Stringing the Bow: A Wardha Story

This afternoon I sat in a mall in Wardha and watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Near the end, Odysseus picks up the old bow that no suitor in his hall could bend, and strings it in one unhurried motion. The theatre went quiet. I had not expected that a film shot across six countries, on the costliest production of a famous director’s career, would carry me straight back to 1994 — to a cinema hall that no longer stands, in a Wardha that no longer quite exists either.

Let me explain, and forgive me if I wander before I arrive.

Three Cinemas and a Fourth

I was born in Wardha in 1957 — the town where I went to school and college, before eight years away in Nagpur, and then home again to the town I started from. Until the late 1980s, Wardha had only three cinemas — Durga, Vasant, and Rajkala. They did their job. Nobody complained. It was there that I watched Ram Aur Shyam, Mother India, Guide, and Aradhana — the films that shaped a whole generation’s idea of what cinema could be. Then, sometime in the late eighties, a fourth hall opened: Aarti Talkies. The crossing on which it stood became Aarti Square, and Aarti Square has stayed a landmark ever since. Ask anyone in Wardha for directions today, and sooner or later they will mention it, even though the theatre itself is long gone.

The Doctor Who Built a Cinema

I bring up Aarti Talkies for two reasons, and both are about the same man.

He was an MBBS doctor who had taught pharmacology at MGIMS for a couple of years in the early seventies, before returning to full-time private practice in Wardha. He ran a complete diagnostic service — pathology, radiology, X-ray — and he ran it well. He was also, by every account, a striking man: tall, always in a three-piece suit, with the bearing of a Bollywood hero and none of the need to try. He became the most successful doctor in town, and his patients will tell you it was not just his hands — it was his tongue. A thriving clinical practice would have satisfied most men. It did not satisfy him. He partnered with two others and built a cinema.

Aarti Talkies, when it opened, made the old three halls look tired. It was bigger, more comfortable, better run — the sort of place that made an evening out feel like an occasion. Then, ten years on, the doctor died before his time. The theatre outlived him by two decades, standing empty and then falling silent for good, until it was demolished. A mall went up in its place, with a new multiplex tucked inside it. That mall is where I sat this afternoon.

A Composer Who Never Heard the Applause

One particular Sunday there stays with me: watching 1942: A Love Story at Aarti Talkies in 1994. The film mattered to me for more than its story. It was the last film R.D. Burman ever scored, after a long lean stretch in which he was told, again and again, that he was finished — some thirty flops in a row before this one. 1942 turned out to be a triumph, but Burman never heard the applause. He died in January that year, months before the film reached the screen.

So the theatre was jinxed, in its own small way. The doctor who built it did not live to grow old in it. The composer whose music filled it did not live to see it succeed. Two men, two premature deaths, one hall standing between them.

Enough of History

Enough of history. Let me come to the point I actually sat down to make.

Watching The Odyssey this afternoon, in a mall built over the bones of Aarti Talkies, took me back four years further still — to the Covid lockdown. Schools were shut. Hospitals had turned away most patients who did not have Covid. As Medical Superintendent, my days filled with meetings — collectors, bureaucrats, government officials — and lecture after lecture over Zoom to committees that multiplied faster than the virus itself. Strangely, this left me with something I had not had in years: spare time.

Reading Greek Myths with Diti

I used it to read about Greek mythology, and to watch YouTube videos on the subject, with my granddaughter Diti, then eight years old, sitting beside me. I read the stories aloud. She listened, asked questions, then asked more. Achilles, Charybdis, Scylla, the Trojan horse, the sirens, the long wandering of Odysseus — these names became as familiar around our dining table as the names of relatives. I did not know it then, but I was watching something take root.

Diti’s love for Greek mythology became a love for the English language itself. Over the next four years, by the age of twelve, she read her way from Harry Potter into whole shelves of English literature.

Two Mythologies, One Bow

Somewhere along the way, she started noticing things I would never have thought to look for: a kinship between the Greek myths and our own. Shiva’s bow in the Ramayana, which only Rama could string, was her first find — she set it beside the bow of Odysseus, which no man but its owner could bend. Then came the oceans. Hanuman, leaping across the sea to Lanka, is swallowed whole by the she-demon Surasa, and escapes only by shrinking small enough to slip through her mouth before she can close it. Krishna wrestles the serpent Kaliya in the waters of the Yamuna. Diti laid both beside the Greeks and their own restless sea, the one Odysseus spent ten years trying to cross.

That, in the end, is the thread this afternoon’s film pulled taut: a doctor in a three-piece suit, a composer who never heard his own triumph, a granddaughter who found her way into books through a war fought three thousand years ago, and a bow that only the right hands could string.

The film itself — the gods, the arrows, the six countries and the quarter-billion dollars it took to bring an old story back to the screen — I will save for my next post.