Everything arrived late in my hometown – the news, wrapped up in the day-old newspaper from Calcutta. The movies came even later at rickety, smoke-filled theatres.

Not that it mattered. For most of my childhood, I don’t remember going to the cinemas.

It was one of the many things one accepted as a child in the 1980s – like the pine trees growing near our home, the mists that would curl around the hills, and the pockets of time that would open up when curfew was imposed on this sleepy outpost in the Northeast.

Years ago, when the town did not have to shut down by evening, when you could be safe on its streets after dark, our parents told us how they had traipsed down with friends to watch evening shows of Bengali films in the old Kelvin cinema in Police Bazaar.

Out at night watching movies? That was not the hometown I was growing up in. A year before I was born, riots had broken out, turning the town into ghettos of us and them.

And so, everyone had to be home – or at least in the safety of their neighbourhoods – within an hour of the blue-grey dusk drawing a curtain over the town.

But the movies did come to us. First, slowly – Chitrahaar every Wednesday and a film every Sunday on state-run television. And then, all at once, through video cassette libraries and the VCR.

It turns out that here too, we were late to the “video revolution” that had become commonplace to the rest of the country 4-5 years ago.

The belatedness did not cast a shadow on our excitement. Even the names of the video cassette libraries that had sprouted in our part of town suggested we were in the orbit of something new. Not staid like Shah’s Stores or RB Brothers’ or Mampi Stationers’, they called themselves Eureka, Needo, Aristo and Electrovision.

But to experience this new world, you needed a VCR or a VCP. And few homes in our neighbourhood could afford those sleek machines at the time.

There was a way out. Bhara, the Bangla word meaning rent, which we would chant plaintively to the elders at home.

Those same video cassette libraries would rent out VCRs – but you had to finish watching three films in two days and return the machine.

On the day the VCR was set to arrive, the house hummed – all cooking, chores, homework rushed through. Neighbours and their children trooped in, the television room was darkened, and in plopped the cassette.

We emerged hours later, sometimes after back-to-back movies, as if out of a night’s dreaming, groggy and reluctant to yield to the light.

Even on the small screen, the films showed us a world of heroism and love and injustice, where so much was possible. I remember my heart soaring as I watched Mazhar Khan in Shaan, playing a valiant beggar with no legs, wheeling around on a wooden plank as if he was the king of Bombay. Or the delight at Hema Malini jumping on top of a fan in a police station as Seeta (or was it Geeta). We learnt the music of the names of neighbourhoods in Bombay – Oshiwara, Sakinaka, Borivali, Chinchpokhli – as if they were just around the corner.

“Tora jeno cinema geelre aarki”, an annoyed elder would remark. It’s like you are drinking up all these films.

We did drink them up without discrimination – the campiness, the melodrama and the downright absurd.

For days, I wondered how a woman rescued from a storm, freezing wet, given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the hero had ended up pregnant (Ganga Jamuna Saraswati).

We watched enough films to be able to predict dialogues, to the discomfort of parents. “Ekhoni bolbe dekho, ‘Main tumhare bachhe ki maa banne wali hoo’,” piped up a playmate of ours, at one such movie marathon. “Just wait, she is going to say, ‘I am pregnant with your child.’”

We mopped up, like sponges, the wild films of that decade, their excess. The zaniness of Govinda’s dances, Sridevi’s sexy buffoonery, the ridiculous villainy of Shakti Kapoor and the headiness of a Kimi Katkar, dressed in smoking-red, dancing in a crowd of men. It loosened something in us – like the juddering of the dhaks during the annual immersion of Durga idols which pulled us dancing on to the streets.

In a few years, when the house got a VCR on its own – a sleek, black Funai – who could stop us? Every weekend was movie time. Looking back, the grown-ups of the house seemed extraordinarily indulgent.

Often they would pick up films for us on their way back from the evening market – the black cassette jostling in a bag of tightly-coiled greens, dried fish and bountiful vegetables.

Their parental antennae did perk up, but for the oddest reasons. I remember the awkward silence and stern faces on my mother and aunt, when my cousin and I asked them to get us a copy of Love, a Revathi-Salman film released in 1991. “You should be careful of the films you watch,” they said. The irony. We had devoured all that Hindi cinema had to teach us about pyaar, bewafai, balatkar to stumble at innocent love.

Another time, an aunt of mine flinched at us watching Aa gale lag jaa, because of the risks involved in looking the shopkeeper in the eye and asking for such a title. “No, no, no. I cannot go and tell Dileep from Electrovision, Aa gale lag jaa. It will be a scandal.”

She might have shrunk from mixing up life and the movies, but our neighbour from a few houses up the hill had no such misgivings. She is known to have sighed to her friends, when the discussion came around to film songs. “Tarar ki moja. They have all the fun, these actors. They lie on flower beds, dance around trees, sing to each other. Why can’t we be like that?”

Then, without missing a beat: “But it’s not that he doesn’t love me. He keeps the biggest slice of fish for me.”

The women sniggered at her in gossip sessions that endlessly replayed her words, but surely wondered at the fish slices they were getting after their husbands had their fill?

The effect of Hindi film songs on us was undeniable. Songs were how we consumed movies. They were messages in a bottle from another universe, love letters that stood in for the lover – better than the films, and endlessly replayable.

I was a shy, awkward, plump girl, growing up with a sense of inadequacies, with heroes who were too far away, with clothes that were too frumpy, daydreaming about moulting out of my body and small-town life – and I loved sad songs from Hindi films.

I remember spending hours with the National Panasonic two-in-one at home, twiddling between the rewind and forward buttons, coaxing them to arrive, over and over again, at the track of my choice.

On many days, it would be Mohammad Rafi giving voice to yearning, from a four-cassette collection that I had saved up money to buy. Or the startling adult-ness of Gulzar’s lyrics, which promised that life would be enigmatic in both love and pain.

Sometimes, the destination would be naughty – Ila Arun and Alka Yagnik singing Choli ke peechhe kya hai. Here I was trying to figure out how to walk-slouch to the bazaar in a way that could hide that I now had breasts, on instructions from my mother. Back home, I grooved deliriously to the two women – by turn raunchy and virginal – singing about what’s hidden in blouses.

A few years later, when I realised that the popular image of my hometown was that of a rock-pop music hub, where every second person was a Bob Dylan acolyte, I felt shock, and then the twinge of shame.

I did not know the difference between Bob Marley and Bob Dylan – at least till satellite TV arrived. The homes in my neighbourhood had harmoniums, not guitars. Even the children who went to the posher convent schools did not seem initiated into that world.

I felt a bit like an impostor, and definitely uncool – something I was not unused to, since as Bengalis in this town, we were often reminded that we were outsiders.

One day, while walking back from math tuition, a friend – much better versed in Western music – casually confided in me that Hindi film music was no longer uncool. AR Rahman had made things better.

The hours I was spending watching Channel V and MTV had given me some inkling. Reggae could meet Punjabi folk could meet ghazal. Bally Sagoo had flicked that switch.

But to me, the melancholy of old Hindi film music seemed at home in this town. A certain longing streaked our days. We always seemed to be waiting for something to arrive.

In the monsoons, the light outside the window itself was a shade of dark. When drizzle turned into downpour, as the rains pummelled the tin roof, I retreated into its shell of sound, the Umrao Jaan soundtrack, and my daydreams.

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