‘Like a Scene from All Those Movies’

Anjum Hasan wrote a comment for Out of Print on republishing this story written twenty years ago and set in a Bangalore in which the ‘old and the new are held in balance early in the new millennium.’

Her comment closes with:

‘So rather than create nostalgia for what was, the story could, two decades on, merely stand as a measure of how swiftly and surely we have arrived at this point: of the world simply being too much with us. And that is something, that clogged surfeit, it is much harder to make fiction from.’

Read the full text at this link, and appended below.

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I’ve known Nikhil for two years but watching him in a crowded café, talking to a girl as he desperately smokes cigarette after cigarette, I feel I don’t know him at all. And this girl too, whose hesitations Nikhil will have sensed and quickly closed in on, whose cigarettes he’ll be smoking, will learn of nothing but his hunger for American films. She might think he’s revealing himself when all he’s letting on is his love for that wit, that storytelling, that swagger, even. Nikhil was the second person I got to know after moving to Bangalore. The first was Radha who lived down the lane and was studying to become a dentist. She befriended me soon after I arrived but could never quite understand how I planned to sustain myself on the writing and reading I did. She didn’t just mean financially. The idea of sitting alone like this day after day without any kind of horizon in view unsettled her.

I had exhausted the potential of the modest three-stanza poems on the life of my small hometown. I wanted something more – the bite of the big city, a feeling of being at the centre. Delhi was too crass and Bombay seemed expensive. That left Bangalore where, as a student, I’d once spent three days attending a philosophy seminar at the university and trawling the town’s treasure-filled bookshops. A month after I moved into my tiny flat, Radha sent a message with her maid asking if I could lend her some novels. Her plain and peach-coloured house, two small storeys and no place for a compound, was at the corner of the lane, and I guessed she had spied me on my small sit-out in the evenings, absorbed in a book. I sent her a Martin Amis. It was returned in four days with a request for another. Something about the smooth look of the book assured me she hadn’t read it. I don’t know why this didn’t annoy me.

In those first few lonely months, I’d spend a lot of time in an old café in the town centre, and Nikhil would always be there, smoking his cigarettes and drinking his coffee and, if on his own, looking around him as if expecting someone or something. The café’s owner, who often strode through it slapping old-timers on the back and asking them about their creative projects, their travel plans, their love lives, introduced me to Nikhil. He called him a filmmaker, to which Nikhil said – Go away Abraham, your optimism depresses me. Then Nikhil gestured at the Nabokov novel in my hand. I said I was reading it for the third time. I said Lolita’s genius was in its prose and its plot was perhaps a device to find a new and riveting way to talk about an old and hackneyed theme like love, an aesthetic device. Nikhil said – You should watch the film, actually both the films based on Lolita, there’s more to this book than its prose.

That remark became the hallmark of our friendship. Nikhil had read a few novels in his student years but now got bored when people talked about books. We’d go looking for copies of pirated films in the bazaars of Gandhinagar, stride through Cubbon Park eating peanuts, or sit in the café for hours on end, subsisting on many coffees and one plate each of chicken sandwiches. Or watch films at his place. He had boxes in his living room piled high with videotapes and DVDs and he would stand over them and ask me – What do you want to watch? That question was rhetorical, superfluous but Nikhil took delight in asking it. In the end, he’d be the one to decide. (It wouldn’t do to just watch Tarantino’s well-known films without also watching his smaller gems like Jackie Brown. It was necessary to see Barton Fink and Fargo back-to-back to be able to discuss which was the better film. And how could I admire Marlon Brando’s aged mafia don character without first having seen the actor young in On The Waterfront?) All of these films Nikhil had already seen, often more than once. Now instead of watching them, he observed them, picked out favourite lines, noticed actors’ quirks, traced connections between them and the dozens of others stored in the huge cinematic map he carried in his head. Soon we were writing a film-script of our own. Though I had come to Bangalore with the idea of working on a novel while I looked for part-time work, I was easily persuaded when Nikhil said that the time was ripe for a good cinematic thriller. He knew people in Bombay who might want to buy it and I had the Hindi into which we’d have to translate.

‘I think we should drop the cops-and-robbers format and look at crime in an everyday setting,’ said Nikhil. Our idea was perfected over many evenings – a little hill of cigarette butts growing between us, the smell of traffic that would get into our hair and clothes when we walked, the cosy warmth inside the café on December evenings – and it was to take an average guy, someone in a position of minor responsibility, and plot, through his investigation of a crime, his gradual crack-up. We embarked on this writing adventure in a spirit of mild hilarity, yet there was also an underlying seriousness to our discussions on plot and dialogue. Both Nikhil and I were men without much money – he lived alone like me and received from his parents in Coorg a modest cheque every month. He had briefly apprenticed with a graphic designer and would sometimes take up the odd design job. I was thirty-two years old – two years older than him – and dependent on the savings from the teaching job I’d held for seven years. I reviewed new novels for the local papers but knew I’d soon have to find better-paying work. For now, there was the film script and the promise of money.

It was in April that Nikhil first disappeared – a month of baked evenings that would darken with the promise of rain. I’d sit under a rackety fan every day, typing slowly on the old desktop computer I’d brought with me on the train. I called Nikhil on his mobile phone one Saturday afternoon, feeling the season’s restlessness and wanting a beer, but couldn’t reach him. So I called Radha instead. Radha was a whole ten years younger than me, she who considered my pecuniary situation and my informal approach to life, irregular and strange. But she seemed glad to spend time with me – to sit on my balcony with a cup of tea, eat roasted corn on the cob from a passing vendor with a pushcart, nip into my kitchen and laugh at how empty the shelves were. We never talked about books, she didn’t ask to borrow anymore, but about the city – how she had seen it change and how it was still the same. Unlike Nikhil who only moved between cafés, video shops and pubs concentrated in the city’s centre, Radha was an explorer. We’d go on her scooter to wholesale markets in search of cheap spices for her mother’s cooking. We’d eat fifteen-rupee meals in shabby places where rickshaw-drivers and auto mechanics were fed. I would see the plot for what was quickly becoming my screenplay unfold on these outings with Radha, and wonder a little at Nikhil’s insularity to what was around him, his childish obsession with America.

Radha would send across idlis and coconut chutney with her maid some Sunday mornings. And when I went over at her insistence to watch television, which was always muted, her widowed mother would smile at me from a corner of their darkened living room, where she sat chopping greens or humming hymns. I would watch the girl instead – her easy laugh and quick sense of indignation – and think: I could get to love her. But in that shadowy room with its sepia portrait of the dead father, I also sensed anxieties – about money, career, marriage, the future. Middle-class anxieties of the kind that I considered myself free of but which affected me, sitting there. Early mornings, floating out of sleep, I’d hear the small explosion of Radha’s scooter down the lane as she set out for college, reminding me of her seriousness, the knowledge that she had only herself to rely on. That Saturday in April when I called, she announced she was going to come over and make me rasam. I protested feebly – rasam suggested a complexity my kitchen wouldn’t be able to handle. She arrived with a bulging plastic bag half an hour later. The sound of Radha in my kitchen, as I returned to my computer, lulled me. After stalling for a while, I got up and went to boil some rice. We kept bumping into each other in that narrow space but she didn’t seem to notice as she talked on – asking me questions about what people ate where I’d grown up, the languages spoken, the weather. She’d never been outside Bangalore and her intrepidity within the city was in direct contrast to her ignorance about life outside it. We ate a late lunch sitting cross-legged on the striped mattress stitched and stuffed by the cotton carder around the corner, the sole piece of furniture in my living room, and then continued to sit there. She fended off my advances with little slaps on my wrists, giggling and refusing to meet my eye. Then she sobered and said, ‘You’re just playing with me.’

‘Of course, I am. I’m knocking on your door and asking – will you come out and play with me?’

‘I can’t fool around. I have final exams next week.’

She got up to go. I asked her if we could meet the next day and even though she refused and said I was dangerous, I was happy when I lay down on my mattress and fell into a clear, brief sleep.

Nikhil was still unreachable the next day. I went out to the nearest cybercafé and sent him an email. On the third day I took two buses to his house in Wilson Garden and found the door locked and his bike parked inside the also locked gate. I thought, when I returned home and began pacing my six-foot wide balcony, mobile phone in hand, of how little I knew about the man. He spoke of other friends but I’d never actually met any. I was not even sure what his parents did for a living. I didn’t know why Nikhil – who was always striking up conversations with women in the café – had no partner. What exactly had he done with the thirty years of his life? There was a passionate impatience in him that made the past irrelevant. It’s what I’d appreciated, that he never lingered on his particulars and wasn’t interested in mine. There would have been little to tell in any case – the humdrum childhood, the modest schoolteachers for parents in whose footsteps I’d followed for a while.

After a week of silence, he called.

‘Sorry, sorry, family business to attend to, had to go out of town. Shall we meet in an hour?’

I switched off my computer and walked to the bus-stand, got off at Shivaji Nagar, walked again to the cafe. Nikhil was waiting and started talking at once about a new bunch of films he’d got. We need to watch them soon, he said, with an urgency I’d grown used to. We discussed our script. I wanted a sprinkling of song and dance – in the manner of regular Hindi films. The story was moving in the direction of a spoof and nothing would better underline its playfulness than having a woman in chiffon sari cavort at the scene of a crime. Nikhil wouldn’t hear of it; he scoffed at Bollywood. Our story had begun promisingly. The hero, a traffic policeman, is standing on his balcony one morning, drinking his coffee, and sees his new neighbour drive off to work on his scooter. It strikes him that man has been taking the longest route possible out of the colony. This small aberration piques Sambhu’s curiosity and gradually turns into a major obsession. He makes errors in his traffic policing and one day causes a near-fatal crash. Shaken, he stops going to work and spends his days tailing the man whose name, he finds out, is VV Kumar. All in the colony know him as a senior advocate but in truth he’s just a humble notary, putting his stamp all morning on rental agreements and applications for driving licences in his shed of an office, hanging outside the court later in the day to solicit more business, while in the evenings he turns real estate broker. But the mystery of Kumar’s circuitous driving remains unsolved, and that’s as far as we had got. I’d been excited about our progress but felt that afternoon a certain malaise after Nikhil rejected my song and dance idea.

Over the next few weeks, we watched a series of French and Italian black-and-white thrillers to inspire us. We returned to the script, developed the story in the direction of a vendetta, then abandoned that and were back where we’d been before Nikhil disappeared. And suddenly he was gone again. I went over to his house and this time found the front-door open and an elderly couple on the sofa, probably his parents, looking, surreally, as if they’d been waiting for me. But his mother stared blankly when I said, ‘I haven’t heard from Nikhil for a long time, so I thought…’

‘Sit down, sit down,’ she said. ‘What do you do?’

I glanced at her husband who, ballpoint in hand, squinted at the Deccan Herald crossword. Then he put it down and went into the kitchen.

‘Just wanted to know where Nikhil is?’ I asked. Instead, she began telling me how critical it was that he get a decent job – their small coffee estate in Coorg brought in less and less every year and they were not getting younger. She never answered me – the larger anxiety about her son’s prospects seemed to be all. Her husband brought me coffee – ‘we roast and grind it ourselves,’ chipped in the lady, while he continued to study the crossword. I left after drinking the little tumbler of lukewarm, milky brew in three large gulps.

He was gone for a month and the rains arrived in his absence. I’d go over to Radha’s house where her mother had suddenly grown garrulous and would ask me the same questions about the town left behind that her daughter had once put to me, and then, of course, she’d inch closer: religious creed, parents’ incomes, siblings’ professions and marriages. I answered as politely as I could and then took Radha out for a walk in the more secluded back lanes without streetlights where she let me kiss her before pulling away and saying – You’re playing with me. When I told her about Nikhil and his film-watching, she’d turn up her nose. He seems to be just playing, she’d say. Some nights I’d sit alone in one of the two neighbourhood restaurants that served alcohol and drink watery beer, a still new, still wonderful, sense of freedom mixed into its taste.

After Nikhil returned I waited for him to give me an explanation but there was none. I told him that I’d turned thirty-three while he was away. My savings were now close to nothing, the freelance writing brought in a trickle. Nikhil reminded me of the money we were going to make on the script. When I pointed out that it was floundering, he began talking about a film on Bob Dylan he’d seen in the video shop. It seemed like a good idea for us to head there right away. The next evening it poured furiously for an hour, branches of the jamun tree slapping against the panes, and then Radha came over to my place of her own accord and stood leaning on the kitchen’s doorjamb as I boiled instant tomato soup, still a novelty for me. ‘My mother insists that I see all these men,’ she said. ‘All these people, looking for brides.’

‘Maybe you should go through with it,’ I said. ‘At least that way she won’t have anything to complain about. You can always say – I tried and it didn’t work.’

‘But it’s never-ending. Why would she give up?’

‘Soon you’ll never have to do it again.’

‘How? When?’

I looked at her but it seemed laughably brazen to say – Maybe I’ll find some work soon, then we’ll get a house in a better neighbourhood and you’ll set up a clinic somewhere nearby, but not at home because I need some peace and quiet to write. Did she want me to say this? I don’t know. She must be longing for some image of a nicer life to be presented to her, better than her dim living room, its light cut off by the houses pressing in from three sides. I told her she needed to learn patience. ‘I’ve been patient all my life,’ I said as I handed her a mug of soup. ‘You can’t marry someone who just turns up. Give things time.’ She looked upset and said with sudden vehemence, ‘I don’t need your philosophy,’ then softened when she saw how that remark froze me. ‘I have to think of my mother.’

When Nikhil disappeared for the third time, I resolved not to waste more time on the script and sent him an email about it. He replied, saying he was back in a few weeks and that he’d had to take a lot of shit but soon everything would be sorted out, adding that he was sorry to have kept me in the dark and that I was the ‘closest friend’ he had. He had a way of speaking in absolutes – he’d call Taxi Driver the greatest film ever made. It always struck me as brave. He laboured under none of the uncertainties that make most people relativists. I felt mollified again, went back to musing on the lives of the city’s traffic policemen.

Nikhil returned in August. He’d always been thin, but now his pale, boyish face looked haggard and he had a cold that made him sniff strenuously every few minutes. At the café, we ordered tea and he talked. What struck me at first was how much he had withheld from me, but soon I was absorbed in the details. Three years ago, he said, he’d married a woman called June, an American who was in India making a film on cows. He’d met her, unsurprisingly, right here, and admired her clarity of purpose while she’d admired his sweep – the hundreds of films he’d seen and his unshakeable opinions about them. They were married for a year when June decided that she wanted to quit.

‘She was frustrated by the fact that I hoped to go to the US and she hoped to stay in India. In the end we realised that we’d seen each other as passports into the other’s country. She wanted to make films on local life for American television. She had plans and I helped her at first with location research and film contacts but everything was very slow going for her. So she decided to move to Pondicherry. She used to email me sometimes. She’d got interested in pottery, joined a studio and stopped making films or even talking about them. I lost touch with her eventually.’

This past April, Nikhil learnt from a common friend who travelled regularly to the US, that his ex-wife was now in New York, working in a restaurant. Nikhil spent a sleepless night pondering this. She was in New York! The city he’d always dreamed of. He tried to put it out of his head but it kept bothering him, the absurdity of this. His wife was in New York and he should have been with her. ‘I had always wanted to go. But hated the idea of cramming for all those exams to get into a college somewhere. And later, of course, I could never afford it, even a holiday seemed impossible. You’ve met my parents.’

After a few days of jealous obsessing, he sent June an email saying that he was coming over there for a film conference, asking if they could meet. When she agreed, he asked his parents for money and bought an air ticket. He spent the first day in a daze, just walking by landmarks he knew from films – like the Dakota, the apartment on 72nd Street where Roman Polanski shot Rosemary’s Baby, and a bar called Vazacs at the corner of 7th Avenue and Avenue B, famous from several movies including Godfather II. He stayed in a hostel where none of the flushes in the bathrooms worked, and ate nothing but croissants all day – not sure if he had the nerve to enter a restaurant. He had three hundred dollars and a ticket back for a week later. The next day he did better and browsed in a second-hand video shop where he found a rare copy of Paul Auster’s film Blue in the Face, which he bought at once even though it cost twenty precious dollars. The third day he called June and they met in her Bronx apartment. She lived by herself and she let him sleep on the couch for the rest of the week while she worked five hours a day at a small Indian restaurant, cooking matar paneer and aloo gobi. She was saving to join a creative writing course at university.

I told him I had once toyed with the idea of studying creative writing but I don’t think he heard me. In no time his week was over. Nikhil told me he came back to Bangalore, borrowed money from friends – the ones I’d never met – and went again at the end of May. He found a cheap video lending library and spent nearly four weeks in June’s apartment watching film after film, smoking Camels, surviving on a takeaway hamburger till dinnertime because June didn’t have much money either. In the evening she would bring leftovers from the restaurant. She didn’t seem surprised at his visits at that time, he explained, when I asked. She was happy to have someone to talk to and he remained on the couch. When his money ran out, he returned home and waited till August before breaking a fixed deposit he had for emergencies and taking off again. This time he looked for work and found a job in a used books store that paid decently but took up most of his day. He quit and waited tables on the night shift at the same place where June worked. At least this gave him more time to watch films. But soon his wife started to get fed up of him. She questioned his motives.

‘I told her I just wanted to be in New York, but she didn’t believe that. She said I was trying to get into her life again and I wanted to deny it, but I was living in her house, spending time with her. So I went back to that overpriced hostel and took up again at the second-hand bookshop till my visa expired.’

On the way back he was questioned by officers at JFK airport. They wanted to know why he’d come and gone thrice in the last four months. They detained him for several hours and kept asking if he’d been working illegally. Finally they’d let him off saying they hoped they wouldn’t see him for a while, because then he might never be able to get back into the USA.

‘But I’m going back. As soon as I’ve found some work here that’ll make me some money. What about the script, by the way? Is it done?’

He looked ill. No mention of any film he’d just picked up, something it was imperative I watch at once. His eyes raked the crowded café like they used to when we first met. I told him I was stuck at a good point in the story and left him sitting there, drinking cold tea, alone with his problem. I walked out into the street despite the rain and when I was almost at the bus-stand I saw it – the answer to Sambhu’s riddle. He gets hold of a Bangalore City Traffic Police barrier and sneaks out at dawn to put it up in order to force a left turn on motorists. As he’s rolling the thing into place, V V Kumar appears, out for a morning walk. He asks what’s happening and Sambhu concocts a story about how there are roadworks coming up nearby and the lane has to be closed off. Kumar tells him he is a lifesaver. Why, asks Sambhu. ‘Because, you see, I can only take right turns till I reach the main road, or else I’ll die within a week.’ Why, asks Sambhu again. ‘It’s according to Vaastu. Everything has already been decided. And I was told, that is, an astrologer said to me, that someday an obstacle will appear in my path I must overcome. After that it would all be plain sailing. But I didn’t realise it was going to be so simple.’ He makes to slip Sambhu a hundred rupee note, tells him he’ll put the barrier back in place when he drives off that way later in the morning, and asks him what he does for a living. Sambhu backs off from the proffered note but ends up a firm believer in Vaastu and joins hands with Kumar. He spends the rest of his days advising buyers on the auspiciousness or otherwise of the empty plots and newly built flats on the market.

I wanted to go back and tell Nikhil about my twist, but worried that he would dismiss the whole thing as mere bagatelle and I decided to think it over a bit more. When I went across to Radha’s the next day, there was no-one home. Instead of calling, I went back and waited, working on the final pages of my script. When she arrived, it was with news. ‘I’m getting married,’ she said. ‘It’s sudden but I knew him as a child, the family left for the US when I was about ten years old. He came back to look for me, asked an old neighbour where I was and drove right here. He proposed within ten minutes of seeing me. His parents wanted the engagement this week – they have to go back to California. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you first but I had to take a decision fast.’

She stopped, wanting me to say something, but the only word that I could think of was – wait, wait.

‘It’s for my mother. I turned to her when Mani proposed, and I’ve never seen that relieved look on her face – not after my father died. I simply had to do it. They’re good people. I can finish with my studies here, work when I move there…’

‘Do you even know where California is? Like on a map?’ I asked finally.

‘You’re always playing with me. I’m serious, this time I’m serious.’

‘I’m not playing,’ I said, my voice trembling.

‘You’re a good person.’ said Radha. ‘I hope you find a job soon.’

I followed her as she walked out. ‘You’ll miss Bangalore. And what about your mother?’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll miss everything.’ But her eyes were like Nikhil’s – already elsewhere – and she hugged me half-heartedly. A week later, Nikhil mailed me from New York saying he had managed to talk the immigrant officials into letting him in after showing them his marriage certificate. He said he might become a part-time taxi-driver or work nights as a janitor. ‘Anything that makes me enough money to live in a cheap apartment and watch at least two films a day.’

I didn’t reply even though the script was done and I needed money. I was alone with my books like I’d been when I’d arrived. Then Bangalore seemed teeming with people; now it was empty, and the city, the one that you want to lose yourself in, the one that gives you places and things to know yourself by, had moved someplace else. As I lay on my mattress, smoking day after day, a line from that one song kept playing on. Simon and Garfunkel in Central Park. I knew all those hits from long ago, and not very long ago had watched the film of that concert with Nikhil. He kept rewinding to ‘New York … like a scene from all those movies, but you’re real enough to me, but there’s a heart, a heart that lives in New York…’ All those masterpieces they put on that night and yet Nikhil was stuck on this trivial, silly song. And now, like something, like a toothache or a scald, it throbbed inside of me too.