The Eighteenth Parallel (8 page)

Now for the purpose behind this fetching of a tonga from a mile away. It was to take us all to a Tamil film showing at the tent cinema on the Karbala Maidan three miles away. In the regular cinemas of Secunderabad, Tamil films were shown only once or twice a year, and that for just a week, though Telugu pictures had a run of four to six months and Hindi and Urdu pictures which came after a showing in Hyderabad city first, ran strong for a couple of months. The Tamil films that lasted two weeks as far as I can remember were just two:
Mangamma Sabatham
and
Sri Valli.
Vasundhara played the role of Mangamma, the woman who takes on a philanderer, and in the mythological film
Sri Valli,
it was Kumari Rukmani, a young girl then, who played Valli. Exhaustive discussions on the charms of these two heroines were held even among elderly people who had shed their inhibitions for the nonce.

The tent cinema showed only Tamil pictures. It was difficult to say what induced the owners to pitch camp in Secunderabad. They showed nearly sixty films in six months. Twenty free tickets would be offered for every two tickets sold. Although a government appointment had become some sort of
memento mori
of modern times, those in authority and their families were always offered special privileges in the tents. The shows would allow a half-hour's late start for them. The first showing lasted until ten o'clock at night and the second started at ten-forty. The footage of films would be cut from 20,000 to 18,000 feet to fit the time available. Whether it was the first or the second show that we went to, the tonga was engaged only to get to the cinema. We always returned on foot in procession for three and a half miles through the streets of Secunderabad at dead of night, rousing the suspicions of at least thirty dogs and disturbing the sleep of several neighbourhoods.

It was quite a common occurrence for a film to be cut in the middle. One day, the film seemed about to break, then it began to run upside down and then quite suddenly it caught fire. We stampeded out of the tent. The show was re-started after half an hour and we went in again. This time we sat in the next class and watched the bit of the film that had survived unburnt. It was Salem Modern Theatre's
Subhadra,
on which a million rupees had been spent, according to the advertisements. The length of the film had already been curtailed by a Government order during the war. The version we got to see was further curtailed by the fire.

Thinking back after all these years of our curious treks back home in the middle of the night, it seems amazing that nothing untoward ever happened to any of us. We took no precautions, had no security measures. My older sister, a fast walker, usually went far ahead of all us. Father and I would be a furlong behind her. Another furlong separated us from my brother and the rest of the sisters. My mother usually brought up the rear all by herself, lagging nearly half a mile behind everyone. On a straight road, we would at least have been within viewing distance of one another. But there were no streets in Secunderabad that ran straight for more than fifty yards. All this, notwithstanding the efforts of a British Resident to build a highway straight as a taut string, to be called Kings way. When Kingsway finally took shape, however, there were eleven curves within its mile and a half span. What had happened was this: the owners of those houses on the path who would have been affected by the straightening up of the road had out-manoeuvred the British Resident. Every curve was rumoured to have fetched Rs 10,000. Ten thousand rupees was a large sum those days.

Whenever our family procession entered these curves or the so-called short cuts through the bylanes, we lost sight of each other. Victims of a fond illusion that we'd reach home earlier by this route, we would zigzag through the crooked lanes. When we entered a new lane I would grumble to Father, 'This lane is too long, Appa.'

'Let's ask for it to be cut then,' Father would reply.

At the next lane I'd complain again. 'This one is also far too long.'

'Let's cut this as well, then.'

And so we went along, planning to cut lane after lane. When we were not engaged in this discussion of reducing the length of the lanes of Secunderabad, Father would ask me 'Don't these people have a grain of sense? Do they have any brains at all, I wonder.' The reference was to my sisters and Mother for not keeping pace. I never troubled myself for a reply because my ideas concerning the brain and the mind were rather vague. Moreover Father's tone left no doubt that the questions were merely rhetorical. We traversed the streets of Secunderabad in this curious fashion even when, years later, the city was in the grip of the Razakar terror. For that matter, as close as two days before I was attacked in the street, we had been walking through the streets at night. This time it was a Telugu film,
Gollabama,
not a Tamil one, and Anjali Devi had made her debut in the film.

With her acting and her dancing, this actress zipped her way through the Telugu country and went on to conquer the Tamil country as well.
Gollabama
played more than six months at the Paramount, a permanent cinema theatre. We hardly ever bought tickets. More likely, you'd find our family waiting in a space near the cinema while Father spoke to the manager. We didn't always know this. After half an hour or so, when the manager had been softened up sufficiently, he would come out of his room and ask us to sit in one of the upper stalls. On several occasions, when there were no seats available, extra chairs were brought for us on the manager's orders. We never did see any film from the start, though. Father's habit of persevering for a free pass on every possible occasion was probably an offshoot of his job in the railways. We didn't ever buy tickets for any railway journey either. If it became unavoidable we would have recourse to a PTO which enabled us to pay a third of the usual fare. We undertook a journey of several thousand miles every year just to avail ourselves of this concession. Our pass would have the names of the starting point and the destination. A column one inch long was provided for entering the names of all the stations we wanted to touch. We were permitted to break journey at these stations. Since this column was too small to include all the places we wanted to visit, the names overflowed, swarming into the margins, left and right, up and down on my father's pass. By the time we returned after we had visited a score of places in two months, we'd be tired of the whole thing. Only once during such a trip was our house burgled, as far as I can remember. But it was our buffalo which presented a nearly unsolvable problem every time. The question of where to leave our buffalo would come up about a month before our journey. People in the milk trade were not likely caretakers as they might not feed the animal properly. A cow of ours had once been starved to death by a milkman. Then there were those who had cattle at home for their own use. But they were not prepared to put up with the additional responsibility of another animal and refused to entertain our requests. The only course we had was to leave the animal with someone in the villages beyond the city, paying him for his services. The problem was that the person might show up a week before we left on our trip—or he might never turn up at all until just before we left. Once we even missed our train because of the buffalo. After that we – Father and I – started to take the buffalo ourselves to Ghatkesar, a village several miles away. Father would take his walking stick along and I would carry an umbrella and a stick. Father wouldn't miss his customary enquiries. 'What babu?' 'What dorai?' and 'What master?' And the buffalo would lead us up and down and roundabout and half the day would be done before we finally reached a village of some ten palm-thatched huts. There we would search for our Mallayya or Sayana, and entrust our animal to him. We would return home by train. Free passes, of course.

The railway pass which was recognised by the cinemas went absolutely unheeded by the customs employees. Our tonga filled with half a dozen people and an equal number of boxes would stop in front of the customs checkpost, an old building situated just outside the Secunderabad railway station. After months of touring far and wide, we had to wait there in a final ten minutes of utter panic. The customs inspector there was a woman, even in those days when the Nizam's territories were supposed to have been in the Middle Ages. It was she who ransacked our boxes and baskets year after year at the end of our trips outside the State. She would go on fishing things out one after the other, while we would go on insisting that everything was brought within the Nizam's territories. The woman, who bore a slight resemblance to Janab Jinnah's sister Fatima, would eye us all very suspiciously and mutter something before she finally took a bunch of hill bananas or a few mangoes for herself and said to us, 'You may go.' I didn't ever see anyone paying customs duty there. She stayed in her job, a permanent fixture like the sun and the moon and the mornings and evenings, ransacking travellers' possessions and dampening the zeal of vegetarians and fruit-eaters even after India's Independence was declared. She was there right through the year-long confrontation of the Government and then for a few months even after the annexation of Hyderabad State by the Indian troops.

My father's usual ebullience got considerably subdued in places like this customs counter and such other precincts which were under the sole jurisdiction of the Nizam's government. No language except Urdu could be used for any transaction in these offices. It would be presumptuous to expect any official to be at his seat at the appointed time. The Nizam's bureaucracy described itself as the Mughalai Durbar. The Mughal Emperor's courtiers posed several possible connotations, the chief one being that nothing happened according to schedule. Eighty per cent of the State Government employees were Muslims; the rest were mulkis, that is, those recognised as natives of Hyderabad State. In those days the Nizam's State Railways offered unmatched opportunities for employment for Tamil persons and others from outside the state. Railway employees always looked down on the minions of the State Government, but living in the State, it was not possible for them to avoid the State offices entirely. On such unavoidable occasions, you found railway employees going in search of Urdu scribes to fill up their forms, and then buying and pasting on the Nizam's court stamps (on which even the numbers were printed in Urdu). You'd find them at the local office at exactly eleven o'clock for the eleven o'clock appointment, waiting there until two, and returning defeated at the end of it all, because neither they nor the local staff had the faintest idea what the other party was talking about. The railway staff were generally treated like an alien horde of plunderers. Father must inevitably have had his share of unpleasant encounters in the corridors of the Nizam's State offices. But then remember my Father's predilection for accosting everyone with the introduction: 'I am a railway servant.' Even if he were to meet a full-throated lion somewhere, this formula I'm afraid, would remain the same. Was it any wonder then that the Mughal courtiers of Hyderabad were not exactly friendly with him?

6

There was a large crowd at the Dreamland Cinema. What had been an orderly queue at first turned in a crowd converging on the ticket counter the moment it was opened. If only Morris had been here! He would elbow his way through the crowd till he reached the counter and would then hoist himself upon a few shoulders and get a ticket. Chandru entered the hall without a ticket and curiously, no one stopped him. He was the lone spectator in the hall. A special show of
Bathing Beauty
began for him. The five-foot-nine Esther Williams swam about in the water for a long time before she left the screen. Then she came and stood 'fully clothed now' before Chandru. Two of her upper teeth were a little too big but this only conferred a distinction upon her. She was asking him something sweetly, gently.

'I didn't understand...' Chandru replied.

'Do you like me?' she asked, very clearly this time. Unable to think up a quick answer in English, Chandru was silent. She took him by the hand, led him up to the screen and stepped into the swimming pool with him. Chandru began to tremble.

He was still trembling when he sat up in bed, quite awake. He felt not only ashamed but also afraid. These absurd dreams were a recent development. Was there no way to be rid of them? But there was no one he could turn to for advice.

He got up. The inside of the house was in shadowy gloom. The presence of a roof overhead could only be deduced by the absence of stars.

Chandru came up to the front door. Tall doorways in keeping with the enormous height of the house. The bolt at the top must have been two feet long. Unfastening it was not easy. Special efforts were required. But he had to get out into the open. Had to.

The dim moonlight that filtered through scattered clouds showed things on the ground in silhouette, emphasizing the contours. A light mist hung in the air. Lancer Barracks and its environs slept deeply. The strains of a distant song could be heard—a Muslim song with an unmistakably Muslim cadence. A gramophone in some Muslim restaurant would be belting out Zohra Begum or Amirbai Karnataki.

Chandru felt several parts of his body ache—his thigh, hit by the cricket ball at those four square inches unprotected by the pad; his shoulders which had borne the brunt of the Razakars' attack. Were they really Razakars? Actually, it could have been far worse since they had struck from such close quarters. Then there was the diffuse pain in his legs, the result of cycling fifteen miles against the wind in less than four hours and wheeling the cycle along the last three miles because he didn't have a lamp for his vehicle. Those twelve-rupee cricket boots, the handiwork of the cobbler under the tree, weren't good for anything but cricket. The half-mile walk dragging the dead weight of those boots was enough to make your feet ache. Today's walk had been considerably longer. But what was this pain in his side? The buffalo seemed to have butted him.

There was some comfort in the distraction that physical pain offered from the tangles and confusions of the mind. Chandru rubbed his thigh. But though his whole body ached, the pain was not intense enough to drive everything else from his mind.The embarrassment of the dream returned... Nasir Ali Khan. The old man at the bicycle stand. The wind on his face on the Tank Bund. Narasimha Rao. Refugees cooking on the pavement of the road. The fat woman at the police officer's house, the bluish green tracery of veins on her neck and hands ... He stood for a while in the open. The shadowy shapes round him took on a more distinct identity as his eyes got used to the dim light. There was a peepal tree in front, with the compound wall of the Barracks behind it, and the street beyond the wall. On the other side stood his house, attached to many others in a row. A stretch of open ground, then the banyan tree with its multiple hanging roots. Again the compound wall on that side separating the barracks from the surrounding streets. The street. The street lights. A few bungalows here and there. Strains of music at a distance. A distinctly Muslim tune. The song, a song he had heard so many times over Kasim's radio next door. Pyari Begum was probably asleep now.