The Scary Way to Grow Up

In the summer vacation of ‘78, I was still quite a few years shy of the official age to watch ‘adult’ ( translation - grownup)  movies in the movie theatres. But that didn’t stop me from pleading, cajoling and finally bullying and blackmailing my brother  to let me go and watch The Exorcist with him. Himself and two of my girl-cousins were planning to watch this movie, which was released in India after a long delay of four and a half years and nothing, absolutely nothing, would’ve stopped me from seeing this movie with the reputation of being the scariest movie of all time.

At that time in the seventies, we had just come out of the Emergency rule by Indira Gandhi and the strict censorship of the period was still in vogue. It was quite usual for the current crop of Hollywood blockbusters to reach our shores a few years after been released in the west and a movie like The Exorcist, I understand, languished in the Indian Censorship Board’s table for a long time. The moral police during the Emergency Raj couldn’t make up their minds whether the movie was too scary or too blasphemic and its only when the Congress party and Indira Gandhi lost the General election, the new regimes ‘openness’ allowed the film to be released albeit with a sizeable cut including a scene involving a cross, which even by todays standard, is shocking.

I had known all about the movie from whatever information you’d get in those days from newspapers and magazines. Swapan Mullick, the film reviewer from The Statesman had said that the movie lives up to its hype and even with the cuts of vital scenes, the shock effect is sizeable. There were some reports of people leaving the theatre early in Kolkata but there was no confirmed reports of people fainting, unlike the reports from the west. A close friend of my brother who’d seen the movie, told us that it was really really scary and self confessed that he’s scared to got to the loo at night by himself and asked his little brother to stand guard.

My father bought the ticket for us – either he didn’t know much of the movie or he thought that the scare would be good for us. I remember my mother telling my brother, your brother is underage if the staff doesn't let him in, you need to come out with him too and forget about the movie. New Empire, where the movie ran, in those days still clung to the great British traditions of eligibility for admissions and we remembered a story when another of our cousins were ejected out of Dr Zhivago by David Lean because she didn't look old enough to be sixteen, though she truly was. And that was nowhere as adult as The Exorcist.

Both my cousins wore saris and girls when they wear the right kind of makeup looked distinctly older. My transformation was trickier. Though I was taller for my age, my face looked pre-pubertal, though there was some hair follicles desperately making an appearance above my upper lip, but nobody in their right mind would mistakenly call that a moustache.  So out came my cousin’s eye- brow pencil and the ‘mo’ looked a bit more substantive. As for the rest of the adult look I pinched my mother’s reading glasses which I realised had to be kept on at all times and I’d be watching the movie, most likely, over the frame of the glasses.

At the door my brother gave the usher the pink tickets with the illegible seat numbers and the middle aged man had one look at me and asked , Is he old enough?

Yes he is, said my brother in sheer panic and snatched the tickets from him and literally shoved me inside the movie theatre.  After we found our seats my brother hissed to me to stay down; I sunk low into the soft seats to avoid detection till the lights dimmed and the advertisement's started. Even then, I’d will myself to blend into the corduroy seats every time a man with a flashlight walked past.

To this day I don’t know what was more terryfying that day –  the thought of being evicted by an usher with a flashlight in the darkened theatre for being underage or the mastery of William Friedkin’s horror tale. What I do know now is that, in a way on that summer day,  I crossed a line, stepped over a border and entered the realm of grown up life.

The Widow

 The Sardarni boarded the near full bus with her two children and realising that it was jam-packed, came right at the back where we sat. The little boy clearly wanted the window seat by giving his mum a 'can I have that seat' look. I shifted. The mother smiled and thanked me; the children shifted towards the window side. She sat down next to me without any hesitation, her arms brushing against me making me shrink a bit, but she was easy and comfortable sitting next to an unknown male unlike a typical Indian woman. Right at this time and almost surprising everyone with its punctuality the bus groaned into life to make the twelve hour trip to Rishikesh.

My cousin Santuda and myself had trekked to Goumukh glacier from Gangotri and come back to catch the only bus travelling back to the plains. The trek was hard but rewarding in terms of the scenic aspect but we weren't exactly unhappy to get back to have a decent shower and meal once we've reached the proper human jungle. The journey had to be done and when we found that the only avaialable seats were at the back, we knew that the journey  would be bumpy and probably back breaking.
The woman wore white from head to toe - white salwar and white scarf covering her head. Her hands were delicate almost perfectly so with fingernails pale white. Her wrists were bare with out any bangles and as I glanced at her face in one quick instance, I noticed her without any jewellery - no earrings, no neck ornaments. Then it dawned on me; she must a widow. The bus in the meantime had been hurling towards Uttarkashi negotiating the twists and turns of the Garhwal Himalayas and at the back seat it was unavoidable that we'd be bumping against each other. In after one such acute turn I apologised to the lady. She told me not to worry in a perfect North American accent. Surprised, I asked her where she was from and what was she doing here in the pilgrimage land. She didn't reply at first, just glanced at her children, her eyes softening as she did that. She had one of the saddest eyes I'd ever seen. Then she told me that she's from  Montreal, Canada, travelling through the pilgrimage route in the Garhwal - Gangotri, Jamunotri, Kedar and Badrinathdham. She said her son was eight and daughter ten, and this is first time all three of them had been to India.
I'd met my husband in Canada, she said. He was the most kind and genuine, hardworking man she'd ever met. She was studying business administration and he was driving taxi cabs. The only thing that was common to them was their religion - both of them were Sikh. They married in spite of their social standings and family oppositions and spent eleven years together.
Then on the 25th of June, two years ago her husband boarded an Air India flight called Emperor Kanishka to New Delhi and was blown to smithereens along with 328 other people by Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh militant group in retaliation for operation Blue Star on the Golden temple. He was coming home for a pilgrimage that he promised himself for the birth of his children. I was never religious, she said. I wanted to come here to feel him - my husband, not God. She never believed in God and the tragedy has made her even more a non-believer. So what are you looking for? I asked. Some answers, any answers, she said.
They left the bus at Uttarkashi heading towards Hemkund Sahib. I saw them disappear in the midday sun amongst the thousands others. Big tragedies happen. They touch our lives, but we move on. What remains is the memory of the eye of the widow, looking at her children and then beyond into the Himalayas for an answer that's never there.