The Sari Shop (12 page)

Rina smiled. At this moment, Raghu brought in a tray bearing cups of tea and fried cashew nuts in a glinting glass bowl. Rina served the tea, and continued to talk, ‘Well, literature and anthropology are closely connected. I just hope I can achieve something. Make sense of things. In our strange, multi-layered society that is a very, very difficult thing to do.’

Ramchand thought he understood some of this, at least the bit about trying to make sense of things, but then the two went into a lengthy conversation, talking about post-colonialism, paradigms of poverty, Indo-Anglian writing, and many other things. All these things went completely over Ramchand’s head, he couldn’t follow the conversation any more and he began to feel a little sad and sulky. Then he cheered up. After all, he still hadn’t reached the letter ‘p’ in his dictionary. Once he did, he’d probably know as much about post-colonialism and paradigms of poverty as they did.

Then Mrs Sachdeva looked at her watch and said, ‘Oh, my dear. I have been here for almost half an hour. Didn’t mean
to spend so long. And you were in the middle of your wedding shopping, I see,’ she said, glancing at Ramchand, without recognizing him as the shop assistant who had sold her so many saris, and had got many a headache in the process.

‘I do hope your mother won’t be cross with me,’ Mrs Sachdeva said, getting up and patting the pleats of her sari.

‘Oh, no, not at all. I personally like these spontaneous visits more than formal meetings,’ Rina reassured her with a charming smile. ‘And you will be coming to the wedding, won’t you?’ she asked the older woman.

‘Of course, my dear,’ said Mrs Sachdeva. Then she placed a hand on Rina’s shoulder. ‘You know, Rina, sometimes teaching can become stagnant work. You ask yourself at the end of the day whether it is worth it, but with a student like you, it has been a real pleasure. I will watch your future progress with great interest. I do hope, Rina, that you will not let the mundane things of life take over the real things.’

‘Never,’ said Rina, with steely determination in her voice.

Then Mrs Kapoor came in. Mrs Sachdeva smiled at her and said goodbye, and then departed.

Rina resumed the brisk, business-like air that made her resemble her mother, and the two women quickly chose what they wanted. Ramchand cycled back, going over every word of the conversation he had heard that day, trying to fit the pieces together. On Saturday evening, Hari nodded and winked at Ramchand, motioning him to come over to the remotest corner of the shop. When Ramchand did, Hari whispered to him, ‘I’ve got three tickets for
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
, for tomorrow’s matinee show. At Sangam Cinema Hall. They are running it again this week. I don’t know why they can’t show the latest films, but this one I do want to watch again. You, me and Subhash. Okay?’

Ramchand was about to refuse. Hadn’t he resolved not to
waste any more Sundays watching films with Hari? But he
had
been studying his books regularly. It would be a nice break. ‘Okay,’ he whispered to Hari.

Hari said, ‘For the morning show, Subhash and I are going to watch
Gadar
. That is a new release. You want to come for that too? It is supposed to be a super blockbuster. We haven’t got the tickets for it yet, though. It is playing at Adarsh. It is too far away to go all the way there just for advance booking. We are just hoping we’ll be lucky and will be able to get the tickets when we get there. You want to come for that?’

‘Two films in a day?’ Ramchand asked, his voice uncertain.

‘Yes,’ Hari answered gleefully.

Ramchand wavered for a moment and then remembered all his virtuous resolutions. Also, he knew most Sunny Deol films were very violent.

‘No, no, both of you go for
Gadar
and then meet me outside Sangam for
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
, okay? I’ll just watch that one.’

‘Okay,’ Hari said. ‘You are sure?
Gadar
is a big hit, and you have already seen
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
once.’

‘Yes, but I have almost forgotten it, I didn’t watch it a hundred times like you did. And I really like the songs. And there will be too much violence in
Gadar
. I have seen the posters,’ Ramchand said, resolving to spend the morning with his books before he went for the matinee show, so that he could watch the film with a clear conscience.

Hari shrugged, ‘Okay, whatever you like.’

The next morning, Ramchand washed his clothes, cleaned up his room, took a bath and then sat down with the essay book. He carefully started reading an essay titled ‘Science: A boon or a curse?’

He could read much more smoothly now.

Science has made great progress for mankind,
he read.
Because of science, in fields of medicine and technology, there is great progress.
Cures for many diseases have been found. Day to day facilities are many now, like household appliances. Science has solved many of our problems
.

But every coin has two sides.

Science may be a boon, but it can also be a curse. Because of science, there is pollution and there are wars. Plastic bags and gases from factories are spoiling the environment. Toxic things are in our drinking water. So we must be careful how to use science.

One sentence in the paragraph struck Ramchand as very profound.
Every coin has two sides
. There are always two ways of looking at a thing. No one had ever told Ramchand that. According to Gokul, Mahajan, Hari, Shyam, Rajesh, and even the landlord (Chander hardly ever spoke to him), things were either good or bad. This new way of looking at things interested Ramchand very much. In fact, he berated himself – he should have been able to think this out for himself. There were many instances he remembered in the shop, when a particular sari, disdainfully rejected by one woman, would be eagerly pounced upon by another. He should have thought of this then. He had no originality! And what a nice way of putting it, every coin has two sides. He had never heard that before, so beautifully put. He noted down the sentence in his notebook in careful handwriting that was getting better every day.

Ramchand kept a careful eye on the clock. The show was at three in the afternoon. At two, he combed his hair once again, put some money in his wallet to pay Hari for the ticket, then slipped his jar of Zandu pain balm in his pocket, in case he got a headache. Then he locked his room and went downstairs. The mangy dog who lived in the street was sleeping right across his doorstep. Ramchand carefully stepped over him and walked to Sangam Cinema.

The bazaars were closed today. Stray dogs sunned themselves on the roads. A few families from the outer, newer city
came in cars to the old city on Sundays, to visit the Golden Temple or the Durgiana Mandir and to later eat at one of the famous dhabas.

But outside Sangam cinema hall, crowds milled around near the ticket window, pushing and shoving. A huge hoarding of the film, in which Hrithik Roshan and Ameesha Patel’s faces looked almost vermilion, had been put up outside.

Ramchand tried to spot Hari and Subhash.

He soon saw them both waving wildly at him from the middle of the crowd. He hurried to join them. ‘You fools,’ he said to them, ‘why did you have to go and stand in the middle of the crowd?’

‘You are the fool,’ Hari said, ‘if you think we did it on purpose. The crowd just crawled all over us till we were lost in the middle of it.’

They all grinned and called each other names and clapped each other on the backs, so that the right mood was set to watch the film together.

‘Good we have the tickets,’ said Ramchand, looking at the sea of fighting humans at the ticket counter.

‘Yes,’ said Hari, ‘we really had to push and fight to get tickets for
Gadar
in the morning.’

‘Oh, I forgot, how was it?’ asked Ramchand,

‘Zabardast! Great film,’ said Subhash. ‘And Sunny Deol is great, yaar. I really think he might
actually
bash up Pakistanis if he met them.’

‘That’s why I don’t like him,’ said Ramchand.

‘Why, don’t you think Pakistanis should be bashed up?’ Hari demanded.

‘Why talk of Pakistanis? Let us go and see if they are letting people in now,’ Ramchand said evasively.

They were. The three made their way into the dark interior of the cinema hall. The walls were paan-stained, the floor was littered with peanut shells and empty packs of Ruffles chips.
The tickets had no seat numbers, so there was a general scrimmage for seats. The three settled themselves in comfortably soon enough and waited for the film to start. Hari sat between Subhash and Ramchand and he took out a bag of groundnuts from his packet. The three cracked open the shells, munching and talking happily.

Subhash and Hari put their feet up on the seats in the front, and Subhash regaled them with stories from the Ladies’ Fancy Store.

‘One day a woman came in to buy earrings. After a while, another came in to look at some bangles. And suddenly, at the same moment, they caught sight of this lamp shade, bottle green with a gold fringe. And they immediately asked how much it was. And would you believe it, when we told them we had only one piece, they fought each other like mad dogs. We just didn’t know what to do. They started calling each other names. I was afraid they’d soon start pulling out each other’s hair. And all over a silly lamp shade. Women!’ Subhash said disbelievingly. ‘They are capable of anything.’

‘We don’t have fights in our shop like that, do we, Ramchand?’ said Hari. ‘Must be something to do with Subhash’s face. He is so ugly that after you have seen him once, you
have
to take it out on something or someone,’ Hari said, giggling. Subhash punched him, and then he began to giggle too. Soon, Ramchand joined in and they laughed hysterically, Hari almost choking on a nut in his mouth.

‘And there was this woman,’ said Subhash, ‘who leaned so far over to look at the hair clips displayed under the glass counter that she didn’t realize I could see down her blouse and see everything.’

Hari roared at this, but Ramchand sobered up a little. ‘Ramchand is a saint, don’t talk like this in front of him,’ joked Hari.

‘No, I am not,’ Ramchand said, smiling quietly, thinking of
Sudha. After all, there was no need to get crass about every woman one saw. For him, Sudha was enough.

Suddenly, the dim lights went off and the cinema hall became pitch dark. ‘It’s going to begin,’ said Hari.

The titles rolled, people began to whistle and stamp. After all,
Kaho Na Pyaar Hai
had been a superhit a couple of years back. Hari and Subhash began to whistle and stamp along with the others in the audience. ‘Please,’ Ramchand urged them, ‘what are you doing? Stop, both of you.’

‘What, Ramchand Bhaiya? We have come here to enjoy. Don’t we sit quiet and well-behaved in the shop for six days a week?’ Hari answered.

Ramchand gave up.

Hrithik Roshan, the hero, played the guitar, he was poor. Ameesha, the heroine, was rich. There was a song where groups of young men and women danced on an ocean liner. All the women had flat stomachs and most of the young men wore trendy caps. Then the hero and the heroine were stranded together on an island, where they admitted they loved each other, and the title song followed. Ramchand sat enraptured. He leaned towards Hari. ‘Hari, look at that ocean, so blue, so vast. What do you think it must be like, on an island, vast blue sky, vast blue ocean…’

Hari interrupted him, ‘Shut up about the ocean, you fool, look at Ameesha Patel’s thighs.’

Ramchand tapped his foot to the song, Hari and Subhash sang along loudly. Two women who sat three or four rows in front of them turned back to look at them in annoyance.

‘Ay, Hari. Shut up, yaar,’ Ramchand said urgently. ‘Those women don’t like it when men in the audience sing along. They think it is indecent.’

Hari stopped for a moment and said, ‘What is your problem, yaar? Are they your daughters-in-law that you are so worried about them?’ Hari began to sing lustily again, ‘
Dil mera, har
baar yeh, sunne ko bekraar hai
.’ And then the audience stamped and clapped and their voices rose to a deafening roar, ‘
KAHO NA PYAAR HAI
…’

Ramchand gave up again.

In the interval, they had tea and a samosa each. Ramchand went to the toilet. It was stinking beyond imagination. There he took out the jar of pain balm from his pocket and smeared some of it on his forehead, rubbing it in carefully. He had a slight headache.

The rest of the film was exciting too. Hrithik Roshan had been killed by villains, and had reappeared as a double, dancing wonderfully in a night club, wearing clinging black clothes. There were beautiful landscapes – mountains, green lush plains and clean roads that Ramchand loved. God knows where they were, he thought, and which lucky people lived in such places and woke up to such breathtaking beauty every day. When he got back to his room he felt indescribably sad. After the excitement of the film, the lovely landscapes, the catchy songs, the crowds, the room seemed very quiet and lonely. He had declined Hari’s offer of loafing about till dinner time and then going to Lakhan’s for dinner. Ramchand had said he had a headache and didn’t feel like it. Subhash had called him an old woman. Ramchand had smiled and left.

Now he opened the back window and looked down. He could see the cosy living room of the landlord’s family. The television was on, the landlord and the children were watching a film. The landlord sat in a chair, the children were huddled together on the divan, a quilt over their knees.

Through the kitchen window, he could see Sudha in the kitchen, standing over a pan on the gas stove. A gold earring she wore caught the light of the gas flame and twinkled on her ear like a firefly. Then, while he watched, she brought a tray into the living room and put it on the table. There were two cups of tea, one for herself and one for her husband,
and tall glasses of milk with Horlicks in it for the children. Ramchand knew it was Horlicks because he had often seen her rinse and dry empty Horlicks jars, and then store daal or salt or masalas in them.

Her warm body was covered in a thick salwaar kameez and she had a brown woollen shawl tightly wrapped around herself. How comforting it must be under that shawl, Ramchand thought wistfully. The landlord warmed his fingers on the outer surface of the cup of tea, before he took a smug, leisurely sip.