Three Accidents

Kolkata 2004
I’m sure those mall trolleys will soon have horns. Like cars on our crowded streets, these trolleys just don't budge. Nobody keeps to the left or bothers if he/she is blocking somebody's path. Forget trolleys, even pedestrians could do with horns these days. Imagine trying to rush to work through a narrow lane. You will encounter people walking hand-in-hand at a leisurely pace, while you hunt for an opening from where to overtake. Maybe it would help if you could honk. Until the authorities come up with that, I thought the next best thing to do would be speeding. So, whenever I saw a crowded path ahead, I simply ran. Big feet landing with a thud, announcing my hurry, seemed to help. Or, I hummed loudly while brushing through people. That made overtaking people easier. So long as people coming from the front kept to their left it was smooth sailing. Then, one day, as I was speeding through, believing my truck-like demeanour would show me the way, I hit someone hard. There was no crash, but bone hit bone and rebounded. I looked up to see who the victim was. An old frail man in a dhoti kurta, he could easily have been my family patriarch. I could not meet his eyes. I looked downcast, ashamed. With great effort I finally tried to meet his eye. All he said was, “Bete, tumhe choth to nahi ayee? (Son, hope you didn’t get hurt!)”

Cuttack 2008
My father is riding a scooter. It has ferried our family for 25 years now, but like many other mementos it stays with us. When I first joined work, I rode to my workplace on it. I am in Mumbai and my father, now retired, still rides it sometimes, in Cuttack. One day, he is returning after visiting a friend. At a crossing, he waits for some speeding youth to overtake him. But the two bike-borne youths still come and hit his scooter from behind. Luckily nothing happens. Until then. “Old man, you should not drink. And if you do, you should drink at home. For, you are an old man and can die. But we are the youth. We should not die.”

Mumbai 2009
Should I buy bread to have with eggs, or milk to have with cornflakes, I debate on my way back from the gym. Just as I am approaching my place, a car stops short of hitting me in front of a neighbouring society’s gate. I want to tell him that he might as well “run me over”. He lowers the window and, “@#$%@#$%@#$%.” I try once again, but he cuts me with more “@#$%”. I give up, “you are a battameez insaan (uncivilised man).”
“Come, I will teach you tameez (civilized behaviour), you @#$%^%.” He steps on the accelerator, the car runs over my foot. Thank god for small mercies, light cars and sports shoes. But this time I yell, “you @#$%^&.”
He comes out of his car, asks the watchman to get a danda (stick). They both go looking for one. I should use this time to flee. I don’t. When he comes back, I tell him we should go to the police station and settle this. But he grabs me by my shirt and tries to shove me into his car. “Yes, let us do that. Get into the car, chal, sit there,” he tells me. I am like, “Don’t touch me.” And then, “…..”
I next see my two-year-old son standing beside me, telling me something (Remember Meena Kumari in the last scene in Mere Apne?). I wonder how my son came to be there when he was away in Kolkata at that time.
Next moment I am lying on the road, blood oozing from my mouth, my cellphone clutched in one hand. My tormentor and his car have left. I ask the watchman the car’s number. He tells me, sotto voce, ‘Go away from here’.

At the cinema

Ever since my wife and toddler son joined me in Mumbai, we had stopped watching movies on the big screen. Denied the luxury called undisturbed sleep at home, thanks to our bundle of joy’s uninterrupted wailing, we dared not venture into a multiplex and look back at it as our hall of shame. We would just rent or buy a VCD and wait for our son to go to sleep. But by the time we could coax him into dreams we would be yawning ourselves. So we dropped the idea of watching a movie altogether.
We would look back at the last time we had been to a hall together in Kolkata, or when I had been to one in Mumbai alone. Otherwise, it made little difference to us whether it was ‘A Wednesday’, Thursday (Ghajini) or Friday. It looked like we had already seen our last show, at least for the time being.
A visit to the movies section of Landmark or Crossword meant looking nostalgically at a combo collection of Ray movies, or with regret at the new offering of movies from West Asia courtesy NDTV Lumiere.
And we comforted ourselves by reading the reviews or hearing friends speak about the movies they had seen. SMS jokes giving out the secret of a must-watch suspense thriller had little impact on us. Until, one Saturday (my off day).
Though we had stopped going to the movies, we did what we thought was the next best thing. We would go and sit inside a multiplex complex close to our home. It was the ideal setting to look back at how much fun it was to sit outside the government-owned Nandan cinema complex in Kolkata. People do not go there to just watch movies. There’s always a theatre festival going on in the open inside the complex. Or there’s a fountain beside which lovers just sit and watch and are watched. There are stalls doing brisk business selling coffee, tea and other edibles. Some went there only to see then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee arriving to translate Gabriel García Márquez into Bengali.
The multiplex near our place did not offer any of these Nandan-esque possibilities, but images of Nandan moved before our eyes, nevertheless, as we sat in front of a fountain and stared into the nothingness.
So lost were we in our thoughts, we never realised when our son had crawled all the way to the entrance of the hall. We saw a couple and their son looking askance, seeking out the careless parents. I waved at them and rushed to relieve them the responsibility of babysitting as they proceeded to watch a movie.
On coming close, the man smiled at me and asked if I was planning to watch a movie. I said ‘No,’ not letting him know what it meant to us. He then went on to say that he had bought some extra tickets as he wanted to watch the movie and they would not screen it until at least a certain number of tickets were sold. Seeing my reluctance he added that he would give me the tickets for free. I decided I would buy the tickets from him.
I told him I would need to ask my wife. By the time I talked to my wife, still near the fountain, and went back, he had found some other takers and was left with just one ticket, which he graciously gave to me, drowning all my pleas to buy the ticket. With the ticket in hand, I proceeded to buy one more for my wife, while she hurried home to collect milk bottles and extra diapers. We were not expecting to be in there till even the interval, though. We just wanted to go in long enough to watch the curtain rise, the lights go off, and the light from the projector hit the screen, just to get a feel of some of the things we were missing. And make a respectable exit, before our son started wailing.
But surprise of surprises, our son stood and watched the whole movie, from between two seats. He cried only when we tried to make him sit, as he was too short to watch the screen while seated.
Movies have cast their magic in our lives once more, and we now have someone who is, as they say, catching them young.