Journalist Khalid Mohamed’s childhood: ‘My joys were the clandestine escapes to the cinema halls’

Grandpa owned two cinema halls – National (renamed Moti) and Nishat – both located in the red-light area of Kamathipura. Both the cinemas, sold by Grandpa during his lifetime, went defunct after the multiplex boom. Kamathipura was divided into roughly fourteen sections according to the regional and linguistic backgrounds of the sex workers active there. Their claustrophobic room-cum-charpoys were known as ‘cages’ since the women were trapped there, with no hope of salvation. For a child, the National and Nishat were barbed-wire zones.

However, Saiba the chauffeur and Bachoo – surrendering to my howls of protest – would sneak me in on the quiet for re-runs of the Dilip Kumar-headlined Azaad (1955) and Kohinoor (1960), Dev Anand’s Taxi Driver (1954) and the action-crammed bone crunchers of Dara Singh.

Naturally, Maaji’s prime mission was to enrol me in the ‘best school’ in town. The New Model Infant High School on Warden Road stopped at the third standard. In her crystal ball, she saw me as a lawyer or, by a quantum leap, as a magistrate or judge. This could have been a side-effect of her crush on both Rajendra Kumar and Ashok Kumar in Kanoon (1960). Desperately I’d swear in the name of Allah that I’d run away to beg Raj...

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