Indian Writing

Omkara (Almost)

While buying tickets for Corporate yesterday - and what an ill-fated experience that turned out to be - we also bought tickets for the morning show of Omkara, which I really liked when I saw it last weekend. A~ was travelling last Sunday so we thought we’d see it today… but, lekin-parantu-kintu-but, it rained all of last night and when I woke up this morning our building’s garden was flooded. My father, who’s here with us right now, already had the television on. He’s addicted to 24/7 news, and he was giving us a running commentary on the flooding. The Andheri subway is flooded, he announced. And Bharatmata…

Well, that’s not news, is it, for Bombayites? I mean, it’s the monsoon, and this is Mumbai. So we drank our tea and grumbled and grouched a bit about the weather, but we never thought of cancelling our plans to see the movie, and the rains did seem to be slowing down by half-past nine. So we quickly folded up the Sunday papers, outfitted ourselves in windcheaters and Hawaii chappals (yes, we’re dedicated to the movies), and, each of us armed with a colourful umbrella, we set out to hail the cab that would take us to Apsara.

From the window of our building, beyond the flooded garden, we could see the road. Or at least, the place where the road was supposed to be. We live on the lowest-lying stretch of Breach Candy, and there was an ocean of water on the street. The road looked a little - empty. But wait, there was some movement. A bus trundled past, an SUV ploughed through, and a taxi was being pushed slowly through the brown waves.

A taxi! Yay! Where there is life, there is hope. We picked up our umbrellas purposefully. Never mind that the cab was still being pushed - surely it would start by the time we reached it! Or we could help push! A Bombay taxi after all!

My mother looked up from her book - she’s reading Nicole Krauss’s History of Love - to tell us to be careful. My father tends to worry a lot more. “Keep me informed every half an hour about your well-being,” he called as we got into the lift. Every half an hour. Well-being. He tends to talk like a newspaper editorial. We chorused back that there would be no need, we’d be okay, we were only going to a movie, after all.

Except that when we stepped out of our building and into the garden, we couldn’t even get out to the street. We tried very hard. I pretended I had never seen the giant snails and earthworms in our garden. I put my feet gingerly into the brown water. We walked five paces, then turned back, then convinced ourselves again that if we could just get out on to the street… The water was already up to my knees and I’m a short person. Five more paces, then we turned back again. We looked at each other in anguish. A~ had the tickets in the pocket of this windcheater. Onward, again, with steely resolve. The wind blew around us like the storm in King Lear. Wrong play, I said sourly in my mind - it was Othello we wanted to see. Our umbrellas turned themselves inside out. After about ten more paces into the swirling waters, when the gate was still a vast distance away, I felt something soft…hit…against…my…chappal. Aaaaargh.

Okay, I didn’t scream, but I stopped in my tracks. It was brown and dead and bleh, messy - and, thank you God, it turned out to be just a clutch of floating leaves from the samudraphal tree. But it was ENOUGH. We turned back, grieving for the wasted movie tickets, and came home.

And tried to ignore my father’s knowing I-told-you-so grin.

From Mayank Shekhar’s interview with Shahrukh Khan in the MM today (link vanishes within 24 hours):

MS: The ’90s decade, when you began your career, was a turning point for Indian economy and its people, where the rich became richer, and the poor became relatively irrelevant. There is a suggestion that no movie-star or screen image has managed to enchant both rural and urban India at the same time. Do you regret that?

SRK: I don’t understand the question.

MS:A film like Kal Ho Na Ho, though a commercial success, will not be identified with people in Purnea, a small town in Bihar. And in fact does not even open there.

SRK: You are overlooking an important point here. In the pre-’90s, the method of releasing films was very different from now. Then you began with eight prints of a film, which incidentally, you released only in the few very big cities. If the film did well there, like Hum Aapke Hai Kaun, you got the money and the guts to go deeper into the country. I don’t think people were so rude to say we should now allow poorer people to see the picture too. But that is the way the system moved. (more…)

Amit Chaudhuri on Bombay:

Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city in extremis, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. (more…)