The grass eating tiger

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: middle of the town. SMP which had a thatched roof, hard wooden seats and many bedbugs. And then there was Shanmuga Talkies which was across the railway line and hence necessitated crossing the railway bridge.

As manic movie goers, my mother and her siblings felt this need for a weekly fix Sunday after Sunday. And so after a high tea of Biriyani, sated and satiated, we would walk to one of the theatres for a Malayalam movie.

Jawahar was the more sophisticated of the theatres. The other two were quite ramshackle and their projectors of a great and venerable age. Very often the film would come to a halt and whistles and shrieks would fill the theatre as the hoi polloi made sure that the projectionist knew of their displeasure.

My brother and I would ache to join in but a frown from our mother would clamp our mouths and so we would nibble on warm peanuts in a paper cone and wait for the screen to come to life.

When the movie was over, the family car would be waiting to take us home. To supper and a dissection of the movie. Later in bed, my grandmother would want me to narrate to her scene by scene the entire movie. For while my grandmother was a great facilitator of Epicureanism, she was quite a stoic herself, staying back at home to look after the one million things that needed her personal attention and intervention.

When my grandmother died, the pattern of our summers changed, But the habit of high tea and the Sunday movie was set forever in my life. The Sundays I am at home I set aside the evening for this bit of hedonism. A tea remarkable for its high calorie content and enough cholesterol to make even the healthiest of hearts cringe. And a movie on one of the Malayalam TV channels. For the habit set included a clause. The Sunday movie could only be a Malayalam movie.