Blogical Conclusion

OF TIME AND TIDE

JULY 6, 2008 - THIS WEEK, CLASS, WE’LL BE TALKING about memories – film memories, which certain times (and in certain types of people) leave deeper tracks as they wheel their way into the dark tunnels of the mind, and are, therefore, easier to retrace than other memories, those of people and of places and of things you’re not as fanatical about as film. Memory is – to state the obvious – an important tool in the work I do, for it helps me retain bits and pieces of movies and music, and recall them as and when needed. But this isn’t about that kind of memory, the good kind, the helpful kind, the impress-the-heck-out-of-others kind. This is about the scary kind – the things you don’t want to admit to remembering because doing so would instantly out you as an extraterrestrial from Planet Freakdom, but you do so anyway because you have column space to fill and you haven’t gotten around to watching the new Manoj Night Shyamalan movie you’ve been meaning to write about.

I could have done that last Sunday, but instead, I found myself flipping through TV channels so fast, the images became an unwholesome blur from my scariest dreams – Mickey and Minnie morphed onto Salman Khan and Amisha Patel who were in the same frame with wildlife from Kenya and Tamil talk show hosts. And then my finger froze. Coming up next on a channel, I noted, was Saagar. Kamal, Dimple, Rishi – well, why not! And having decided how the next three hours were going to be spent, I threw away the remote – afraid I’d fall victim to the Seinfeldian dictum that men aren’t interested in what’s on TV so much as what else is on TV – and watched the minutes leading to the movie being filled up with old songs. Uttam Kumar, bottle in hand, was swaying to Na poochho koi hamein from Amanush, as I began to have happy-hour flashbacks of my own.

Of Gaiety theatre in Chennai, which is now a seedy house of semi-porn but, back then, hosted a huge billboard with the hand-painted faces of Rishi and Kamal and Dimple against the backdrop of a roiling sea. Of the ads in the Friday papers that conveniently forgot about Rishi Kapoor and loyally proclaimed “Kamal Hassan in…” Of K Balachander bursting with pride over his protégé’s performance, in a local magazine, and of a wag commenting later in the same publication that with the amount of “ice” the veteran director had showered on the actor, the latter would surely be at home, nursing a cold. Of the controversy, then, because this film – advertised as Dimple Kapadia’s comeback – was beaten to the theatres by Ravindra Peepat’s Lava, whose opening frames foreshadowed the burning dilemmas its heroine would face (torn between Raj Babbar and Rajiv Kapoor) with an image of a volcano erupting and spewing molten matter as the voice-of-God narrator intoned, “Dil ki armaanon ka lava.”

And of an entire day I’d spent fuming because a film glossy had superciliously declared that RD Burman had “managed to produce excellent music in Saagar and Jawani.” The evaluation was possibly true, as the great man’s form in the mid-eighties was closer to base camp than peak, but then fans aren’t always accepting of logical arguments, and what had irritated me beyond measure was the word “managed.” Managed? Had Anu Malik or Rajesh Roshan or Laxmikant-Pyarelal come up with the scores for Saagar or Jawani, it could be said that they’d somehow managed to do so, but hadn’t RD, just a few years ago – and in another Kamal Hassan starrer – shaped the exquisite contours of Hum tum hum do rahi? The nerve of that ridiculous writer in that ridiculous magazine. Would another composer of the time have managed to create that trumpet prelude, which would instantly tip us off to the at-once-happy, at-once-sad mood of the number?

Now you see why I label these as “scary” memories, because if – instead of communicating these thoughts through this paper – I’d been standing across you frothing in the mouth with this bout of apoplexy, wouldn’t you be backing away slowly, fearing that a few minutes more and you’d end up bound and gagged in my basement, next to Mother in her rocking chair? Anyway, Uttam Kumar finally got done with his swaggering and Saagar got going, and as the tedious love triangle went on (and on), I was wishing I’d left it untouched in my memories. This was what I’d settled on finally, after all that channel flipping – this laughably overheated story of two overgrown boys weeping over the girl they love?

Still, there was that one moment, the morning after Kamal discovers that Dimple is really in love with Rishi. He grips the bars of the window in his small bedroom and tells the woman who raised him that, many years ago, when his parents died, he’d found himself all alone and now, again, it was the same. He wonders why this keeps happening to him. As melodramatic outpourings of trampled-upon hearts go, this is hardly Javed Akhtar’s finest hour – but what redeems the scene isn’t what Kamal says so much as how he says it. Looking into the distance, he begins, “Yeh mere hi saath…” And then he turns and buries his face in her bosom and goes through the rest of the line in partly muffled sobs, “… kyon hota hai, Miss Joseph?” As I struggled with a frog-sized lump in my larynx, I was relieved that at least something from the film that was playing before me was every bit as good as the film that was wedged in my head from that screening at Gaiety theatre.

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