#Scurf160: a movie night alone

A movie date alone about forgotten love when a stranger becomes more than that

on the serendipity of watching Three Of Us

Amid deaths in the family and going through the motions of an otherwise absolutely banal living, I found myself ensconced in the lounge of an innox screen in nehru place last month. Life had been serving weirder googlies my way, as I kept escaping one way or the other. This movie was going to be special the way you know a solid winter night with a warm cup of rum toddy in hand will be. It was Avinash Arun’s Three of Us for which I had been piling up on hopes for months even before seeing the trailer. The still released eons ago was enough to have me pining for it like a one-sided lover. Just that I didn’t know I’ll be deep in the trenches of mourning a loved one’s sudden passing away, battling a fresh surge of loneliness and continuing with life with a renewed hatred towards it by the time the movie releases.

The life-threatening air and endless number of cars aside, I love almost everything about living in Delhi. The Teppanyaki restaurants, the cocktail bars, the gorgeously-dressed people, the general sense of restlessness (mostly ambition-induced) when you step out on the roads works like a charm. That all manners of movies, of all budgets and ranges get to be released in Delhi and see their more than mere three days of screen-life adds to it.

After work on a weekday I took an autorickshaw to the nearby Inox. A few conversations and clarifications later, I was nestled in the sofa seat of a rather posh screen that had barely 10 sofa seats altogether. The whole mood inside was bluesy, however reddish the interiors of the theatre were, there was a quietness there even amid a crowd of seven. It felt like attending a private screening where cinephiles down glasses of champagne, cozy up inside blankets and glow together in the shared warmth of being inside the belly of a cinema hall.

The thing about mourning is that it induces within a sense of torpor which is difficult to break out of. The weariness that comes from skulking all through the days and nights, crying bucketfulls after losing a loved one to a heart wrenching accident, is definitely tough to wash off. So when I sat in that sofa seat, a certain sense of ennui creeped up on me from all directions. This patch of life was rough and I was forcing myself to have a good time despite it all.

What was I doing here when I had parents home who had not eaten well for almost two weeks? Wasn’t I crying just an hour ago? Was a movie really required in a time like this? Will the movie help me break my emotional sinuses and soak my heels into a different milieu even if just for an hour?

The movie ticket had been expensive, so so expensive, which meant that I quickly shed any thoughts of getting a tub of popcorn. I removed my N95 mask, slid off my shoes and buried my cold toes under my thighs. The sofa seat was forgiving.

As the movie started I felt the dankness of my life evaporate into the air around . The opening sequence showed Bombay, rather a kind of Bombay that I had often sought solace in on screen. The pastel shades, the suspended time, the shared warmth of people who have grown old together made me feel at ease. My feeling of insufficiency suddenly became mutable.

It was then that the guy seated to my left had a tub of popcorn delivered to him. It was large, huge for even the hungriest of souls to be able to finish alone. I continued to concentrate on the moving visuals onscreen as he started munching on them. Next thing I noticed he was offering to share the popcorns with the man to his left. Next, he turned to me. Our eyes met in the darkness of the cinema hall and he asked if I’d like to have some popcorn, like I was a guest in his drawing room.

It felt surreal. Strange. Scripted! Almost like a scene from a movie like the one we were watching. I had always pined for a moment of unmediated, sudden intimacy like this in any public space with a stranger. Maybe a train compartment, maybe an Uber pool ride. That it was happening in a movie theatre while watching Three of Us was even more poetic, layering it up with a certain sense of mysticism, beauty and meaning.

To break the pregnant awkwardness of that moment, I threw a chaotic question at him: “What flavour are these?”

“Cheese.”

“Oh nice!”

I gushed with a wave of embarrassment in that slip of a moment. We had broken the ice.

Greedily I sampled a couple of corns from the tub careful so as not to even graze his hand at the slighted or disturb his balance. He smiled, as did I and we nestled into a kind of a succour. He placed the tub on the shared handrest between us, and we spent those 90 odd minutes watching the movie partaking in a normal silence, a new ease and a shared love for the movies.

There was in those moments, the feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. And all of it, so banal, so fleeting, so ephemeral. Much like the love between Shailaja and Kamat onscreen. An unsaid commiseration, a belongingness even if only for a handful of minutes.

Soon after as credits rolled, I sat there, my eyes peeled on the screen reading each name with an academic vigour when I saw a friend’s name there. A name from a not so distant past that brought back some bittersweet, incandescent memories.

Sharing a tub of popcorn with a stranger while watching a movie about forgotten love, seeing the name of a certain someone who meant something to you ages ago — sublime moments like these are so rare, so hard to conjure up in this big city kind of living, but on that day, in those two hours those moments came to me. And I held on to them for meaning, nourishment, warmth.

Later this week, I will watch another movie alone in the same theatre. It is probably not going to be as soulful as Three of Us, and probably also not as sophisticated a viewing experience. All I hope for is to be able to fall in love with myself or anyone, at the end of it. Nothing else really matters.