Ticketless
It’s been over two decades since I completed my masters. The turn of the millennium was a time when students were still submitting handwritten assignments, reference work was carried out on gloomy afternoons after class in the musty library of the university, and the internet and desktops had just about started to mark their arrival in the now-redundant cyber cafes and at homes of the privileged few.
I wasn’t in it for the love of academics but because, after graduation, I did not know where else to be and what more to do. The two years of masters was a borrowed time to push back expedient decisions on career and deflect the incipient murmurs of “what about marriage” at home.
It was distractions I was after, and in those days, you sought them through the physical enterprise of checking newspaper listings and going to the box office of the cinema or theatre in “advance” or minutes before the show hoping the tickets hadn’t been sold out. There were distractions galore in south Mumbai, where my university SNDT was fortuitously located. Those that lightened the purse: commercial cinemas and performing arts events, and those most suited to the student’s pocket – the “entry-free-all-are-welcome” cultural events: movie screenings at the Alliance Francaise or Max Muller Bhavan respectively in French and German with subtitles, talks at Patkar Hall in the university campus, literary readings at the Rhythm House and occasionally too at NCPA. Time was when the city had not been run over by malls and going out was not altogether synonymous with buying a slice of time, place, entertainment and intended merchandise. ‘Crossroads’ was the only mall to speak of where me and my friends went on an occasion or two to take strolls in an air-conditioned space rather than shop.
One of my classmates was a member of the founding team of the youth theatre festival ‘Thespo’, which was still at a nascent stage. I asked her if she could wangle a free ticket for me, what with her being in production and all. A toehold in the wings would do too. The title of the play I was interested to watch completely eludes me, except for the word ‘president’. My classmate told me that I could, provided I earned my entry inside the auditorium by helping out with the ticket sale at the box office.
And so it was that one evening, I found myself sitting behind a table outside the glass entrance of the Sophia Bhabha Auditorium, with a wad of passes, box for the collections and the promise of an exciting finale to my successful hustle. The price of the tickets is burned into my memory for what was to follow. While the ticket cost Rs. 80 for the general audience, the rate was slashed by half for students who could produce their IDs. Today, I look back in awe at the length to which I went to save Rs. 40.
The sales picked up as the show hour drew near and knots of students and theatre lovers – among them some city grandees – waited for the doors to part at the opening gong. Twilight gave way to dark, faces shone in night lights and chatter rose of a high pitch. It was then I saw a pair of bony hands, bulging veins running up to the forearms. Before me stood a gangly old man, emaciated to the bone, dressed plainly in blue trousers and a shirt. No questions asked, he reached for his wallet and with shaking hands fished out two tattered notes of Rs. 20 each and held them towards me.
Somewhat stupefied at the vision of decrepitude and deprivation so incongruous with the affluence of the surrounding, I said, “The ticket costs Rs. 80.”
“But someone told me it is Rs. 40,” he said.
“Only for students. For others it’s Rs. 80,” I said.
I saw his face fall fast and sink into shame. The self-assurance with which he had proffered the notes suggested he had done some spadework by way of inquiring about the ticket price to save himself precisely the very embarrassment he now felt at having his vulnerability exposed in public. He had perhaps asked one of the students who inadvertently had quoted him the discounted rate. His entire aspect seemed flounder at the likely realization of this mistake. He stepped aside in silence and as if in need of physical support, stood against a wall: exiled to the shadows.
I wanted to run backstage to the festival team to ask if they could make an exception for him, at least if all the tickets were not sold out, but I couldn’t abandon the box office and didn’t want to raise his hopes, having seen them get dashed so brutally. The man there, still, standing about.
A while later as the gong sounded, the crowds started moving inside. My classmate came to appraise the collections. At once I told her about the man. She directed me to the organiser who could decide on the case. I rushed inside, jostling my way through the lumbering mass of people in the vestibule till I spotted the organiser, a fellow student from undergraduate days.
“He will pay,” I told him, “half the amount. But what’s wrong with that? He really wants to watch the play. Can he?”
“Yeah, alright,” he said.
On those words I ran back out. Here was someone as desperate as me if not more to get inside the theatre hall that evening and with a shared obligation to thrift. But when I came out, he was gone, nowhere to be seen. I felt an ineffable pang of regret and disappointment in myself. Should I have had the sense to ask him to wait? If only he had waited longer. Or should I have at the least assured him that he stood a chance, just to take the edge off his injured sense of self and lessen his alienation?
Overwhelmed by the tragic scene that had played itself out like a prologue, I watched the play I had come for, but it felt like I was watching a pantomime.
A good many years later when the pictures had been turned into multiplexes and I held a job, I saw an uncanny reprise of the episode.
I was in a ticket queue at Metro box office, having decided to catch a show at the last minute. A man in the adjoining queue had reached the ticket window.
“Rs. 360 (or nearabout),” said the attendant.
The man did not have the required cash. “Okay,” he said, “give me any other movie that costs less.”
The attendant listed some ticket prices, all of which were well beyond his pocket.
“Arey baap re!” he said and left.
In this pandemic, the cinemas and theatres have intermittently opened and shut, as the municipality toggles between lockdown and unlock regimes. These islands of fantasy and entertainment are out of bounds for the down-and-out multitude, at a time when the urge to see an alternate reality to the catastrophe we are living in is most pressing.
The haves can perhaps proclaim “There’s no place like home” and simultaneously take trips to some dreamy blue ocean or the other. For the have-nots, there is no place at home.
Outdoors, in this nicknamed City of Dreams, civic nightmares unfold with painful regularity: vanishing pavements, out-of-bound roads, unkempt parks and gardens. In the papers, the city’s dweller gets characterized as an embattled being eternally in need of some kind of solace in the oft-encountered line: ‘In a respite to Mumbaikars …’.
The old ticketless man is more than just an abiding memory. He is the ‘Everyman’ at large, in search of an escape he cannot afford. He is a phantom sidling along the edges of the city’s cultural landscape.
END
Comments