friends to a dance.

The abstract stained glass backdrop on the stairway of her home helps her performance.

Soon after her dance, she befriends Sukhen by pretending to be a poor girl. He runs a bookstore

which is across the office of the Mafatlal Group, a big textile group at the time.

and an employment agency for mill workers from an office with a view of the Municipal Corporation building,

He also writes books in his spare time. A bestseller called ‘Hum Hindustani’ which gives him 10,000 rupees in royalty after selling 500 or 600 copies. Aspiring writers, make a note!

None of this goes anywhere, there is a rather ineffective villain Shankar, Sanjeev Kumar makes his first screen appearance here as a police inspector,

there is Dog Caesar who is called Tiger,

there is the mandatory accusation of stealing and court cases, there is a huge fire in the mill.

There are moments, but not a real cohesive narrative.

There is a scene when Sukhen hits Satyen in anger, furious that he could have believed that Sukhen has stolen money from Satyen’s boss. Leela Chitnis comes in, stops him, and holds Satyen. The father comes in at the back and sits there, looking. Sukhen calms down, but still feels helpless. There is hardly any dialogue but the scene is so powerful.

There is also an exchange between Sukhen and Sudha. He tells her that he can help her find a job, and she mocks him, “What job, a teacher, nurse, secretary, earning a few hundred rupees? All the good jobs, important jobs are taken by men.”

There is some serious color-co-ordinated ragging by Sudha’s friends of Sukhen and Sudha at a picnic.

There is moneylender’s office and the BEST bus

and the fire engine.

Joy Mukherjee and Helen walk in the rain on Marine Drive

and near the Gateway of India, singing.

I imagine my newly-wed parents walking around the Gateway on Sundays, though not singing, of course. Sadly.

There is a large vacant stretch between the road and the Gateway which is as I remember it from childhood, not the barricades, and cars, armoured trucks and security personnel of today.

There is a Victoria ride, which is what the horse carriages were called then.

But I am sure that even then, you couldn’t eat ice-cream at a roadside cafe near the Taj.

There are boats

And Asha Parekh singing on a boat.

And there is the mill, packed with machines that work

and bales of cotton.

There was a time when the mills in the films worked as they did in real life and films told stories about workers

and their capitalist owners,

the rich and the poor. Even the fantasies, the light-hearted comedies seemed rooted in the real world. Films were made for the crores of people who made up the working population.

I grew up in Agripada. My father for a time, had a small factory manufacturing tins for biscuits. My uncle worked as a clerk in another factory. My aunt was married to a factory worker. My younger uncle owned a small garage. My friend lived in a mill-worker chawl because her father worked in a textile mill. Her house was little bigger than a big cupboard, and I remember 8 or 9 of them lived there.

All around us were the movie halls. Maratha Mandir, Ganga Jamuna (wonder of wonders, 2 twin theaters in one complex), Minerva, Naaz, Novelty, Apsara, Edward, Albert, Shree Vijay, and so many whose names I cannot remember. Some of the movie halls were beautiful, and grand, with lovely, sweeping stairways, chandeliers, carpets, murals on the walls, some were bare with wooden seats and rickety fans. It did not matter to us as my mother was crazy about going to the movies and so were we.

Usually, we walked to one theater or the other, with my mother and one or the other of her friends, or aunts, or cousins. We watched movies incessantly, sometimes in the balcony, sometimes in the lower stalls, we hung around movie halls an hour before the movie was about to begin, dreading the idea that we may not get tickets, that the show would be houseful. It never occurred to my mother who dragged us everywhere that we were watching movies with mill-workers or cab drivers, or hand cart pullers. We just took the tickets we got. I don’t remember her ever being teased or stared at, even though she was a very beautiful woman. Bombay even then, was no-nonsense. People came to see a film, and they didn’t care who sat with them.

It was movie-theatre land, a theatre every few meters. Much later I also learned that this is where most of the film distributors had their offices as did some production houses. It was also the land of the dancing girls, the red-light area, the horse stables, and the bridge clubs. Now I know that it was also the land of the background dancers and the choreographers.

Is it any wonder then, that the movies seemed so real to us? Even Kashmir, which appeared in several films and as different from Bombay as it was, seemed familiar and our own.

Soon the mills became empty hulls, useable as shooting locations only for the climax fights.

Now even the last remnants of the mills have disappeared, most of them have been transformed into malls and entertainment complexes.

Our films too seem to have followed the trajectory of the mills. Films mostly are now products, bits of stimulation offered up to the consumer.

‘Hum Hindustani’ ends with a montage of fairy-lit Mumbai monuments, the Victoria Terminus, Gateway of India, the Municipal Corporation building. It confirms my memory of being taken to see the lights as a child, on Independence Day or Republic Day. I remember the streets being very, very crowded, people in trucks coming to see the sights, food on the streets, fireworks. But like all my memories, I have held this one a little suspect, unsure of whether anything like this ever happened.

Now I know it did.

the revenge of the tiffin box

Most of the years Dhanno was growing up, I snoozed in bed, while Teja prepared her breakfast, packed her tiffin, sent her off to school. He is the one who waited with her for the school bus, then a few years later, drove her to her new school in the next block, and then later, said bye to her at the door as she walked off to school on her own.

Long break tiffins were usually leftover pasta, rajma-chawal, or pau-bhaji from dinner, potato-cheese-chutney sandwiches, jam and roti rolls, or the occasional ‘get a vada pav from the canteen’. Small break tiffins were unimaginatively biscuits or dry fruit or a fruit or sometimes a slice of cake.

For years, Teja and I spoke, while we perambulated one or the other of the gardens near our house, “Once Dhanno is 18, we will….” We would travel, we would be free, we would do what we liked, we would be bored, we would cry our hearts out.

When Dhanno did turn 18, for one, she reared her heels in, and refused to leave for a hostel like any self-respecting, fed-up-of-my-parents teenager should. She likes her orange room too much.

After a considerable amount of stress, she did get into a good college in Bumm-Bumm-Bhole-Land and we were jumping around to “Yahoo!”

Then what do you know, but in a week’s time, she began falling ill. And ill. And ill. And ill. She lost a lot of weight, she fainted a couple of times, she had no strength even to get out of bed at times.

I took her to a nutritionist.

Now, we have a regime. Four tiffins, big bottle of water with electrolyte salts, extra juice or chaas in her bag.

Finally, she goes to a college where there are no text books or note books. She has a locker for her instruments. But she still has a huge haversack for all the food she needs to carry.

Evenings are spent in preparing meals large enough for dinner and a mini-lunch tiffin and a big-lunch tiffin for the next day. Then there is the tiffin she has to sneakily consume in the middle of a classroom lecture. And the tiffin she has to eat after college, before she heads back home. After dinner, we rest for a while before we begin the task of packing all the tiffins. In the morning, we wake up to make her breakfast. During the day, we check the fridge and the shelves to see what we are running out of, and what we need to load up on for the next few days.

A long, long time ago, when Dhanno was very little, and life was a round of feeding her and cleaning her poo, I said to a friend of mine, “This too shall pass.” 18 years later, I am a feeding machine once again.

Not to mention the fact, that I feel guilty-Mom all over again, for all the tiffins I did not pack while she was in school.