For Those Fridays Again

By Najila Yahu

My earliest movie memory, growing up, is that of the late-night weekend movie on TV. Mummy would serve us kids supper early to tuck in for the Thursday night Hindi movie on channel 33, the only English channel in Dubai in that pre-satellite ‘paleolithic’ age. It was a ritual. We would lay out comforters in front of our TV in the living room and crawl into the sheets in darkened rooms for an immersive experience.

Going to the movies was a real luxury for us at the time. Rather we would wait for the weekly video release heralded in the weekend newspaper. There were regular releases of Hindi movies and then Rafa or Thomson, video distributors there, would release the occasional Malayalam movie. We would rent out the video cassettes religiously and watch them on our VCRs at home.

I think of cinema. The democratization of art, the stripping of the cult status, the massification of entertainment, I later comprehend, begotten by this twentieth-century art form. I was so amused by Michael Jackson’s video of the ‘remember the time’ song where Eddie Murphy as an Egyptian pharaoh arranges random live spectacles for his bored wife. It’s so funny how she orders the execution of all those performers who bore her even more before being entranced by the performance of Michael Jackson himself. For lesser mortals like us, we had our own private vaudeville, our TV sets. We could kill all those duds with a click of the remote, though of course, the remote control and the umpteen channels arrived later in subsequent stages.

It was usually the TV for us and the occasional visit to the cinemas. Even dad couldn’t resist taking us to the movie for the big screen experience to watch the Mammootty starrer, Oru CBI Diarykurippu . At the Plaza Cinema next to the vegetable market in Bur Dubai, we moved alternately to the edge of the seat in anticipation and shrunk into them in fear as the intrigue unfolded on screen. I have vague memories of going to a drive-in cinema(too little to pin down details) and not so vague ones of visiting the Galleria, our age ‘multiplex’. When we were repatriating to India, my dad treated us to the star-studded movie Number 20 Madras Mail.

Back home, my stars landed me at my grandma’s place situated right across a buzzing movie theatre. On Thursday nights, we would all wait - cousins, aunties and all - after dinner for the late-night show to begin. When all the cars find their parking slots and the people inside their seats, we wait in the garden lazing in the calm cool night for the theatre personnel to prop up the ladder on the wall and stick the poster of the new Friday release. We got our seats reserved on the phone without any queues or hassles. We were neighbours after all. Crossing the road in groups, we would indulge the very next day.

Time and again, audiences have relived the magic of this collective viewing experience. We have even settled for seats in the front row sometimes, emerging with craned necks later. But watching mass entertainers upfront in the midst of fans is an experience altogether exhilarating. You can laugh out loud and cheer along, bring on the hooligan in you with no one watching, and still walk out of the hall beaming yet respectable.

When I got married, cinema is what I think we bonded over. Whenever I wanted to go out, movies were what I lured my husband with. Though he hated my shopping sprees, he would accompany me grudgingly, I know, only because of the movie that we topped off the evening with.

Now with the Covid upon us, we miss the movies. Those transportations to imaginary worlds, that caramel popcorn, and ice cream cones. I browse content on OTT platforms thirstily for that new movie release. Though amazing in the quantum of entertainment, I still wait for those Fridays when cinemas open again to new releases and we can sink into a room full of strangers becoming one at that moment by that movie.

By Najila Yahu