Filmindia (1941)

July 1941 FILMINDI A when I arrive there to see my parents before continuing my journey to Kashmir. But the first thing I notice on emerging from the station is a poster announcing that "Pukar" is the current attraction at the local picture palace. "So, after all, we have got a cinema," I say to myself, and as some members of my family haven't yet seen the Modi masterpiece, I take them to see it that very evening. It turns out to be an open-air business — just a tin shack that houses the projector, and four screens (made out of gunny bags stitched together) enclosing a rectangular space. You pay an anna and sit on the ground, you pay two and share a rickety bench, you pay four and get a chair and if you are the local police sub-Inspector or one of his friends or, perhaps, a fool like me who buys a seven-anna ticket, you secure a slightly better chair in the last row, within ear-shot of the far from sound-proof projection booth. There is no roof but the sky and as it happens to be the night of the full moon, one can hardly complain that the image on the screen is pale and not in sharp focus. Soon there is a gust of wind and the cinema "walls" flap in the wind like the sails of a schooner, threatening to fly away any moment; the notvery silver screen is covered with a thick coating of dust and sand gets into one's ears along with the melody of Naseem's "Zindagi ka Saz" song. The single projector has to stop after ever reel for rewinding and so cries of "Pan, bidi, cigarette" alternate with Sohrab Modi's rhetoric. And yet the audience of over three hundred sits glued to the seats, thrilled and entertained by the saga of Jehangir's justice. At the end of the show, I come out of the roofless "Picture Palace" and pause for a moment at an aerated-water and sherbet stall with a colourful array of film stars' photos. Each one of them has been cut out of the pages of "filmindia" On enquiry I find that the stall-keeper had brought a couple of second-hand copies from Delhi for the specific purpose ' »f decorating his stall. CAN'T EVEN WASH DIRTY LINEN WITHOUT FILMINDIA." A few hours in Delhi. I happen to go to a laundry which had been charged with the heroic job of restoring some sort of shape to my shabby clothes. A young lad, of about 17 or so, apparently an undergraduate, is also there to take delivery of his clothes. I find him eyeing me in a most furtive manner and I wonder what is wrong with me Finally, he comes up to me and says, "Are you Mr. Ahmad Abbas?" 1 plead guilty and the young fellow who seems to be one of the legion of screen-struck youths, says he want^ to have a talk with me to find out whether there is scope for him in the film line. "But, how did you know my name?" I ask, still intrigued by this problem. Few stars can depict pathos more eloquently. Padniadevi has reached dizzy heights of popularity in Bengal and now she is wvrking in F.C.I's. "Paper Pathey" and New Theatres' "Meenakshi" and New Talkies "Nari". 39