The lorry never returned to Vik’s father’s fleet, which seemed to confirm Vik’s theory.[13] While Renga never returned to their lessons with Reynolds, he did eventually return to school. The three boys used their daily breaks to discuss the movies screening at the Rex, a routine that continued until the year that Siva convinced his mother to let him drop out of school and take up a job as a hospital porter.

  Renga was soon to leave the school as well, accepting his early scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He ran into Vik at the Cinema Rex one week before his flight departed the island. Vik had taken to carrying a notepad into the movies with him, which he’d fill with scrawls legible only to himself as he went to see even the most trivial films three, four, five times. Renga was a repeat attendee as well because he had to watch any film at least twice before he could stop being distracted by the plot and could concentrate solely on the way the images aligned with the music. He explained this to Vik, who seemed slightly awed.[14]

  “And why do you watch these things so many times?” Renga asked.

  “I sit in the different sections, see how the movie comes at me when I’m sitting with different people.”

  “Is it any different?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Seems like a waste of money, no?” Renga asked, smiling to dampen any potential sense of insult. Social gestures like this were important now; they were both a little older, he needed to practice politeness for Europe, and he’d grown to know Vik much less in the two years since his father’s death and the opening of Cinema Rex.

  “Waste? I get in for free.”

  Renga was about to reply that it seemed like a waste of time, at least, but he remembered his politeness. He said something else instead, and they talked about nothing in particular until the projector awakened and allowed them to be silent.

  Skip Notes

  1 Renga’s prickliness over his friend’s Chori Chori comment was sublimated into a grammatical nitpick, but it was rooted in his deep, abiding love for that film, which he had seen eleven times over its run at the Royal. He went alone, by arrangement with his music tutor, M. Bouillhet. The tutor allowed Renga to skip every second piano lesson if he could replicate a new piece of music from Shankar Jaikishan’s soundtrack at the next lesson. Bouillhet was a hardline but affable racist who reasoned that it was easier to train a coloured boy to use his natural ear for rhythm and melody than it was to drill him on Bach.

  2 Twenty-nine years after the opening of the Rex, Siva would take his inappropriately young son to a screening of George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the Australian Mel Gibson film whose relentless action style would go on to dominate 1980s blockbuster cinema. Siva, now a nurse at the second-best hospital on the island, found an accurate visual depiction of his absurd childhood vision of Australian life. The film, in its joyful ridiculousness, served to confirm that his notion of Australia had been pure fiction. He enjoyed The Road Warrior, except the bit when Max’s dog dies, which he felt was an unnecessarily cruel touch.

  3 This aunt, Roshi, was to become Cinema Rex’s most beloved customer. The boys and older men who worked as ushers all referred to her as Auntie, and offered her free Coca-Cola every time she came in. She drank gallons of it every week, and died of complications from diabetes in 1973. Devi, who outlived her by almost two decades, didn’t know her sister’s precise age, but knew that she had died too young. She never drank any sort of carbonated soft drink after 1965, but continued to take four sugars in her tea.

  4 Cinematographer Gordon Willis would indirectly answer this question for Vik. In 1972, Vik sat in a packed theatre in London, watching The Godfather. The lighting in Brando’s study precisely replicated the kitchen’s light on the day he had watched his mother prepare stew. The effect was intimate, not aquatic, and notable for how much of the darkness it made visible.

  5 Renga would later develop his corded strength with a set of exercises described in a Charles Atlas kit that was mistakenly delivered to his house six months after the opening of the Cinema Rex. The parcel was addressed to Raj Ghany, the silent fat boy who lived across the street, but Renga chose to accept it as a gift from beyond. The physique that he constructed and maintained was partially responsible for securing the respect of a curiously flabby and middle-aged Tamil action star named Arvind, who gave Renga his first major scoring job, on an explosion-heavy, 1983 rip-off of E.T.

  6 In the early 1990s, Siva realized how obese he had become at a screening of In the Line of Fire. He’d come alone, as he had a bond with Clint Eastwood that had nothing to do with his children or married life. The new owners of the Rex had installed rigid plastic armrests the previous week. Siva placed his large Coke in the cupholder of his favourite seat [27A] and sat, only to find that the armrests chafed his sidefat dreadfully. He came out of the film dented and numbed. As obesity problems had spread over the island in the past decade, the management found Siva’s petition for a row without armrests to be reasonable. Row 27 was soon stripped of the offending plastic projections, and cupholders were attached to the seatbacks of Row 26.

  Siva widened into the neighbouring seats until he suffered a massive heart attack in 2005 while attending to a patient who had been admitted after a heart attack of his own.

  7 Vik was to write many of his major papers at the London Film School on The Night of the Hunter, actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing. Instead of tiring of “actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial outing,” Vik began to love that string of words, thinking of it as his own personal cliché, a coded signature that appeared in all his work on his favourite film. When the editor of Cahiers du Cinema excised the French iteration of the phrase from Vik’s fourth article for the journal, without first asking permission, Vik swore to never publish in it again. Unfortunately, maintaining that promise to himself would only have been possible if he had succeeded in chucking his journalistic and academic career in favour of screenwriting and directing, a dream that failed to materialize after seven drafts of a screenplay and a humiliating internship at the BBC in his mid-thirties. CdC accepted his proposal for a long feature in which he would interview five important directors on their own poignant and career-influencing early failures. The piece was well-regarded, but Vik failed to attain the encouraging sense of recognition that he was looking for in these conversations with great figures of cinema; their failures had been experiments in learning and fortitude, while his own taught him that there were things he would never be able to do.

  8 While pre-code Hollywood films had made selective appearances on the island, The Night of the Hunter’s unsensational portrayal of a new wife’s normal sexual drive and Mitchum’s psychopathic distaste for regular intercourse was so unusual that it didn’t register as subversive. The audience seemed to look through the screen, a fact that Vik had noted before he was distracted and that he would later expand upon in his dissertation, a reception-theory piece that would eventually be resurrected as the centerpiece of his first volume of essays, Hollywood in the Colonies. This publication, more than anything else in his career, was responsible for his tenured position in UCLA’s film studies department, an appointment that he took up in 1984 and held until his retirement in 2011.

  9 Vik used an altered, depersonalized recounting of this incident in the opening chapter of his second major academic book, Rabelais at the Drive-In: Carnivalesque Interrogations of Class Structure in Colonial Cinema(s).

  10 Vik was not to see the rest of The Night of the Hunter during its run at Cinema Rex. His mother was so relieved to recover him that she limited his punishment to a ban of the film, which counted as a light penalty to her, but was crushing for Vik. His long essay On Interruption, which caused one critic to call him “the othered Barthes,” begins with the author’s broken first viewing of Laughton’s film. “So did my career,” Vik said during an interview with that same critic, an instructor from the American University of Paris who managed to simultaneously condescend and flatter.

  11 When Vik did watch the film all the way through, he was able to place the moment when the man had walked into the theatre: it was during the moonlit boat ride that the children take down the river, where every shot foregrounds an animal that looms massively over the drifting boat in the background. A lunatic masterstroke on Laughton’s part, a sequence that Vik never dared unpack in the confines of one of his academic studies of the film, for fear of damaging its place in his memories and his sense of film.

  12 Renga had never allowed the other boys to come to his house for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was that he did not want them to see his piano and begin to ask questions. After the events that took place on the opening night of Cinema Rex, which included Vik seeing his home and the piano it contained, Renga dropped his English lessons with Reynolds in order to take on additional musical training at the conservatory on the eastern side of the island. This allowed him to see less of Vik, and to focus on the skill that would get him off the island two years before anyone else of his age, with his admission to the Royal College of Music in London. He ran into Vik at an early Pink Floyd concert in Camden (they would often, separately, boast that anyone who hadn’t seen the band perform with Syd Barett could never understand what popular art lost in his disappearance). The conversation they had that night was their longest since the night they had been pulled away from Robert Mitchum’s pursuit of two celluloid children and a cash-stuffed doll. Their friendship began again, quickly and simply, with Renga purchasing two lagers at the bar with pound notes passed to him by Vik as heavy psychedelic noise interrupted their talk. When Vik took his beer from Renga, he saw that the spindly pianist’s finger was stuck a half-inch into the liquid. He noted the sight nostalgically, then forgot it in order to enjoy his drink. They both agreed that drinking felt safer off the island.

  13 At that concert in Camden, just after having bought a large blended scotch for an unappreciative and very-ugly-up-close David Gilmour, Renga confirmed Vik’s theory. “Wanker guitarists everywhere favour the brand that strangled my dad, it seems.”

  14 At a retirement event, when he was asked what he thought his greatest contribution to film had been, Vik replied that it was the minor role he had played in installing Renga in Hollywood, twenty-five years earlier.

  Renga had lopped off his unwieldy last name as soon as he started appearing in the credit sequences of Bollywood films, and it was as Renga that he was known to Vik’s friends and colleagues. Vik pinpointed Renga’s Hollywood launch as the first handshake between his friend and Bobby Gopal, who had been hailed as a new Satiyajit Ray in the international press and was utterly ignored in his native India. Renga was crashing in Vik’s Westwood guest room, writing incidental music for daytime TV shows as he attempted to break into the real scoring game. “We’re two bachelors in our forties,” said Vik, after two months of this arrangement. “Living together. In California. And not even one of us has the dignity to be homosexual.” When Renga had failed to laugh or return a comment, Vik realized something new about his oldest friend.

  It may have been part of the reason that Bobby Gopal had established an immediate sympathy with Renga at the UCLA reception following Gopal’s lecture on the hidden racial complexities of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The talk had been elaborate and fascinating, and became even more interesting when Gopal tossed his blank papers aside to declare that he’d improvised the whole thing and didn’t believe a word of it. Still trim in his fifties, his physical grace shamed the spider-bodied Vik, whose bulging abdomen had put an end to the useful life of his favourite jeans earlier that year.

  After the lecture, Gopal directed his answers to Vik’s questions toward Renga, whose slender muscularity complemented the director’s well-kept form. “My next one is going to be a gangster film about colonialism. Well, not about colonialism, per se, but you know, cultural rape.” Renga asked if there was a composer attached to the project. Bobby replied with an interested “No,” and Vik silently peeled himself away from the conversing men, returning to a conversation he’d engaged in earlier with a scarecrow-haired screenwriting professor whose dryer-mutilated sweater displayed more wrist than neck. Renga appeared at his side a few minutes later to request the car keys, so he could play a tape of his music for Bobby. When Vik walked toward his Camry at the end of the reception, he saw Renga and the new Satiyajit Ray kissing in the back seat. Vik called himself a taxi. When Bobby Gopal’s Mother of Slums swept the Oscars two years later, Vik told his new wife, who had once been married to that wrist-flashing screenwriting professor, that he should have received some sort of producing credit for ushering Renga’s Academy Award–winning score into existence, however indirectly.

  Mary Borsky

  Maps of the Known World

  When I was sixteen, my father brought home a man for me to marry. The man’s name was Pete Paska and he sat down at the kitchen table without needing to be asked twice.

  I was at the other end of the table, chewing the flavour out of a pack of gum, two or three sticks at a time, my history book open to a chapter called ‘The Glory that was Greece.’

  “Such a man! Such a man!” my father said, grinning at my mother and me, but mostly at Pete Paska. “He can speak perfect English and perfect Ukrainian. Who’s going to make Irene a better husband than this?”

  I stopped chewing when I heard my name.

  My father’s face was flushed and happy, and Pete Paska’s face was a shiny birthday balloon. They brought the smell of snow and whiskey into the house with them.

  “He’s got a good indoor job down there at the train station,” my father said, pressing Pete Paska’s shoulder. “He’s a man for the future! He’s a man for progress! He’s a man for action!”

  “See this salt-shaker?” Pete Paska asked loudly, pointing at the rabbit-shaped salt-shaker in the middle of the table. He had a forceful manner and I couldn’t help but pay attention.

  “Is this salt-shaker going to move by itself?” he demanded. He looked around at us, but didn’t wait for anyone to answer. “No! It will not!” he said. “It moves when someone moves it!” Then he picked up the salt-shaker and held it dramatically over the table, giving us a minute to take this in.

  My father grinned happily.

  Irene. Man. Husband. Future. I heard every word my father said.

  I stared at Pete Paska from behind my bangs. I’d never seen him closer than across the street, or connected him with anything except, in a general sort of way, the train station.

  He was an older man. Twenty-six or twenty-seven, maybe. He was shorter than my father, but more muscular. He had dark eyes, wavy black hair, and slightly yellowish, gnawed-down looking teeth, the kind some small industrious animal might have, a beaver, say, or a muskrat. I got a good view of his teeth because he smiled at me every few minutes.

  I looked up for a while, but then tried to go back to my homework. We were having a test and our teacher was known to ask trick questions, such as what was the name of Alexander the Great’s horse.

  “She’s shy,” my father said, as he placed two whiskey glasses on the table, one in front of Pete Paska and one in front of himself.

  “Still water runs deep,” Pete Paska said, and smiled at me again.

  My mother, her back a brick wall, kept washing dishes. She banged cups onto the shelf, clattered forks into the drawer, and slammed pots into the cupboard.

  “Di Bozheh!” my father said, toasting Pete Paska. “To your health!” He held up his glass which had a donkey painted on it.

  “Di Bozheh!” Pete Paska answered. His glass had a rooster on it.

  “To the Old Country!”

  “To the New Country!”

  “To Family!”

  “To Marriage!”

  “To Progress!”

  “To the Future!”

  “To Action!”

  “Why are you in all of a sudden such a hurry to marry her off?” my mother yelled the second Pete Paska shut the door behind him. “What’s the big rush? She’s got lots of time yet to get married!”

  “He counts for something in this town,” my father said, still happy from the good time he’d had with Pete Paska. “He’s a Big Wheel down there at the train station. Four guys working for him and it’s all the time, ‘Yes, Pete! No, Pete! Anything you say, Pete!’ ”

  “What about school?” my mother countered. “Shouldn’t she at least finish school? Shouldn’t she finish school and work for a while like the other girls?”

  “You think men like Pete Paska grow like mushrooms after the rain?”

  My mother swept the floor and scooped the dust into the wood stove which sat alongside the newer gas range.

  “At least let her finish the year,” she said, clinking the round lid back onto the wood stove. “At least let her finish grade eleven.”

  I heard the bedsprings creak in my parents’ bedroom off the kitchen. I knew my father was sitting down to take his shoes off.

  “You think she’s better off with one of those Jailbird-Johannsens?” he called out. “Or maybe that shiftless Bert Strain? People like you, they never know when they got it good.” The bedsprings creaked again. “Perfect English! And perfect Ukrainian!”

  As I rested my head and arms on the table, I noticed I hardly breathed. I hardly had to. This wasn’t new, though. Sometimes I could go for long periods, hardly breathing at all. At school we learned about evolution and how fish climbed out of the ocean and developed lungs. Something like that was happening to me too, I thought, though in my case it was going one step further. In my case, it felt as though I was gradually getting to the point where I didn’t need to breathe at all. It didn’t seem strange though, no more so than other things that happened, growing pains in my legs, or cramps before my period.

 

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