thebengali.com

In 1985 I was persevering to get an education at the Union Academy Senior Secondary School in New Delhi.

I say persevering because I was 14 and I was trying to come to terms with the fact that Maths and Science were really interesting subjects to people who were not me.

I was also realizing that temptation was the least of the problems for a 14-year-old boy trapped in an All-boys school, flanked by an All-girls school with three co-ed schools and another All-girls school within a radius of three kilometers.

And, to compound it all, I had a bunch of friends who were very committed to exploring the restlessness of 14-year-olds.

It did not help that Union Academy was located in Gole Market, which was a brisk walk from Connaught Place, where one could find two of the very few cinema halls in Delhi that ran English movies with ‘A’ certificates in their morning shows – a tragic scheduling error that was not lost on a 14-year-old attending morning school.

If this was not temptation enough, there was the matter of two broken window bars in the groundfloor classroom – the window opened into the adjacent dhobi-ghat (a dhobi ghat is … well, let’s just call it a grand open-air laundromat).

And so, one fine day, in spite of our diligence and dedication to the cause of education, six of us bunked class, squeezed through the window with the missing bars, and ran all the way from the dhobi-ghat to Connaught Place, just in time for the 9.30 morning show at Regal.

The poster at the theatre was all the sign we needed that we had found our own corner of paradise. The poster had a blonde woman, some sort of a map and the title : “Incident at Map Grid”.  The decisive conversation about the decison to spend hard-earned pocket money went like this:
“It’s English,” grinned Ghosh. Everybody nodded appreciatively.
“Story achcha hoga - looks serious,” piped in Ashish.

“Blonde heroine,” Ghosh grinned wider. Everybody nodded appreciatively again. 
Khurana and Vineet started collecting the money for the tickets. I kept looking towards the route to school, convinced the history teacher was following us. Deba looked cool as usual.

At 9.30 we were in our seats.

By 9.45, we had only seen water, air, and men talking in Russian.

By 10.15 am, we finally understood what Milton was lamenting about in Paradise Lost.

And by the end of the movie, we were swearing at the bloody censor board – the blonde woman on the poster had been snipped out of the movie.

“It was in Russian! Not one scene!” Ghosh was livid.

“Hanh yaar, story bhi samajh mein nahin aya,” rued Ashish.
“That’s the last time you get to choose what we see,” Khurana told Ghosh. Vineet was laughing his head off. Deba continued to look cool.
As for me, I had finally started relaxing, but then I started worrying about how we were going to get back into school.