The guns of Ramgarh

The guns of Ramgarh
Harpal Singh

Here, this is right up your street," I was told on being given a book for review. I was immediately interested in it. It was Sholay: The making of a Classic. It was a good idea, I thought, to capture the colour and detail associated with the making of this box-office gold standard for posterity. There was another reason for this attraction: it had been written by Anupama Chopra (nee Chandra), my former colleague for many years at India Today who, I believe, has changed film writing over the past decade.

The jacket of the book had a timeless tint of sepia, and a frozen frame out of the movie showing Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan in their element, Dharmendra blowing into the mouth-organ entwined around Amitabh's broad and sturdy shoulders, and Amitabh whistling away to glory, steadying the 350 cc Enfield Bullet with a buggy through the fields of a fictional Ramgarh.

As I started reading the book, 25 years after Sholay was made and released during the Emergency, my own memories, some distinct and some very faint, of watching it several times in the first year, a couple of times in my school uniform, came alive. I also recalled how Sanjay Gandhi and his aggressive supporters in the Congress party used its screenplay to attract crowds to their stalls, decked up with Dalda tins and other doles for sterilisation suckers.

These local chieftains routinely played the cassettes and LPs at a high decibel -- there were no CDs then -- as the crowds swelled and lip-synced Gabbar Singh's potent lines. When there were sufficient people, they took to the mike and delivered the salvation speech, complete with paeans on Indira Gandhi's 20-point programme, and then waited for everyone to enroll or disperse -- sometimes even shooed away the regular onlookers who weren't game -- before repeating the act.

Some 10 year ago, I had bought the Sholay screenplay for myself and it lay on my bedroom bookshelf, next to my audio books. I thought it was time to pull out Sholay and play it in the car. So there I was, relating the description in the book with the dialogues and enjoying every moment of both. That is, till the Red Fort shoot-out on the night of December 22.

I left for home around 10 pm. By then the police barricades were up in Delhi. Unmindful of them, and in fact unaware of the shoot-out till I reached home, I drove down the Ring Road, the Sholay soundtrack playing in the car, and smoothly sailed with the night traffic, till the Brar Square barricade next to Delhi Cantonment. I was in the third lane and there was a cop standing on the right side. All the vehicles were slowing down and passing through this sieve.

When my turn came, I rolled down the window glass but didn't lower the stereo's volume. The train robbery sequence in the movie had just ended and the gun battle had ensued. The timing of my movement was such that as soon as I crossed the cop, there was a stunning stereophonic boom of bullet shots. The alert cop was taken aback but recovered quickly. I had sufficiently aroused his suspicion.

Obviously, he signaled me to stop, craned his neck inside, dug his flaring eyes on my face and examined the car number. Hiding my smirk and also a bit embarrassed, I managed to mumble a sentence to say that it was my cassette playing, even as I reached out to switch it off. Satisfied that I wasn't a renegade on the run, he let me go, no questions asked.

I haven't played the Sholay audio in the car ever since.