The Darkness That Is Light

This essay appeared last weekend in The Peacock, the daily newspaper of the International Film Festival of India

Last December, I wandered down from Grant Road station in south Mumbai to Alfred Talkies, a senior citizen among Mumbai cinemas, a playhouse built in 1880 converted into a cinema in the 1930s. There, I found exactly the atmosphere that had once breathed light and life into the days and nights of my twenties. A few stragglers traipsed around in the lobby, which opened directly onto the bustling street. Inside his booth, the ticket clerk sat gazing down into his phone, beautifully framed by his own window, undisturbed by patrons, under a “Beware of Pickpockets” sign. 

When the film ended, the door flew open, marshalled by an usher more used to shooing people out than welcoming them in. Out came a shabby and doleful parade. A man with one leg trussed up in bandages,  a blue plastic bag dangling between crotch and crutch. Travellers with shoulder bags bulging with clothes, squat women with brightly painted lips, alcoholics blinking in the brightness.   

A blind couple stood next to me, holding hands – as romantic in their own way as Shahrukh Khan and Kajol. When we entered the bare and sad auditorium, with its metal seats and paanspit-stained concrete floors and whirring wall-mounted fans, they found a little nook for themselves and began to pass a vada-pav back and forth. Another woman walked past me and settled down in the best seat in the house – middle row, centre seat – and put her feet up, toes pointing away from each other like a dog’s ears.  

I breathed deeply of the tubercular air, and as though by a wave of a wand, the hall suddenly split into zones of darkness and light. We were part of three intersecting worlds. That of the film, that of the cinema – and the small society of our own straggling selves, strangers and neighbours to one another in 12A, 16M, 21F. 

Growing up in Bombay, I loved going to the cinema, but no more than millions of other Indians. Going to a theatre was thought slightly disreputable. The content itself was considered one hundred per cent corrupting. (When I got many answers wrong in an exam a day after pestering my father to take me to an Aamir Khan-Madhuri Dixit starrer in 1990, he hollered, “Next time, just write Dil! Dil! Dil! in your answer sheet!”) To tell you the truth, I myself preferred reading books, which allowed you to be a co-producer of images and speech and human faces in a story.  

All that changed when my family moved to Delhi in 1998. Not only did the professors in my degree in English Literature make frequent allusions to film (usually films I’d never heard of), the newspapers often advertised film festivals and retrospectives, hosted by consulates and cultural centres. I started going to these shows in the evenings, sometimes doubling my pleasure by driving there in my mother’s newly bought blue Maruti 800.  

Here was cinema with an astonishing diversity of narrative modes and styles: Kurosawa and Kieslowski, Tarkovsky and Ghatak, Kaurismaki and Majidi. The montage in these films seemed even more meaningful and alive than the sequences of sentences in the novels in my university course.  

Very soon, my focus shifted entirely from books to films. When I won a scholarship to study English in Cambridge in 2000, I spent most afternoons of my first year at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, watching all the great new films of the world. After watching Shyam Benegal’s Manthan, I even dashed off a letter to the director, asking if I could come work with him. But all this was very naive (although sweet). As I would soon find out, I was just another cinephile maddened by the moving image, without a vision or theme or style or strategy.  

Eventually, I returned to Bombay and began work as a cricket writer. Ill at ease with both life and work, I soon abandoned my job and set myself to a task I truly had some aptitude for: writing fiction. But who or what was I to write about? Mumbai was already the most written-up of Indian cities. Was there a path through the jungle?  

One day, wandering around the city, I saw an old cinema hall playing a rerun, bought a ticket, and went in. From the moment that my hand, groping in the dark, found a hole in my seat, I was entranced. Here was a fascinating social universe, shabby and sometimes sordid, yet self-sufficient and serene. The rows of people in the audience had the familiar glazed expressions of cinemagoers worldwide. But their attention to the film was distracted and intermittent. Rather, they seemed rapt in some story or memory inside themselves.  

In this segment of moviedom, the actual film was only one point of focus; it was the darkness that consoled and cocooned as much as the light amused and diverted. Hundreds of people came here each day to escape the harsh gaze of day – and now I was one of them. They needed a dark place to rest or ruminate, to pass time before a long-distance train journey, to arrange a rendezvous. (I suddenly remembered kissing my first girlfriend in the dark of Siri Fort Auditorium in Delhi, and thinking that the cinema was such a delightful place, for reasons that had nothing to do with film.)  

If one were to be a film projectionist in such a cinema, of course one might be provoked by such a tasteless audience, seeking the cover of darkness and not the wonders released by a beam of light arrowing down from above. But equally, one might see oneself as a sort of good shepherd of lost sheep. A master of ceremonies supplying the light that helped the immense darkness sustain itself against the predatory landgrabbers of the cosmopolis, and keep up its heritage as a shaam-iana for lost souls.  

From this insight came the story for my first novel, Arzee the Dwarf, about a very small man who works as a projectionist in an old cinema in Bombay, the Noor (“light” in Urdu). Arzee loves the Noor, but not just with the passion of a cinephile (which he is). Rather, the darkness of the cinema is a very specific gift to his own stunted body. In lighted spaces and on the street, he is continually exposed to ridicule, but in the dark, he becomes invisible and then his real qualities shine through.  

Further, the projectionist always works on the top floor of the cinema. From his projection booth, Arzee looks down at the world, as a king might from his castle, and cannot be looked down on. The cinema is like his second body, lifting him up into the heavens. Arzee is a custodian and benefactor of both light and darkness, and this is his black-and-white gift to the people of Mumbai – at least all those who will come to his door and settle in his cinematic dawaakhana, “still and intent as statues”. 

This week, at IFFI, I see once again scores of people who have travelled long distances from Goa in search of great cinema, but also harbouring a deep faith in the cinematic space itself, a conviction that the moving image is most beautiful (and moving) when projected to the largest possible size and savoured in a great dark cavern in the company of hundreds of other cinephiles. Watching a Netflix show at home, we consume cinema in solitude or with those whom we already know well (even sometimes responding to WhatsApp messages on the side). But there is something about the ah-h-h of four hundred people catching their breath at the same time or the ripple of laughter pulsing across a room, like a wind through wheatfields, that reminds us of our shared humanity, our common emotional triggers and taste.  

We are bright-eyed and fully alive in the dark, yet we lose our faces; we give them away to be part of a story-streaming commune for two or three hours. “IFFI is not just a celebration of filmmaking, it is also a celebration of the audience,” said IFFI’s director Shekhar Kapur to me earlier this week. We come together several times each day under that mantle of darkness – the enchanted dark that we know, like Arzee, to be a kind of light.