My Life at the Movies
By Thomas Palakeel
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I stayed at the huge government school for only one year; it was a happy, peaceful year for me; I was not beaten up every day by my mathematics teacher; the teacher didn't even care as long as the students didn't call him names or giggle while he instructed us. I felt dwarfed at the big school; my progress was an insignificant matter. The teachers seemed arrogant, lazy, and capable great cruelty if provoked. I kept quiet. All year I escaped the rod and enjoyed much peace in my life. I also had huge, hunky classmates who cursed and smoked and tormented the lady teachers. Since my father's store was next door, I preferred to spend more time with my brothers, paging through all the magazines I could find in the scrap paper pile. During lunch-break, I went to the store and ate with my father and brothers. My mother dispatched plenty of steaming rice and hot curries in a four-decker lunch-box shaped like a tower. After lunch, I played with cousins.
Once I made a bet with one of my cousins claiming that "The Bible" was an English language movie, but my cousin argued it was Malayalam. If I were proved right, I would get a quarter, and the burden of proof was on me. I remembered seeing a two- inch advertisement for the Hollywood film "The Bible", and I took it upon myself to locate the old newspaper. I paged through pile after pile of old newspapers in our store, spending at least a month on the research; finally, when I located the advertisement and disproved my cousin, he said he wasn't serious about the bet; he did not pay. He said he just wanted to see how gullible I was, but I did not tell him how much I enjoyed the research.
My research in old Malayalam newspapers helped me graduate into American magazines. This was a time my brother George came up with a promotional idea at the store. To compete with his rivals during the school season, my brother gave away free wrapper sheets, torn out of old copies of Time and Look to students who purchased notebooks from our store. Students prided themselves about wrapping their books in the famed "American Magazine." Tired of the boring newspaper wrappers, students like me made our first fashion statements by wrapping our books with those slick sheets. And these color photographs also offered us hints of some brave new world out there, so far away from Thidanad.
I often volunteered to carry lunch for my brother so that while he ate in the back of the store, I could smuggle out magazines inside my shirt. Gradually, I built up a secret library under my bed: a dozen issues of Time, one copy of Life, one movie magazine with color pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Esther Williams, and Elizabeth Talor. Though I could not read English, I understood the photographs: America, cars, Vietnam, Israel, Hollywood, Egypt, lands of war, famine, wealth, and of course, the mission to the moon. Next year, though my brother could not find a steady supply of old American Magazines, by another twist of the Cold War, almost every home had begun to subscribe to a new magazine: The Soviet Land.
The flood of magazines continued: German News, Plain Truth, Soviet Life. While the Western world waged a propaganda war from our book wrappers, I understood another truth: the world really existed in the English language. Then, the news broke that a movie theater was going to be built in Thidanad. My only regret was that I was not an adult yet; though a penniless boy, right away I planned to see the very first movie and then the next and the next and all the movies in the world that'd come to our movie house. As the theater began to rise from the ground, I watched the construction as dutifully as the owner.
First, the workers erected two dozen coconut poles on the raised ground. Then the carpenters raised the roof, and in a week, it was thatched with coconut fronds brought in from neighboring villages on bullock carts. They walled up the building with hundreds of bamboo mats, painted black to block sunlight. And finally, the 35 mm projector arrived; Thidanad Saji Theater was ready for the show. Before seeking permission to watch the inaugural movie, I volunteered for menial chores at home. When my father gave me the money, it was on condition that in the future I would not ask for such permission and that I should devote myself to studies and prayer. While my sister Molly and I were playing a card-game, I bragged about the permission I had received to go to the first show. She wouldn't get the permission; she was only a girl. She would get to go only if the whole family were to go. No way, our whole family would be able to struggle through the crowd to get into the inaugural show. Molly did not enjoy this at all and argued that movies were not good for a boy; I held up my ground with a modest claim that God liked movies: "Didn't God create movies?" I asked. "God also created Satan!" Molly said. Pointing out a catechism book that listed things God did not appreciate, Molly established the sinfulness involved in watching movies.
I was glad the dispute took place while we were in the midst of a card-game because I was able to force her to end her favorite game right away; the card-game was included in the list as well. I did not have to force her. She looked at the list and threw the cards on the table. On the day of the inauguration, I wedged my way into the huge crowd so skilfully I was one of the first in the crowd to get hold of a ticket. The humidity was so high, some men who sat near me had taken of their shirts. One man squeezing sweat off his shirt. One of the men said loudly to another sweaty faced man: "Heh, a woman's breast poked me so hard in the crowd, my back's split into two. I thought I'd die." The men laughed, dwelling endlessly on the topic; I laughed, too, but I felt ugly. Unlike my first movie, this one was black and white. Again, like the first movie, it was about two men fighting and killing and dying for the love of one woman. I didn't really appreciate the fact that women were so much of a big deal for everybody. What was there to die for? I had no clue.
A week later another black and white arrived. Then another and another. And I felt miserable, unable to see these movies. Since Thidanad Saji was only a temporary theater, the movies shown there were at least a year old, and sometimes, the movies didn't even run a whole week, causing the management to switch films midweek; for such short runs, they often brought a film made in Tamil, Hindi, or English, in the order of audience preference. Every time I asked for permission for a movie, I was browbeaten and silenced. I spent hours thinking of all those movies that would be shown in the evening and late at night, wishing that I had been orphan or something, so that I would be free to watch them all.
That year I got to see only two more movies, both were family events. You guessed the stories: two men loving one woman, at the end both of them trying to kill each other. Aren't there any new story that they could show in these movies? I wondered. A friend said that it was a "formula" that they used in all the movies and that almost any movie would be variation on the theme. I began to think that some day I would write a story that would transcend "formulas". To do so, I wanted to improve my movie-knowledge. Needed to watch more movies. Better understand the problem of formoolas so that I could correct them when I grew up and became a great director.
Gradually I began to sense that some of the short-run movies transcended the formula problem. For instance, there was one movie about a monster that spewed fire from its mouth and crushed buildings and uprooted trees and dined on policemen. No formula. It was an English movie, from Hollywood: "King Kong." I was impressed by Hollywood. The name sounded good. Tantalized by all the great movies that had come and gone, I reached a point when I could not hold myself any longer. I decided to sneak into the theater. I considered walking alongside some adult, pretending to be his child, but I was too well known in our village. I tried to be friendly with the gatekeeper, but he did not even acknowledge me.
Then a new idea dawned on me. Why not put a hole in the wall? I would need only a tiny hole. No one would detect it. If at all they did, they might think it as the work of some hornet or even mouse. Late in the evening, I asked for permission to pray in the village cupola, and the permission granted, I went into the town and infiltrated the banana grove behind the theater. After studying the scene, I crawled underneath the fence that separated the grove and the theater. Nobody was waiting there to catch the movie thief so I picked a flint from the floor and drilled a hole in the bamboo wall and proudly placed my eye at the bamboo hole. The show had already begun. I could see only about half of the screen. The fragmented scenes mesmerized me, convincing me that I ought to dedicate my life to this art. I did not stir from my position although I was overcome by worries: if I ever got caught, the owner would tell my father; it would be worse than any verbal abuse the gatekeeper could hurl at me.
So, I limited my secret viewing to a few quick peeks. Over a period of one year, I could not have watched more than an hour's worth of the show. As I craved for the art, I started collecting trivia and fantasized about becoming a director. (I didn't want to be an actor. No way I would run around trees with women). When the drummer and his boy travelled all over the village advertising new shows, I followed them to collect the handbills. The drummer--a butcher's assistant on Sundays-- always shooed me away. He gave out handbills only to the adults. Sometimes, I dogged him, begging until he tossed me a sheet, out of which I copied important data onto my cinema journal: a plot-summary, names of actors, studios, directors, cinematographers, lyricists.
On my way back from school, I often stopped by the theater. I would linger there, studying the posters and the still-photographs. Like a little Romeo in love with movies, I waited at the foot of the wooden ladder that went up into the projection room, pining for entry into the higher sanctum where the projectionist was constantly tinkering with the wonder machine. He seldom looked out the door; rarely did he notice his admirer. I would wait until the projectionist swept his room and threw out broken film-strips. I started salvaging these film-strips and the spent carbon-rods. Once I found a strip of film several feet long, much of it depicting the same dance scene, frame after frame. That moment I really understood the technology of moving pictures. The holes and the lines that bordered the filmstrip made sense. Fascinated by the new insight, I built a projector. It was simple. A flashlight, a box, a spool, a lens. Viola! My bedroom became my own movie hall. In the absence of a motor, I had to pull at the reel, trying out varying speeds. But the pictures I projected on the wall never moved. I saw no dance. No sword-fight. Saddened, I abandoned technology in favor of art, and occasionally used the contraption as a slide projector. I continued to visit the theater and the concession stand.
Eventually I was able to start a friendship with the men inside: the gatekeeper, various unemployed youths, including a village-genius named Sebastian, who had returned to the village after teaching English in some far away town. Also included in that circle of adult friends were the drummer who used to chase me away, the great projectionist, and of course, the film-representative, who accompanied a film from village to village, often a young man from the city; a rep's trademark was the wide, chisel-shaped sideburns and bellbottoms. Once I confessed to Appachayan that I wished to be a film-rep when I grew up. "How easy!" He said, "Get those big chisels from the carpenter. Glue them on your cheeks. You've got a rep!" Within the first three years of my silent romance with the movies, I had memorized the names of hundreds of movies and artists, though I had seen only four more movies and peeped at a few fragmentary scenes.
The men at the concession stand never chased me away. Even the projectionist listened when I talked in enthusiastic superlatives: Satyan is the greatest actor in history; Melli Irani, the greatest cinematographer; no one will beat Thoppil Bhasi for screenplays, Vayalar for lyrics. When I grow up, I'd write screenplays, I bragged. For a boy who had to make do imagining movies instead of actually watching them, screenplays ought to come easy. As my interest in the movies broadened, sad to say, our theater began to show signs of decline. As I hung out at the theater so often, I had inside information about the impending shut down. One theory was that people of our village did not watch movies regularly, but what actually destroyed it was the sprouting of several modern, air- conditioned theaters in the neighboring towns. Toward the end, I remember the place was mostly empty.
Whenever the gatekeeper saw me, he would wink at me, letting me in for free. And the drummer stopped making his rounds. It was on one of those days that the projectionist beckoned me: "Come up the ladder. I'll show you the machine!" It was a high point in my boyhood. I always cherish the memory of standing near the whimpering, whirring movie- projector. It was a cozy place. That day, I got to gaze through the viewport at the famed silver-screen. As he started one of the last matinees at our old movie-house, I stood there enchanted by the rays of light shooting out of the lens gate, spreading wider and wider as they traversed through darkness, generating such robust images, such a convincing world. Though I eventually got to watch hundreds of movies I never quite felt the same passion about it after I saw the old theater being dismantled and carted away. When the movie-magazine began to arrive in the mail, with ill-mannered females on the cover, I was questioned at home. I was banned from buying any books or magazines.
Of course, I could read the half a dozen church publications we took. The censorship was painful, especially because I was feeling deprived of heroes and huge events to identify with and to mold a fanciful world around the exemplary deeds of adventurers and movie stars and astronauts. Sadly, the previous years' heroes, Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins, were not in the newspapers anymore. Man's historic landing on the Moon gradually dwindled into an ordinary event. However, I could always go back to my "Appollo 11 Album" that I had created with black and white pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines. My favorite ones were the three family photos: I admired the Armstrong-Aldrin-Collins boys and girls, revered the wives, and deified the great astronaut trio in those pictures. The picture of Edwin Aldrin descending the ladder of the lunar module never failed to intrigue me. There was another newspaper picture of the trio in Bombay a few months after the landing on the Moon, and this particular picture made me impatient about my boyhood in our isolated Thidanad far away from all those glorious cities of the world where so much seemed to happen, and we did not even get an earthquake! I wished to grow up fast to be a part of it all. Soon after Appollo 11 landed on the Moon, our scientists in India also started launching rockets. They made me feel very proud.
When I saw a line of light moving across the horizon, I quickly decided it was one of our rockets. For years, I showed off newspaper photos of each new launch and claimed that I witnessed the event with my bare eyes. The adults who knew my pitiably low grades for science ignored my claims, but my passion for rocketry continued until I found out one truth: an American rocket was shaped like an enormous Coca-Cola bottle, but an Indian rocket was slim and narrow like a pencil. Often I tossed a pencil into the air to simulate how a rocket would go shooting away from the earth toward infinite frontiers! One evening, while gazing at a stand of arecanut trees in the back of our house, pondering a magnificent summer sunset, I realized our rockets truly resembled arecanut trees. One missing element was INDIA scrawled across the length of its trunk. I used to love the bold black lettering on Appollo: NASA-USA. I must admit my passion for rocketry did not lead me back into my fifth-grade textbooks, let alone turn me into a rocket scientist.
Instead, I became fascinated by the art of tree-climbing which seemed closer to home for a village boy not known for academic brilliance. For nearly a year following the landing of Appollo 11, every time I saw our tree-climber leap on to those rocket- shaped arecanut palms, I wondered whether the climber felt like an astronaut deep down in his heart. Next time the youthful climber arrived to pick arecanuts on our grove, I volunteered to accompany him. As he started work, my gaze followed him up and down each tree, and I pictured him in a space suit, reaching out and touching the clouds every time he plucked those stalks of yellow and green arecanuts. As the youth slipped on the tree-climber's noose on his feet ready to climb yet another tree, I touched his sweaty shoulder from behind and popped the question: "Can I ask you a favor?" "Hm," the youth nodded. "Teach me the trick. I'd love to jump on a tree and go hop hop hophop to the top. Just like you." "It takes a very long apprenticeship," he said. I didn't comprehend what he meant, but I followed him around; he helped me climb a few small trees.
Then he showed me how to use the rope-noose to lock my feet on to the trunk and how it functioned like a movable rung of the ladder. Used well, it could help a climber go cruising to the top of the palm, he explained. I slipped on the noose and jumped on to a tree with the air of a professional, but I did not progress one meter; thus, I learned that my body had weight. "I'll climb without the noose. It hurts," I said. "No, no. You must learn this slowly," he said. "The noose hurts." "If you don't keep trying, how do you expect to get used to it? Try until your feet grow calloused and tightly muscled and ready for the big climb. Then, wow, won't you just run up the tree like a baby monkey!" Without the noose locking my feet on the tree, I kept on hugging the trunk, desperately pressing my chest, making no upward progress. "This won't work." I stepped back, giving up.
The climbing guru snapped open my palms and kneaded it: "See, kid, these are so soft. You must harden it. Must grip firmly a log of thorns without ever flinching. That's what it takes. There's no easy way." I put on the noose and gave it one more try. "Now, gradually free your chest from the tree. Put all the weight on the feet and your arm-grip. Now, move up, go. Free your chest. Free your chest, move," my teacher urged me on, but I kept hugging on to the trunk, unable to release my chest, unable to climb. "I'm hugging the tree too much, am I not?" "That's fine for a beginner. Do give your whole body to the tree, but learn to withdraw your chest." I gripped the tree tightly and raised my chest. "More. Raise more," he said. "You're still hugging the tree. Why keep on hugging? Move."
I grasped the theory of climbing, but I just couldn't practice it. Couldn't hold myself up without pressing my chest on the tree. The moment I tried to extricate my chest, I was slipping off. "Watch this," my teacher said, taking me to another part of our small grove where we had half a dozen old trees in a haphazard cluster. He put on the rope-noose and hopped on to the first tree. I studied him, his climb. He did not use his chest at all. He actually danced his way to the treetop, shouting: "Watch this. Want to climb like this some day?" I watched. What followed was a virtuoso performance. First, the climbing maestro started to swing the tree. Quickly, the tree turned into a nimble projectile. Swinging it back and forth, he aimed it toward a distant tree.
Then, he swung the tree all the way to the top of another tree, and the next moment, I saw him grabbing the target tree and clutching on to it. For a few seconds, the two trees remained like an arch. Then the maestro shifted his feet, rope-noose and all to the second tree, allowing the host tree to swing back, alone. The transfer was precise, swift. I cheered. Again, he swung the tree to a third tree and transferred with greater ease. "What do you think?" he asked, swinging on the tree, playful. "On a large estate, I can keep going from tree to tree, without ever touching the ground. Now, see how fast I can come down!" I saw him adopt a standing posture, holding his arms around the trunk as if the lithe tree were his dance partner. "Here I go!" He shouted. Before I could bat an eye, he let his body slide down the entire 30 feet run of the trunk; he did halt before hitting the ground and stepped out with a broad, boyish grin. "You, too, can do it. Try it." Inspired by the performance, I put on the noose, and I hopped on to a tree. I started to climb well this time around, using my hand and feet. "I can keep going. This is not bad," I shouted. "The trick is to go slow. Come down. Do it over." I wanted to get it fast. I must have climbed about 15 feet. I'd climb 10 more, I shouted, clambering up the tree. "Come down. Rest and try again," he said.
I kept pushing myself up, fantasizing to be an astronaut. A glance at all the other trees at my face level left me a little dizzy and I looked down on the ground. I saw my teacher beckoning me to come down. Soon my feet began to weaken, my arm grip around the tree seemed loose. At that dangerous moment, I had to press my chest against the tree. I was ready to stop, but I had no strength left in me to step down either. The only option seemed falling off the tree! "Come down. You went too far," my teacher shouted. "It hurts. I can't come down," I cried. "Hold tight. Hold tight. Come down, slowly." I meant to hold tight, but what happened was the reverse: my chest came unbound. Next moment my arms came loose, my feet came loose, and whooooosh, it lasted only a second. Thank God, I did not fall off the tree. My chest used the tree as a rail and travelled back to the earth almost as fast as Icarus did when his wax-wings melted. The maestro said nothing. I reached home all bruised up, smelling of trees. "If you ever climb trees again, I will turn your back into the city of Cochin," Mother said, with no appreciation for the lesson I had just learned about the long, arduous, and of course, steady apprenticeship one had to undertake in order to master a great art. I did not dare to explain.
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