That Thing About Bollywood

You know how in Bollywood movies, people sing and dance on mountaintops when they’re in love? I wonder if they do the same when they’re splitting up.

I walked my dinner plate to the kitchen sink, searching for the answer as I thought about all the Hindi movies I’d seen. The rules of classic Bollywood, from way back in the ’80s and ’90s, were pretty easy to remember: everything was loud, exaggerated, and colorful.

I scrubbed the miniscule remnants of green-bean shaak and daal bhaat off my stainless-steel plate. As the specks of spices, lentils, and rice slipped down the drain, I made a mental list of what you do when you’re feeling a certain way in an old Hindi movie:

When you’re happy, you sing, sometimes from a mountaintop. When you’re sad, you sing. When you’re really into what you’re wearing, you sing. Seriously. There are songs about scarves, bindis, bangles, anklets … any accessory will do. I’ll bet one day there will be a song about thermal underwear.

When you’re mad, nope, you don’t sing. But you can do an angry instrumental dance or scream while shaking in rage, and the soundtrack behind you will be full of dishoom dishoom as you beat up the bad guys and save the day.

And when you’re jealous, you can sing or take part in a bonus dance-off.

Basically, anytime you are feeling something, you show it. So, I guess, yeah, you would sing in a Bollywood movie when you were breaking up.

I dried my hands and walked past the window with the swaying jacaranda trees in our backyard. I glanced at the white house behind ours with the clay tile roof crawling with purple bougainvillea vines, my friend Zara’s house, and I headed into our family room. My grandparents’ four pictures hung on the light gray wall there with dried sandalwood garlands around them, symbolizing that they had passed away. Across from the pictures, Mom and my little brother, Ronak, were already snuggled under a blanket on our long gray sofa.

“What are we watching tonight, Sonali ben?” Ronak asked, adding on the respectful Gujarati word for “big sister.”

“Something funny,” I replied, accidentally bumping into the stack of dusty books about the history of Hindi films on the end table. I straightened them out and opened the wooden armoire in the corner, which was covered in family pictures of us whale watching and at Sequoia National Park. I was extra careful not to knock over the new framed photo of my aunt Avni Foi, grinning with her fiancé, Baljeet Uncle, at their engagement party.

The armoire was stuffed to the max with old VHS tapes from when my grandfather owned Indian Video, a little store in Artesia that used to rent Hindi movie videotapes to people, before switching to DVDs. When Dada passed away last summer, he left all the store’s retired videotapes to me, because he knew how much I used to love watching them with him when I was little. Luckily, Dada had passed his old VHS player down to me too, or I’d have no way to watch the tapes at home. And now every Sunday, my family got together and watched an old Hindi movie.

I wasn’t sure how long this tradition was going to last, but I was going to enjoy it while I could. I moved the red, plastic, convertible-car-shaped VHS rewinder and grabbed a movie off the top shelf of the alphabetically sorted tapes. It was fun and silly, and from the lines in my mom’s forehead, which seemed to be permanent these days, it looked like she could use the laughs.

I put the videotape into the rewinder so it wouldn’t wear out the VHS player, popped it into the VHS player when it was back to the beginning of the movie, and settled in under the blanket next to Ronak as the ancient commercials that always played before these movies began. One was for a turmeric cream and featured a bride getting turmeric paste all over her legs before her wedding and a catchy song. Ronak sang along, tapping his toes. The next one was for a pain balm and also had a catchy song, of course, so Ronak kept singing. And then the censor certificate flashed, showing the movie’s rating.

“Wait.” Ronak reached for the remote in my hand and pressed pause. “What about Dad?”

“What about him?” I asked, swiping my silky black locks out of my eyes.

“We always wait for Dad.”

I sighed. “And he always works and makes us wait forever.”

Mom’s fingers were clenched tightly around one another as she squeezed her hands in her lap like she was trying not to say something. “I block my whole evening schedule off at the hospital for this every week. But clearly he doesn’t prioritize-”

Whoops. It seemed she didn’t squeeze her hands hard enough and something slipped out. Ronak’s eyebrows furrowed with worry, but Mom gave us a tiny smile with her chapped lips.

“Why don’t we start the movie, and if Dad wants to see what he missed, after his client dinner, we can always rewind it for him?” she asked.

“But you always tell us to think about how we would feel in someone else’s shoes, and I would feel sad if you started the movie without me,” Ronak replied.

Ronak was sensitive and kind and not afraid to show the world how he felt. He would be a perfect fit in a Bollywood movie.

“Well, we don’t wear shoes in the house,” I said. “So don’t pretend you’re in anyone’s shoes right now and just enjoy the movie.”

I clicked play on the remote that Dada had always kept wrapped in plastic to keep it clean. It may have saved the remote from sticky fingers, but it meant I had to press extra hard to make the buttons work.

“You have no feelings,” Ronak muttered as the colorful titles began.

“You have too many feelings,” I retorted.