At the Movies

 

My grandfather had possessions in the South of India, somewhere around Pondicherry, later famous for Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram. Grandfather had been a widower for some time, and Granny was his second wife and the pre-war version of a mail-order bride. They had exchanged letters and pictures and after a brief period of correspondence he came to Hamburg to pick her up. Long distance courting must run in the family, I practiced it, too.

In January, 1911, they shipped in on a modestly luxurious liner, and, although not yet married, shared the same cabin to consume the nuptials. “And he refused to switch off the light!,” said my grandmother. This, too, seems is running in the family. I prefer the lights on as well. On arrival, His Majesty, King George V’s, registrar in Pondicherry, legalized the liaison and the happy couple drove in an open two-seater - from the pictures I would guess a Talbot Model M4 - to my Grandfather’s mansion, about half an hour on dusty, bone-shaking roads.

The old photographs show a house with round arches and palm trees fringing the pillared porch. The people in this part of India are of a darker complexion than anywhere else in the country. From childhood in austerity, if not poverty, my grandmother had grown up in an orphanage, something didn’t like to talk about, she suddenly found herself transported into the lap of luxury, with domestics attending to every wish and whim.

One day my grandfather decided to take her out to the movies.

Now, we all know of course that motion pictures in those days were a jerky affair of little people rushing about in black and white. After another of those long drives on sun-baked and sand-swept country roads, the perspiring couple parked the car and entered the refreshing cool of a pillared town hall with floor-long drapes between the columns, all in heavy read and with golden tassels. The seating was a mixed company of chairs, carried in from the storage room and put up in a semicircle towards a table under a heavy green cloth. Behind the table was an elevated dais. A lonely piano‘s demure presence in the background was barely noticed. Standing at the table a Sikh faced his audience, attired in shining silk. He was a tall fellow with an impressive coal-black beard and an even more impressive turban from which the hovering eye of a flashing peacock feather kept winking and nodding.

My grandmother felt strangely affected. She later said, it seemed, as if an unspeakable fatigue had overwhelmed her. Suddenly the dim space on the dais lit up.

The somewhat blurry figures of a nomadic tribe wrenched themselves loose from the wavering mirage and in their dark blue burnouses they rode their camels straight towards the alarmed audience. But my grandmother relaxed in heir chair when she saw the Bedouins dismount and in clouds of drifting sand pitch camp at the running water of a desert oasis.

A very real desert and a very real oasis, not at all a stage prop, more like a picture in cinema scope and most amazing, in color - decades before the invention of cinema scope and colored film. There was even sound. The palm trees rustled in the wind and bent under a strong humming roar; my grandmother later swore that she could feel the wind on her face. But the people in the picture spoke in a slow, slurry drawl, it was not a language anybody would know. The women of the tribe began unburdening the pack animals, and one of the released camels hustled towards a tree with low hanging branches. Nobody around my grandmother seemed surprised to see in this North-African setting a hairy Mongolian camel with two humps. My grandmother, too, took it as a matter of course. The beast had a spring in every step of the padded feet and the animal’s joy in finding such a tasty tree remained with my grandmother as a picture of exuberant happiness for the rest of her life. It made her smile when she told the story.

She never fully realized that she alone of all the people had seen this camel.

The wind abated, leaving a fine powder of yellow dust on the palm leaves. Yet nobody in the film’s cast unveiled his face - the faces remained in the shadow with two even darker cavities where one would expect to see the eyes.

The Sikh’s expression, too, had become a mere shadow under the mighty turban, and the man slowly marched up towards my grandmother. All the time the peacock-feather kept alarmingly nodding and winking. My grandmother felt shivers run under her costume. She had a distinct sensation of bitter smelling perspiration and she heard my grandfather groaning and saw him reaching out for something only he could see in front of him. The Sikh came close.

He looked down on her, and while looking down the peacock feather on the blue turban touched her forehead with a burning sensation. She tried to say something, but instead was laboring just to breathe. Air, she needed air! And then suddenly the Sikh’s figure before her began to disintegrate and reassembled in purplish bundles of dark pulsing rods, each probing the air like the thin tentacles of a strange, octopus-like creature. With a cry my grandmother  passed out. When she opened her eyes she found herself lying on the floor with her husband lifting her head and looking at her with a worried expression.

The ladies sitting next to her fanned the air with newspapers and straw-hats. “I told you not to wear a corset,” said my grandfather, “the season is too hot for this.” But she didn’t wear a corset. She was pregnant.

 

© - 10/12/2007 - by michael sympson

1,000 words, all rights reserved