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.