The crowd stirred as the credits for the movie started to scroll by, some retrieving their mats from the trampled grass, some just rising and exiting the tent. No clapping, but a bit of shouting from a few kids out too late for a school night – of course, it was entirely possible they would just be out on the street the next day anyways.
There were no “theater lights” – there were a few lights mounted on the projection truck that Uddyam could, and did, flip on.
It wasn’t the last showing of the night – so there was the A-roll. He had shot it himself, last year – thankfully, the drugstore had opted to renew their sponsorship when the tent cinema had returned to it’s village this year.
The quality of the 8mm film might have physically been better than the 35mm films they played each night – the picture, though, left a lot to be desired – partially because the tiny 8mm projector had to run so much brighter than the larger one. Uddyam had to keep a much closer eye on it.
It was hard to make a drugstore look lively. There were a plot of static shots of promotional posters.
In the daytime, Uddyam tinkered. Even if it ran hot, the 8mm projector was reliable, as was the 35mm – as reliable as you could get when working with kilometers-long reels of well worn film. Uddyam had rigged it so the main reel and its backup reel spun at the same time – should the film snap, or melt, the movie would be playing again in less than a minute, and any decisions of salvageability left for a more convenient hour.
The next step was digital. Of course, the tent theater had nothing like the cost for a proper digital projector. But he was close to getting the focus just right on a cell phone based one – well, it was still not the best picture, but it would do wonders for the advertisement spots.
…which would be over in a moment. And people were still in the ticket line for the last showing.
Ok. Hmm. Time to show something from his own collection.
~
The screen was dark for only a second. Changing a reel directly into another was Uddyam’s prided skill.
“The following is for humour and is not an advertisement for a law firm”. The English text was… legible, on 8mm, and so was the matching bengali text that appeared under it. Hand-done, still looking a lot like the mandated smoking warnings that were required on films these days.
“Have you or a loved one ever been a victim of ‘pull my finger’?” They would have known it was a boy’s voice. Nobody there would have known it was his nephew Kayam – two monsoons ago. That voice was still a work in progress, but the accent wouldn’t be easily placed as being from Jharkhand.
He wasn’t on camera, though. His mother wouldn’t let him be. It was one of his older sister’s Virika hands that reached into the frame – not that she was that much older, but she was eager to be in his movies.
In the frame was his stuntwoman at home. His wife, of – 25 years? 30? Couldn’t be any more than that. Mina. She apparently had gotten her preference for the English spelling sometime after her second husband – no “Meena” for her. The focus – what focus an 8mm can do – was on her outstretched arm. And finger.
She was dressed up for the occasion – nobody would recognize her with that face. The shirt and pants were his – and she managed to fill them like they were hers. Her long hair, as far as he knew, was all somehow concealed beneath her skin in a form that would not betray it.
He wondered, especially with this short film, if she had bothered giving herself matching genitalia for this shoot. This was one thing he had successfully avoided asking her over all these years. His mind went places during these long tours with the tent cinema… she would get almost all of it when the next monsoon season inevitably came.
In this short, though, it was her role to melt. Not like he new she could, seeping into every crevice – but pretending she still had bones, deflating into a skeletal form as a series of farts played over a narration that, honestly, was pretty well obscured by them.
The camera angled downwards as bones she actually didn’t have jutted to the surface, his niece still holding her arm at the right angle for the shot. A little flab sticking out above the trousers, face sinking into the mush to leave only a tousle of hair visible, a regular ripple across her mass he had tried to match piecemeal the farts.
Uddyam had honestly had shot it twice. The kids’ mother needed a less realistic version – and thus was credited with makeup that did not exist in the final version. That version, too, was in the collection – one where it was just a particularly talented woman yogi poorly disguised as a man crumpled in a more human manner.
This one had a red mark on the label.
And, after a single page of credits for only a few frames – the screen went black. The shade quickly was swapped from the 35mm to the 8mm projector, and the last showing of the night began.
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