The Hindi film industry is a family business. I write about the movies because my mother’s love for how tense didn’t change over the years. Without the face changing, so it was the same woman who gave birth to her. Repeatedly.
One plus one equals a million. They say a child can hear what the mother sings or listens to even from inside the womb. love for songs starts when within.
In fact, babies react to music with an invisible smile. How else do you teach something? You hum a tune into his ears and it becomes a new time.
Anything sung is always in the present tense.
It is a way of keeping the dead alive.
A different equation altogether
once you are in front of the screen, between a mother and her daughter
or a father and his son,
one plus one equals none.
It’s called an oral tradition.
A song is also always a way to remember. No wonder we have more songs than prayers, than poems, than gods.
They walked in the rain. The three of them
& you follow in my dreams, tread through the mud this downpour on our own way to watch a movie. Later we will argue about what it was that we were going to see. For now, he leads the way the entire household helps as we embark the bank
a canal, the water up to our knees
covered in red
They are sisters. Twins, almost.
The same distance between my mother and her sister,
& I am with my other mother, a mere child.
Who is reincarnate in the animal
This happened in real life and in a dream. Just like a song from a film, that’s how you are supposed to read it, if you want to survive it’s telling.
In it, every night, parts that resemble one another. Each song mimics an ancient form, a spine within, beating
braided through history.
What was it that we watched? lot of green, a wild stream. You thought I’d love the scenes with the animals. My other mother, she often joked: What can a child make of the animals in a movie?
(Now they kill the Gorilla and save the child)
You’d have probably been scared sacred. A thread. Imagine the theatre full of howling children, dragged through the mud, the red landscape, it turns real ugly real fast and I still don’t know how we made it here in the rain.
I think it is Tarzan, but you contradict.
What an odd choice for a child’s first film.
Her name renamed a secret
Many songs start with a poem
Not a memorable song in this movie, they’d regret
Years later—so many will tell this story again and again, and so much better
we borrow a little and mix the rest with our own lives
And often (the subject of) a movie, a bond between a mother and her child, children
carved out of coconut shells, a song that will change the history of how we tell a story, a story in which we teach the children songs that we were not allowed to hum, and became one in our silence, this voice of sisters, that love you are supposed to uphold but each day is a fight with injustice, why she wouldn’t let the others sing, and remained a solitary voice the face that changed when the stories stayed just the same.
What do our dreams have to do with that?
Somewhere between the other and I between what you see and what you feel is the screen. It’s ubiquitous. The smallest spaces will do. Fit drama into each breath like the dying. Capricious. A hiccup. Between my dreaming and seeing it on-screen, or perhaps, that existed before my dream. Those locales. Of course. Then it happened “in life” as in “real time”. There are parts of the brain that are more beautiful than the Alps. They all light up when you arrive. He drew them, cajole. Turn on the lights, which means an end. Or the sound of the glass, the applause, it’s a lost cause—to explain why an entire nation prides upon believing this fiction, such a lie. We know the truth. This never happened. Which also means that this could happen to you.
So rejoice at all that we don’t have.
Now, in the dark,
especially if I am sitting next to you. Which is where I was the last time I, the last time the song began & don’t even know who the characters are yet—except of course from what we have seen on television. Knew this moment would come but not when. Flipping through the pictures of some star—it’s a kaleidoscope, made of broken glass and with each turn of the hand, a different constellation & in clicks your heart & matches up to her waking up to the wild applause.
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