The Movies

Chapter 3:  The Movies

The humid evenings brought the sounds of crickets and lightning bugs along with the scent of gardenia flowers  to the house. We played cards and also watched movies in those evenings. So we had plenty of that when we were young. 
At home we used to play cards till midnight everyday . 
My father used to go to a club to play cards too. That was his favorite pastime. One night, my mother did not open the door for him because he came very late after the midnight. 
My father enjoyed  movies and I remember going with him for the second shows in the night to far away places too. 
His fascination for the movies made him build a movie house next to our house. The idea was good. The nearest movie place closed down because of unpopular films and bad management. We had a suitable land and my father had plenty of time.  My father was never good at business. He never had a slightest idea of the intricacies of the cinema business. My uncle retired from the Air Force helped my father with his time and money too.
After his movie house started making money, the old movie house reopened and became our competitor. They had more money to invest and their location was good with plenty of public transportation and we suffered badly.

It was tough time for me. 
After coming back from college, I had to work as projectionist’s assistant, ticket vendor and gate keeper. When the collection was bad and people openly criticize for bad films and damage the seats, my father just kept calm. It was too much for me to take. I had to stay till midnight after the shows were done, locked everything up and do all the accounting. Local taxes were assessed on the daily sales and record keeping was a headache. When I cameback, I would start reading for my university examinations. I wanted to get in to the medical school badly because I wanted to prove to my parents that I could do it.

I had to go in the midnight to stick posters of the movies in the streets and go to the nearest district to bring the box of films for the show. Transporting the heavy box of films was a real nightmare. Most of the bus operators would want it to be loaded on the top of the bus. I had to bargain with the porter to get it loaded, but the bus drivers would make a big fuss when I climbed to the top and getting them delayed. Even though the hard work spoilt my fascination with the movies, it was enjoyable when I later invited my college friends for a night at my house and movie next door. And actually  the movies paid my tuition and I spent less and less with the actual enterprise.

When I was very young, my father and his colleagues from the school started a private loan firm called Allied Enterprises and he was always busy with that in the afternoons. But that made him got involved in various community activities and kept him occupied. Those days I did not know what “Allied” meant. After years of business, he lost lot of money as well as my mother’s jewelry . 
One day he closed the firm down , brought all the desks and numerous ledger books and papers to cram our spare bedroom. There were so many  notes and receipts of loans; but my father did not have the money to hire lawyers to chase the defaulters. It was a constant nagging point for my mother and it also made us believe that my father was a failure in the business. He never had a time without any loans. Probably if he had never started those businesses, he could have lived more years and I would not have inherited his debts.

When we had lot of burglaries in the village , my father and his friends organized a sort of neighborhood watch with midnight patrolling and caught some local thieves . My mother cooked hot meal for the patrol gang and I used to hang around with them in the night, listening to their fascinating stories of adventure.

My father would go to the beach nearby on weekends and watch the fishermen bring the big prawns and other fishes.
 In the crowd, the fishermen would recognize my father and forced him to accept a big sac of live fish for my sake. Many times they refused to take money from him. That was the only time I actually saw and played with ice.  Probably that was the biggest reason for me to visit the beach. Most often, I took a big chunk of ice to show to my sister, but by the time we reached home, you know what happened.

Another trip I liked to do was a visit to the town to purchase the hardware for home improvement. The whole day I would walk with him suffering from migraine and nausea and eating nothing, except a cup of ice cream, the only food I ate from restaurants.

My father had a gasoline run water pump. It was the first one in the village before the electricity came to our village.  He did  rent it to people who needed  to water their coconut trees.  He had two helpers who would pull the cart with the pump and my father would hold the "foot valve" end of the long heavy black PVC hose. 
Those days I never thought it was hard work and I did not knew how much he made out of that enterprise. Later, Diesel water pumps became common in every house and he stopped the pump rental. 
But water pump was a great fascination for me. When it was working, we children play in the jet and make sand dams in the channel. We used to get lot of fishes also, when the ponds were pumped empty. When the water pumps broke down, we would call our only plumber and repairman . His house is studded with various kinds of damaged pumps. His assistant was his son, two years younger than me. He was very proud of his son and asked his son questions about the pump to impress me and my father. It was always interesting to watch the pump being repaired. My father would ask me to help the repairman. Most of the time, my father would also work as his assistant. In the end, when we started the pump, and we saw the water being pumped from the out let, our hearts would leap. 
It was always a struggle to pay the repairman the money. My father has to push it to his pocket rather than give to him in his hand. He was doing it out of respect.

When we started the movie house, he was the chief technical expert. He was the first cinema projector operator and Guru of all the operators. We called him "Aasan",meaning Master. So he had an ego problem also and treated his new assistants like idiots. Finally we had to let him go and he joined our rival business to our surprise. He had invited my father to visit the new movie house; even though my father wanted to go and see the facilities, but  his pride did not allow him to do that till he died.