Read The Journey Prize Stories 25 Online
Authors: Various
The Journey Prize Stories 25 (20 page)
Vik’s return coincided with the emergence of the Rex audience, which was released into a delightful miasma of frying oil
and the treats it birthed. The vendor carts were so thronged that it made it difficult for the taxi to park, a problem Vik solved by telling the driver to drive straight into his family courtyard. He paid the man from his father’s stack of bills. Devi emerged from the house, swathed in a fresh sari unmarked by the traces of hurled corncobs. When she saw Vik pulling his father’s feet out of the backseat of the cab, she came over to help, first breaking the dignity of her bearing by screaming at the dog in authoritative French, which devolved into Creole when it became clear that the barking, snarling animal wouldn’t subside into peace unless she used words it understood.
“Bouche to fesse,” she said, lending the words a Gallic crispness that could have been pulled from the lips of one of the dubbing actresses that Vik had heard in the few minutes of film he’d seen that night. The dog was silent, and Vik and his mother pulled his father out of the cab and onto a pile of empty rice sacks. First-class-audience members, overdressed in suits now flecked with grease and flavoured salt, began to filter into the courtyard. With them came a foodcart stink and the ecstasy of a great and mysterious film. They were clamouring for the cab, which Devi thumped brutally until it reversed off her property.
The crowd followed the car, except for a hunched figure traversing the tiled carpet at the Rex’s exit. She hovered at the edge of the pale light dripping from the open kitchen door, staring at Vik: Aunt Roshi. She was even more tranquil than usual, calmed by a massive ingestion of sugar that had come in the form of three Cokes and a sackful of licorice, the remnants of which she was loosening from the generous gaps between her teeth.
Devi pointed to the inert form of her husband, and Roshi trundled over to help, after carefully setting down her final, half-full Coke. Vik was waved away. He sat on the vacated stack of rice sacks and watched White walk to the end of his chain, which was long enough to allow him to nose the bottle of Coke onto its side. The dog licked up the spill, and the boy waited for the rest of his family to go to bed. Renga’s father had been right; bringing his own whiskey-sodden patriarch home had deflected, even defused Devi’s anger. The routine she entered each time she ushered Vik’s father out of a binge and into the recovery cycle from late night to early morning, a period in which she always maintained an utter speechlessness, provoked an emotion in her that was quite different from the light, hot rage she would have otherwise flung at her son.
Vik avoided going out for the rest of the weekend, cutting off his mother’s flare-up before it could begin. He watched crowds enter and exit Cinema Rex from his bedroom window, saw Roshi patronize the establishment twice more before Monday. He felt he had a tacit agreement with Renga to avoid discussing the events of Cinema Rex’s opening night with Siva, but wasn’t able to verify this when the school week began. Renga was absent, an absence that stretched into the rest of the week. On Thursday, their teacher (a slender Frenchman who refused to give top marks to any prose that wasn’t as polished as Flaubert’s) told the class that Renga’s father had died.
“When?” asked Vik, forgetting to use any respectful niceties of address.
“The weekend. That is all I know, and all you should know. Renga will perhaps be back on Monday, and I expect you all
to have written eight hundred words on de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ by then.”
“Is it due on Monday for sure, or just whenever Renga gets back?” asked Siva.
After the news, Siva and Vik felt comfortable around each other for the first time that week, bonded by the invisible presence of tragedy. Vik was sure that Renga’s father had choked to death in the back of the lorry later that Friday night, his throat filling with vomit. This fatal possibility was one of Devi’s most frequently voiced fears, the genesis of the standing command that called for Vik to rotate his own father onto his side during the drunken naps that consistently laid the man on his back.
“How you think it happened?” Siva asked. “Shot? Maybe by robbers?” Vik nearly shared the vomit-aspiration theory, but decided to hold onto it.
“Don’t know, but probably something a lot more boring. Heart attack, maybe.”
“Still sad that way. Sadder, maybe. No story with it.”
The lorry never returned to Vik’s father’s fleet, which seemed to confirm Vik’s theory.
13
While Renga never returned to their lessons with Reynolds, he did eventually return to school. The three boys used their daily breaks to discuss the movies screening at the Rex, a routine that continued until the year that Siva convinced his mother to let him drop out of school and take up a job as a hospital porter.
Renga was soon to leave the school as well, accepting his early scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He ran into Vik at the Cinema Rex one week before his flight departed the island. Vik had taken to carrying a notepad into the movies with him, which he’d fill with scrawls legible only to himself as he went to see even the most trivial films three, four, five times. Renga was a repeat attendee as well because he had to watch any film at least twice before he could stop being distracted by the plot and could concentrate solely on the way the images aligned with the music. He explained this to Vik, who seemed slightly awed.
14
“And why do you watch these things so many times?” Renga asked.
“I sit in the different sections, see how the movie comes at me when I’m sitting with different people.”
“Is it any different?”
“Sometimes.”
“Seems like a waste of money, no?” Renga asked, smiling to dampen any potential sense of insult. Social gestures like this were important now; they were both a little older, he needed to practice politeness for Europe, and he’d grown to know Vik much less in the two years since his father’s death and the opening of Cinema Rex.
“Waste? I get in for free.”
Renga was about to reply that it seemed like a waste of time, at least, but he remembered his politeness. He said something else instead, and they talked about nothing in particular until the projector awakened and allowed them to be silent.
1
Renga’s prickliness over his friend’s
Chori Chori
comment was sublimated into a grammatical nitpick, but it was rooted in his deep, abiding love for that film, which he had seen eleven times over its run at the Royal. He went alone, by arrangement with his music tutor, M. Bouillhet. The tutor allowed Renga to skip every second piano lesson if he could replicate a new piece of music from Shankar Jaikishan’s soundtrack at the next lesson. Bouillhet was a hardline but affable racist who reasoned that it was easier to train a coloured boy to use his natural ear for rhythm and melody than it was to drill him on Bach.
2
Twenty-nine years after the opening of the Rex, Siva would take his inappropriately young son to a screening of George Miller’s
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
, the Australian Mel Gibson film whose relentless action style would go on to dominate 1980s blockbuster cinema. Siva, now a nurse at the second-best hospital on the island, found an accurate visual depiction of his absurd childhood vision of Australian life. The film, in its joyful ridiculousness, served to confirm that his notion of Australia had been pure fiction. He enjoyed
The Road Warrior
, except the bit when Max’s dog dies, which he felt was an unnecessarily cruel touch.
3
This aunt, Roshi, was to become Cinema Rex’s most beloved customer. The boys and older men who worked as ushers all referred to her as Auntie, and offered her free Coca-Cola every time she came in. She drank gallons of it every week, and died of complications from diabetes in 1973. Devi, who outlived her by almost two decades, didn’t know her sister’s precise age, but knew that she had died too young. She never drank any sort of carbonated soft drink after 1965, but continued to take four sugars in her tea.
4
Cinematographer Gordon Willis would indirectly answer this question for Vik. In 1972, Vik sat in a packed theatre in London, watching
The Godfather
. The lighting in Brando’s study precisely replicated the kitchen’s light on the day he had watched his mother prepare stew. The effect was intimate, not aquatic, and notable for how much of the darkness it made visible.
5
Renga would later develop his corded strength with a set of exercises described in a Charles Atlas kit that was mistakenly delivered to his house six months after the opening of the Cinema Rex. The parcel was addressed to Raj Ghany, the silent fat boy who lived across the street, but Renga chose to accept it as a gift from beyond. The physique that he constructed and maintained was partially responsible for securing the respect of a curiously flabby and middle-aged Tamil action star named Arvind, who gave Renga his first major scoring job, on an explosion-heavy, 1983 rip-off of
E.T
.
6
In the early 1990s, Siva realized how obese he had become at a screening of
In the Line of Fire
. He’d come alone, as he had a bond with Clint Eastwood that had nothing to do with his children or married life. The new owners of the Rex had installed rigid plastic armrests the previous week. Siva placed his large Coke in the cupholder of his favourite seat [27A] and sat, only to find that the armrests chafed his sidefat dreadfully. He came out of the film dented and numbed. As obesity problems had spread over the island in the past decade, the management found Siva’s petition for a row without armrests to be reasonable. Row 27 was soon stripped of the offending plastic projections, and cupholders were attached to the seatbacks of Row 26.
Siva widened into the neighbouring seats until he suffered a massive heart attack in 2005 while attending to a patient who had been admitted after a heart attack of his own.
7
Vik was to write many of his major papers at the London Film School on
The Night of the Hunter
, actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing. Instead of tiring of “actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing,” Vik began to love that string of words, thinking of it as his own personal cliché, a coded signature that appeared in all his work on his favourite film. When the editor of
Cahiers du Cinema
excised the French iteration of the phrase from Vik’s fourth article for the journal, without first asking permission, Vik swore to never publish in it again. Unfortunately, maintaining that promise to himself would only have been possible if he had succeeded in chucking his journalistic and academic career in favour of screenwriting and directing, a dream that failed to materialize after seven drafts of a screenplay and a humiliating internship at the BBC in his mid-thirties.
CdC
accepted his proposal for a long feature in which he would interview five important directors on their own poignant and career-influencing early failures. The piece was well-regarded, but Vik failed to attain the encouraging sense of recognition that he was looking for in these conversations with great figures of cinema; their failures had been experiments in learning and fortitude, while his own taught him that there were things he would never be able to do.
8
While pre-code Hollywood films had made selective appearances on the island,
The Night of the Hunter
’s unsensational portrayal of a new wife’s normal sexual drive and Mitchum’s psychopathic distaste for regular intercourse was so unusual that it didn’t register as subversive. The audience seemed to look through the screen, a fact that Vik had noted before he was distracted and that he would later expand upon in his dissertation, a reception-theory piece that would eventually be resurrected as the centerpiece of his first volume of essays,
Hollywood in the Colonies
. This publication, more than anything else in his career, was responsible for his tenured position in UCLA’s film studies department, an appointment that he took up in 1984 and held until his retirement in 2011.
9
Vik used an altered, depersonalized recounting of this incident in the opening chapter of his second major academic book,
Rabelais at the Drive-In: Carnivalesque Interrogations of Class Structure in Colonial Cinema(s)
.
10
Vik was not to see the rest of
The Night of the Hunter
during its run at Cinema Rex. His mother was so relieved to recover him that she limited his punishment to a ban of the film, which counted as a light penalty to her, but was crushing for Vik. His long essay
On Interruption
, which caused one critic to call him “the othered Barthes,” begins with the author’s broken first viewing of Laughton’s film. “So did my career,” Vik said during an interview with that same critic, an instructor from the American University of Paris who managed to simultaneously condescend and flatter.
11
When Vik did watch the film all the way through, he was able to place the moment when the man had walked into the theatre: it was during the moonlit boat ride that the children take down the river, where every shot foregrounds an animal that looms massively over the drifting boat in the background. A lunatic masterstroke on Laughton’s part, a sequence that Vik never dared unpack in the confines of one of his academic studies of the film, for fear of damaging its place in his memories and his sense of film.
12
Renga had never allowed the other boys to come to his house for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was that he did not want them to see his piano and begin to ask questions. After the events that took place on the opening night of Cinema Rex, which included Vik seeing his home and the piano it contained, Renga dropped his English lessons with Reynolds in order to take on additional musical training at the conservatory on the eastern side of the island. This allowed him to see less of Vik, and to focus on the skill that would get him off the island two years before anyone else of his age, with his admission to the Royal College of Music in London. He ran into Vik at an early Pink Floyd concert in Camden (they would often, separately, boast that anyone who hadn’t seen the band perform with Syd Barett could never understand what popular art lost in his disappearance). The conversation they had that night was their longest since the night they had been pulled away from Robert Mitchum’s pursuit of two celluloid children and a cash-stuffed doll. Their friendship began again, quickly and simply, with Renga purchasing two lagers at the bar with pound notes passed to him by Vik as heavy psychedelic noise interrupted their talk. When Vik took his beer from Renga, he saw that the spindly pianist’s finger was stuck a half-inch into the liquid. He noted the sight nostalgically, then forgot it in order to enjoy his drink. They both agreed that drinking felt safer off the island.
13
At that concert in Camden, just after having bought a large blended scotch for an unappreciative and very-ugly-up-close David Gilmour, Renga confirmed Vik’s theory. “Wanker guitarists everywhere favour the brand that strangled my dad, it seems.”
14
At a retirement event, when he was asked what he thought his greatest contribution to film had been, Vik replied that it was the minor role he had played in installing Renga in Hollywood, twenty-five years earlier.
Renga had lopped off his unwieldy last name as soon as he started appearing in the credit sequences of Bollywood films, and it was as Renga that he was known to Vik’s friends and colleagues. Vik pinpointed Renga’s Hollywood launch as the first handshake between his friend and Bobby Gopal, who had been hailed as a new Satiyajit Ray in the international press and was utterly ignored in his native India. Renga was crashing in Vik’s Westwood guest room, writing incidental music for daytime TV shows as he attempted to break into the real scoring game. “We’re two bachelors in our forties,” said Vik, after two months of this arrangement. “Living together. In California. And not even one of us has the dignity to be homosexual.” When Renga had failed to laugh or return a comment, Vik realized something new about his oldest friend.
It may have been part of the reason that Bobby Gopal had established an immediate sympathy with Renga at the UCLA reception following Gopal’s lecture on the hidden racial complexities of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
. The talk had been elaborate and fascinating, and became even more interesting when Gopal tossed his blank papers aside to declare that he’d improvised the whole thing and didn’t believe a word of it. Still trim in his fifties, his physical grace shamed the spider-bodied Vik, whose bulging abdomen had put an end to the useful life of his favourite jeans earlier that year.
After the lecture, Gopal directed his answers to Vik’s questions toward Renga, whose slender muscularity complemented the director’s well-kept form. “My next one is going to be a gangster film about colonialism. Well, not about
colonialism
, per se, but you know, cultural rape.” Renga asked if there was a composer attached to the project. Bobby replied with an interested “No,” and Vik silently peeled himself away from the conversing men, returning to a conversation he’d engaged in earlier with a scarecrow-haired screenwriting professor whose dryer-mutilated sweater displayed more wrist than neck. Renga appeared at his side a few minutes later to request the car keys, so he could play a tape of his music for Bobby. When Vik walked toward his Camry at the end of the reception, he saw Renga and the new Satiyajit Ray kissing in the back seat. Vik called himself a taxi. When Bobby Gopal’s
Mother of Slums
swept the Oscars two years later, Vik told his new wife, who had once been married to that wrist-flashing screenwriting professor, that he should have received some sort of producing credit for ushering Renga’s Academy Award–winning score into existence, however indirectly.