Wrong Movie

Long long ago in a country far far away I was a teenager. My sister, 4 years my junior, was in middle school. In those days we were rarely allowed to watch movies at the theater. There were many factors money being one of them. So when we did go out to the theater, it was for a good reason and it happened about once a year.

This time, I had just finished my Higher Secondary exams and had done really well and had secured admission to various engineering colleges. So I was allowed to go to a movie and take my sister along. We chose Shriman Shrimati with Sanjeev Kumar and Rakhee. I do not remember why we chose that one. I guess it was the only movie running at the sole cinema hall in Janakpuri.

I forget what the tickets cost us, but we had decent seats and we loved the atmosphere. Both of us liked to watch movie trailers probably as much as the movie itself. So it was fun for a while when we realized that one of the trailer was longer than usual. It was not as if we watched a movie every week to have any reference.

An over the hill Rajinder Kumar, dressed as a young man in multi-colored clothes that could get one killed in public, was wooing a past the prime Vidya Sinha with Danny as the Kabab Mein Haddi. RK is jealous of Danny's attention to VS. The rivalry ends in VS dumping RK and hitching with Danny. A brokenhearted RK marries someone else and has a son of his own. By this time this particular trailer had gone on for about 15 minutes and we were now sure we were not watching a trailer. But the possibility that we could be watching a different movie had not permeated our minds.

We turned to the guy sitting next and asked him if he knew what we were watching and we got a laconic answer, Dunno! That there was anyone besides us who was equally clueless came as a surprise to us.

After a few minutes when we saw Kumar Gaurav prancing around, our suspicions were confirmed. We were watching Love Story. We understood what had happened. This hall was not a multiplex and the whole of New Delhi did not have one in the 80s. So we went confidently to the box office and ordered tickets without asking what was running that day. Why should we, we had checked the schedules. When we came home and looked at it again we realized our movie hall changes the movie on a Friday and we had seen the previous week's schedule.

Since we had no other choice and it was not such a bad trade-off and we ended up watching it through. We still have a good laugh when we occasionally reminisce.