Read And Then One Day: A Memoir for Free Online Page B

went religiously into buying
Sport & Pastime,
a fabulous magazine, now defunct, which I’d read from cover to cover, then cut up and stick the cricketers’ pictures in my physics practicals notebook. What useful purpose I hoped that’d serve I don’t know and didn’t know then, but I did become known as the guy with the most cricket pictures.
    I didn’t linger long on the horns of the cricket-versus- movies dilemma. Cricketers were godlike creatures blessed with special gifts; besides, there were so few. There were many more actors, so I plumped for the easier alternative. Cricket is a heartless mistress and much tougher than acting. It’s not as if I’d always watch a film instead of a cricket match but cricket, though it comes pretty close, didn’t for me compare then, and does not now, with the magic of what appears on the screen, which is probably why it has become such a TV- friendly game. The actors in those exclusively American or British films we saw then didn’t look like real people to me but this world looked safe. In cricket one mistake could be the difference between humiliation and glory. In the movies, everything always turned out all right. You could put your faith in a superhero and rest your own head on your pillow and sleep. This magical world didn’t exist yet you could escape into it whenever you wished.
    The few Hindi movies I saw as a child, however, didn’t grab me. They seemed silly and have never stopped seeming so. The actors didn’t seem so much unreal as fake. The back- projections looked like back-projections. I actually remember an actor wearing a wristwatch in some period costume drama. Everything in those movies seemed tatty and in poor taste; watching one I never felt convinced that this was actually happening. Sometimes decades later, at work on the sets of a Hindi movie or while listening to the script narration of one, this same thought has recurred, ‘This cannot actually be happening!’ Yet Hindi movies continue to enthral (and generate) billions every day all over the world. So I guess there is something the matter with my perception. Be that as it may, Hindi movies and their actors have never held much fascination for me; a role model in the Hindi film industry has been hard to find except perhaps for the eccentric Mr Raaj Kumar, and he not for his acting which was dreadful but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career, and sent all Follywood on a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it.
    Nazrul Haque, a classmate, introduced me to cigarettes and found a willing pupil, a fascination for the smell of burning tobacco and the manner of people who smoked it being not uncommon among young boys. The remains of a cigarette were actually found by the dorm matron once in the pocket of one of my shirts going to the laundry. The punishment for smoking was expulsion and no questions asked. While I vigorously protested my innocence in the face of undeniable proof, it did seem for a while that my trunk would emerge shortly from the box room on its own. But on pondering the question, the matrons decided not to bring the matter to the Principal’s notice, the common consensus among them being that I was too much of an idiot to pull off something like this. It was common knowledge that many senior boys smoked, and it was concluded that the cigarettes had been planted in my pocket; some senior was shifting evidence that might have damned him.
    The suspicion that I was a complete idiot began to grow into a conviction, and I had not a clue what to do about it. In spite of my falling grades my father continued to remind me that I was ‘basically an intelligent boy’. This belief must have made it even tougher for him to swallow my increasingly dismal performance. I think he did believe it, and wanted me to believe it too, but it was a little while before that happened, and in the most unexpected way. My utter disinterest in learning anything except cricket