Some of the worst blows I suffered during my childhood came from the Hindi film industry. It has resulted in a recurring nightmare, literally.
I am thankful to my mother for this early training because most of this has proved quite useful. She was an inveterate movie-goer and fearless. She could watch every film with equal passion and equal derision. Often in the afternoons, when she had finished her chores, she would start marching towards the local theatre, Leela, no matter which film was being screened. We lived in Dum Dum then. She would be dragging me along for the ‘matinee show’, because I was quite small then and could not be left home alone.
I was terrified of the big screen. It was too large and sometimes curvy, as my mother would not hesitate to sit in the front rows if the better seats were taken, and the actors loomed over me even more, their ends trying to meet. But more than size and shape, what showed on the screen affected me more.
These were the Seventies and popular Hindi films then, yet to be dubbed Bollywood, were pretty crude. I do not know how many used Eastmancolor, but the colours could be pretty lurid; Amitabh Bachchan was too tall for me, everyone seemed to be shouting and the heroine’s dress was so green and sat so tightly on her that I wanted to rescue her from it. The song sequences were the most disturbing. Yet to be initiated into the mysteries of love, the hero’s serenading of the heroine would seem to be an attack on her. This was good education, though, because true love, I later learnt, is never unaccompanied by violence. More frightening than the love song was the vamp’s number (not yet called an ‘item number’) performed in the villain’s den. This was full-blown Hindi film kink that would merge with my childhood imaginings of evil in the shape of monsters and ogres, whom the villain could closely resemble. Only he did not attempt to boil the unstoppably gyrating vamp — sometimes with blonde hair — and eat her up. This bit was good education, too, because Eros can assume the most grotesque form.
The most lasting impression on my mind was left by a torture sequence from what I now think was a B-grade action thriller. This turned into the nightmare to which I now need a key.
In the original scene, the hero, rippling with muscles, was clad in what I thought was a black mini skirt, but later realised, because my memory is vivid, was in a gladiator’s costume, leather and metal-studded, with matching wrist-bands, and nothing else. His arms and legs were stretched and chained to metal rings. He was originally in an amphitheatre but was later judged by someone on a throne and promptly pronounced guilty. Next, he was put in a cage and giant, sharp, multi-toothed metal blades began to close in on him from all sides and the cage began to be lowered steadily into a crocodile pool with several extremely badly-animated crocodiles opening and closing their jaws rhythmically. Incarceration, death, death, no escape. The hero escapes, of course, but how I don’t remember.
This sequence appears in my dreams as my brain adapts it to the different crises I am going through, changing the character and setting accordingly. I often see the hero/gladiator/me in a cage, but only a few hours are left for my math exam in Higher Secondary. There is no better definition of impending doom. Or that is what I thought. My strategy, always, has been waking up.
Of late, ever since the predictions about the election results have begun to be made, the nightmare has been recurring. I will be judged or probably have already been — and then that feeling of everything closing in on me starts. I am not sure where I am — trapped inside a cage or a B-grade Hindi movie or maybe a WhatsApp forward?
But this time, however much I try, I can’t wake up.