The first film I remember watching in a cinema is Jurassic Park, and I’m fairly sure it was at Geet Talkies in Civic Center. It came to India in 1994, so I’d have been about eight. Four of us went on my father’s Chetak: my father, my brother, the elder bhaiya who lived next door, and me. I don’t know how we all fitted on it. I do remember the dinosaurs on that big screen, and being scared of them and unable to look away at the same time. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I’ve watched more films at Geet than at any other cinema, and a lot of them were free. Between 1999 and 2002 there was a special screening there every Sunday. I don’t remember who sponsored it, but the local newspaper ran a quiz every week and the winners got tickets to the show. By Friday or Saturday most of the tickets had gone to winners, and the rest were given away. My father had a lot of friends in the press, so a few of those always came to us.
By Friday evening I’d know how many tickets I had, and I’d pick up the landline and start calling friends. The show was at nine or half past on Sunday morning, so breakfast was a quick one, and some Sundays my friends came over early and had a couple of idli sambar at our place before we left. Then we’d get our cycles out, the older boys pedalling and the younger brothers sitting behind them, and ride the five or six kilometres to Geet. We’d leave the cycles at the cycle stand, show our tickets and go in, and sometimes we bought samosas. Geet had the best samosas, piping hot inside and fried just right.
The films were mostly children’s films or English blockbusters. Off the top of my head I can name Aladdin, Space Jam, The Phantom Menace and E.T., and there were plenty more. Some of them came back a few months later and we went to see them again anyway. Who doesn’t like sitting in a cold auditorium watching a film?
Now that I think about it, single screens were the original social dividers. Geet had two sections. The balcony upstairs was looked after, with cushioned seats, carpet and clean rows, and a ticket cost ₹60 or more. The lower section downstairs had wooden seats with no cushions, and it was dirty, dingy and cramped, but a ticket was ₹10 or ₹15. Families and couples sat in the balcony. The lower was looked down on, as somewhere people from a good family didn’t sit. Nobody ever told me that in so many words, but I was told. I’ve sat on both sides of that line. As a kid, on those free passes, it was the balcony. In college it was the lower, because every rupee counted, and we’d bunk classes on Fridays and watch whatever was playing.
These days I watch films in Pune, and I love it. The screens at Cinepolis and IMAX make a film an experience, but I miss single screens, and I’ve never managed to put that into words that do it justice. Everything at a single screen built up the excitement, and it started at the ticket window. A lower ticket had to be fought for. We’d stand in the queue for half an hour before the window even opened, and when it did, it was pushing, shoving, cussing, whatever it took to get a hand through the window with a note in it and ask for tickets. I can’t imagine going through that today to watch a film. The worst was when we went to get tickets for the first Pirates of the Caribbean at Geet. It looked like a rock concert, with people crowd-surfing over each other to reach the window, and the film was worth every bit of it.
Once you had the tickets, you walked in, and the cold air hit you the moment you were through the door. You made your way to your seat, small and tight, with hardly any legroom, no cup holder, and an armrest if you were lucky. The sound was Dolby, supposedly, though nobody knew what it actually was. Then the lights went off, the film started, and the lower took over. People howled, whistled, shouted, danced, taunted and passed comments on everything. I never saw a girl sitting in the lower, and given the crowd down there, it isn’t hard to see why. It was chaos, and I loved every second of it, which in college added up to a lot of seconds.
The loudest lower I ever sat in wasn’t even at Geet. It was Dus, at Swaroop, and the film was dead boring, but nobody around me cared. People came in already buzzing, and when Dus Bahane came on, the whole section went mad and people were standing on the seats. The film was terrible, and it’s still one of the best times I’ve had in a cinema.
It worked the other way too, and that’s the one drawback of a single screen: the crowd could decide what you thought of a film. I watched Bluffmaster at Geet with my college friends. None of them enjoyed it, and I came out thinking it was boring too. It’s one of my favourite films now. That hardly happens in a multiplex, where nobody’s shouting at the screen and you’re left to make up your own mind.
Geet was famous for one more thing, or infamous. Inside the same premises was a smaller hall called Ghazal, and that’s where the B-grade adult films played. My school in Sector 10 was right next to Geet, and a rumour that some boy had watched a film at Ghazal was a badge of honour, enough to get him called a bad boy. The story was usually that he’d bunked tuition and gone for the morning show, and some of them really did. I never watched one there. A few of my college friends did, and the stories they came back with were hilarious and will stay off the internet. I imagine it was a lot like the hall in Rockstar where Ranbir Kapoor takes Nargis Fakhri to see one.
I took that photo in 2016. By then Geet had become Miraj Cinemas, with a new name outside and a wall of posters inside, and I kept going. I’m fairly sure I watched Shaandaar there, with Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, and the last film I remember watching there was Ittefaq, with Sidharth Malhotra and Sonakshi Sinha, in 2017, the year I moved to Pune. I didn’t think of it as the last one. I’d been going to Geet since I was eight, first on my father’s Chetak, then on our cycles, then on my Hoodibaba, and finally in the Fiat Punto, and there was no reason to think I wouldn’t be back.
There’s no Geet or Ghazal any more. They gave way to Miraj, a modern multiplex, but it never drew the crowds Geet did, or the kind of following Ghazal had, and it didn’t last either. The building is still standing in Civic Center, with nothing playing inside and nobody queuing at the window. It’s a ghost building now, but for anyone from Bhilai or Durg who grew up watching films, it’ll always be Geet.
I won’t pretend single screens were better, because they weren’t. The lower had wooden seats, nobody knew what the sound system really was, and a whole show could be ruined if you ended up next to the wrong person. Today I can book an IMAX seat on my phone from the sofa and walk in ten minutes before the film starts, and by any measure that’s better. But none of it comes close to how going to the movies felt then, the cycle ride over, the fight at the ticket window, a samosa before the show, and a hall full of strangers reacting to the same scene at the same moment. It might be the whole lower on its feet for Dus Bahane, or a few hundred people singing along with Himesh Reshammiya in something close to harmony. If there’s still a single screen running in your town, go once, and if you’re feeling adventurous, buy a lower ticket.
