M. S. Sathyu directed "Garam Hava". That was way back, fifteen or twenty years ago. I remember the movie well because I saw it three or four times. Fell in love with the heroine in her green velvet dress, and fell in love with the bag-o-bones old lady that played a woman being evicted from her house in Lucknow. Her grandson, a big strapping fellow in his twenties was given the job of carrying her out. When he found her, she was hiding in the wood & coal-room, and when he picked her up she shouted at him, "Muzhe chhor de mushtande. Muzhe kahan le jaa raha hai. Yehi rahungi me. Doli pe baith ke aai thi, arthi par jaaungi."

    My good friend Raj Bhattarai is a movie-nut. Raj works for the Austin City water department where his job, or least some part of it, has to do with the reclamation of waste water and its injection back into the Colorado river. Raj was one year junior to me at IITK, although I did not know that, rather remember, till I met him again here in Austin. I will not say more about him now, since I intend to write him up in good detail sometime later.

    Now Austin is a poor sort of place. It is the Indore of USA. Even worse. At least Indore could boast of Kumar Gandharva. My friend John Radpour calls this "a mediocre sort of place", and it is clear from his demeanor when he says that that even that perhaps is excessive praise. About the only thing positive that could be said in Austin's favor is that Raj and Samita live here, and have for twenty odd years. As I get older and wiser I realize more and more that it is only the people that bring you joy. It is the people we remember ten, twenty, thirty years later. And then we think how wonderful such and such is and how we wish we had spent more time with him or her. Baaki sub bakwaas hai. 

    Raj has hundreds of movie books, and lots of VHS movie tapes. When the University of Texas at Austin holds a Satyajit Ray festival or a Shyam Benegal festival, guess who is called upon to go up on the stage and introduce the director and the movie to the audience. So it was with the screening of the latest Sathyu movie, and that is where Raj met MSS and asked him to dinner, and that is how I got to meet MSS this February. 

    He is a good-looking man, a very good-looking man. Big chiseled nose, glasses, his shoulders stoop a little, dressed very nicely and comfortably in khaddar and handloomed cloth, a thoughtful face, nice friendly smile. We talked of food, and the anti-Tamil riots in Bangalore, the sharing of Cauvery waters, IPTA (Indian Peoples' Theater Association), Balraj Sahni, the Bodo problem, the notion of intellectual property, and Mysore, where he lives. IPTA is a left-leaning group, and both MSS and Balraj Sahni were IPTA members, and friends. Garam Hawa closes with a leftist message, and with this poem that Raj remembered:

Jo duur se karte.n hain toofa.n ka nazaara
Unke liye toofan yahan bhi hai, wahan bhi.
Mil jaaoge dhara me to bun jaaoge dhara.
Yeh waqt ka ailaan wahan bhi hai, yahaan bhi.