Part 5 of my life in Wadi

Before I begin, I have many photographs and pictures which I would like to upload on to the blog so that readers can see what I am talking about. But I am not able to upload them for some reason. I mean they are uploaded but they are not visible on the blog. If someone can enlighten me I will be obliged.

The ACC colony had a club. This was basically a grotesque structure of steel angles and pipes welded together. The walls were cement (most things in ACC colony was made of cement. I had not seen a tarred road for the first 20 years of my life until I went to Kerala. The roads in ACC colony were cement) and the roof, asbestos. There were three halls laid out in a C shape. The large central one was the badminton hall. One one side was the table tennis hall and on the other was the bridge hall, the ladies club and the library – and this was what used to attract me frequently – not the ladies club, I was too young for THAT – the library. There were two bookshelves full of books mostly in English. For sometime my father was the librarian and it was at that time that I took to visiting the library regularly. There were magazines like “The Illustrated weekly of India”, “Stardust”, “Filmfare” etc. The Panickers also bought “The Illustrated weekly”, so I got to read it while I went to see Jayachandran. I borrowed books by authors like James Hadley Chase, Desmond Bagley etc. from the club. But that was much later. I am probably putting the horse before the cart here but then this is not, as I said earlier a chronological sequence of events but a rambling of random thoughts, so it doesn’t really matter.

The area enclosed by the C was again – you guessed it – cemented. And the ACC sports club screened movies there every Saturday night. The tickets were sold in the club office for two classes. The chairs – Godrej steel chairs – for Rs.1/- each and 25 paise for the floor. I must mention that the chairs were green painted cane chairs with curved fronts and comfortable wide armrests in the first two rows reserved for the General Manager, the Chief Engineer and the like, then three or four rows of slightly less comfortable green cane chairs for lower officers and then Godrej steel chairs for other men and women. All chairs cost you a ticket of Rs.1/-. Films like Aarzoo, Dus Lakh, Jungal me mangal, Daag, Prem Nagar, Aaradhana etc any more were screened. Mr. K.P. Menon, father of Geeta Menon was the Culture Secretary or Entertainment Secretary or whatever I guess, so he was the one who sold the tickets. And when the viewers were comfortably seated on their chairs, as darkness fell and the movie was about to start, K P Menon would come around with a torch and check our tickets. He was a soft spoken man but he was also in fear of the law so when he saw a Malayalee whom he knew did not have tickets he asked in great consternation "Entha Ticket Undo?" (Do you have tickets?). These tickets were in great demand because there was no other source of entertainment in Wadi. No movie halls, no Television, no Malls, no nothing. Just sit at home and pray or talk or go to the club.

Now, my Grandmother Thangi was a woman of strong will and many idiosyncrasies and one of these idiosyncrasies was that we wouldn’t go to club, buy a ticket and watch these movies. Whether this was due to any Puritanism or parsimony or any particular animosity with K P Menon, I do not know, but if Thangi said no, it stayed no. There were several who shared such a predicament with me. They didn’t have tickets. What we did was innovate. And the club and K P Menon didn’t mind the innovation. While the paying patrons sat on chairs on one side of the screen watching the movie, we sat on the other side. The screen being transluscent we could see equally well from the other side. The only disadvantage was that we saw the textual matter laterally reversed. This was my first lesson in symmetry for we saw the As and Ts and Ys correctly while we misread the Ds and the Rs and the Gs. This was a wonderful discovery for several of my batchmates in 1991 when it was pointed out to us during our training as curators by Dr.Saroj Ghose and other such luminaries, but it was old hat to us WKPs. More about Dr.Ghose and others to do with him later – much much later.