There were three buses from Nungambakkam to Mount Road: 25,
25B and 17c. On every day of the week in the summer of 1985 (except on
Mondays), I would be standing at the Nungambakkam Police Station bus stand, at
about a quarter past ten. The journey from there to the TVS stop wasn't long,
but buses weren't always reliable, and it would be a little before eleven that
I would find myself waiting, along with several others, on the stairs of the
British Council, waiting for the library to open.
This was a Madras summer, and it was a physical thing. The
air was like hot syrup, and your shirt would stick to your back as you waited,
and when the doors finally opened, you would walk into the blessed coolness of
air-conditioning. For me, that summer, it was heaven.
Library membership cost Rs 80 a year, and you could borrow up to four books
at a time. Cards were issued by a slender, distinguished-looking woman with
short, iron-grey hair with improbably beautiful diction.
There were books I borrowed from there, of course. There
were Wodehouses, pretty much the entire
set - but you could seldom find them on the shelves, as people would ransack
the carts the library staff used to take returns to their proper locations. So
you had to reserve them, which meant looking up the card catalogue, finding the
proper number and filling out a form, and later you would get a postcard when
the books were available, telling you to pick them up within so many days. I
remember making a reservation for Bill the Conqueror, and being delighted when
the postcard finally came - and being ultimately disappointed, as the book
wasn't as good as many of Plum's best. There were the Orwells, and for some
reason, I never read his novels. I consumed his essays, though, fascinated,
even then, by the depth of his perception and the clarity of his language and
worldview.
But it wasn't for those books that I was at the library for.
It was for the part of the library which housed a few TV sets, and you could
get one of the staff to load up a David Attenborough documentary, and marvel at
the glories of the planet. Or it could be an episode of Fawlty Towers, or some
other show, and you'd realize that you were laughing only when you caught some
other member's disapproving stare.
But most of all, I lived for the reference section.
It took up almost a third of the library. There were
comfortable chairs all around, and the space was punctuated by shelves. There
were magazines - music, mechanics, automobiles and current affairs. There were
week old English newspapers that some older members would read, religiously.
There were encyclopaediae on a variety of topics. And there were the film
guides.
I hadn't been very
much into film at that point. After all,
the only major English films that came to Madras were James Bond thrillers, a
year after release in the West. This was the time when the biggest grossing
film in India - for several years - had been MacKenna's Gold. I had watched a
few Bond films - the ones that had come to the theatres, and loved them. And of
course, I'd watched Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I think that I pulled out a film guide to see if there were
other films she had acted in. This being
the British Council, you wouldn't find Maltin's guide - which was available in
the bookshops. But I'm pretty sure that what I initially looked through was
some run of the mill film guide.
I'm not sure when I first came across Leslie Halliwell's
guide. But it was unlike any of the others. Dense, without pictures - imagine a
film guide without a single still, it seemed heavy going. And there was the severity of judgment. Pages
and pages of films without a star rating. I looked up Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Two stars.
Two Stars.
It was one of the
greatest movies I'd seen, and all it got was two stars?
I looked at the Bonds.
The Spy Who Loved Me?
No stars.
What???
So who was this guy? Some arty type who only rated Oscar
movies?
I checked Gandhi - which had won the Oscar recently, to
front page coverage in every Indian newspaper.
Three stars.
Not expecting very much, I looked up From Russia, with Love.
Three stars, the same as Gandhi.
Description: "Arrant nonsense with tongue in cheek, on
a big budget"
Every day after that, except on Mondays, when the library
was closed, you'd find me there, deep in Halliwell's Film Guide, 4th edition,
and later the 5th. Sometimes, someone would be sitting in my favourite chair,
and I would glare and glare, and reclaim it at the first opportunity. Somedays,
I would go with a notebook, and make list of films that I would see, when I got
the chance.
And when I was sated with reading about old films, and
Hollywood's golden age, I would leaf through magazines. Or watch a show.
And soon, it would be evening, and I would reluctantly close
the guide, and head back to the bus stop, wondering if I would ever be able to
see all the films that I wanted to. And as the bus made its way to
Nungambakkam, I would slowly emerge from a world black and white and colour,
where Errol Flynn would battle Basil Rathbone on the stairs of Nottingham
castle and Bogey would have one more drink and Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell
would scheme and manipulate each other and every one else, into a world of
public exams and IIT preparation and all the rest, far away though it seemed at
the time.