It's a wrap

The mind is the most eager wide screen, joyously battered incessantly by a billion movies. That makes each one of us a wonderful moviemaker. Move over Mr. Spielberg!
Here I am talking to a friend on the phone imagining how and where she would be sitting in her room, and when she tells me about the cute guy she met in the charity raising event at her college, I have a demure girl in her pista-green night-dress sitting with her left leg bent and tucked under her the right side of her seat with her right leg offering her body, support. The room is spacious and in shades of pastel and while I notice her right breast caught between her heaving chest and her right thigh, I pan to a large park with white canvas topped tables under sepia tinted sunshine. Shades of autumn trickle down and bounce lightly off the badges that lay on the tables. Blue and red satin ribbons line them and she reaches over to pick one of them when an alluring smell makes her turn her head to the left: Hmmm, cute guy.
"E, are you listening."
I am back to the pista-greened adorable delight, pouting into the receiver, her right breast still trapped with love-or-crush muddled blood slushing through the translucent skin that spreads taut between the large open sleeve under her armpits.
"Yes, sweets. Go on. So you like him?"
"He is kinda smart and cute. He is majoring in finance. Do you think I should give it a shot?"
I see a whole class full of eager students, fresh and eager to tackle those numbers pouring out of their notebooks and out of the overhead-projector. The professor points his pencil to our sweet girl's crush. He runs his hand through his hair and his tongue over the lower lip before he answers something which makes the prof nod approvingly before he continues. He smiles lopsidedly at the response.
More often than not the movie in my head is quite accurate. It tends to get people wondering but I don't tend to rest on it else my future shows would be sullied with the laurels of guessing accurately. Like now.
"Girl, why don't you go wear something warm?"
"E!!! How did you know?"
There is not a minute that the screens of my mind are without a show covering the dreary white. If the show ends the shadows of the audience dance on it; popcorn buckets, someone tickling their girl, a man stooping over with his coat ends drawn back - oh! he has his hands in the pockets, two ladies wobbling along discussing something. Then I close (or open) my eyes and another show starts; no credits, no promos, no trailers, just the movie.
I go to bed with a show about what will happen in office the next day and that trails off into a movie of a large celebration of a festival and while I am in this autorickshaw, my seat moves back and H is sitting there all naked. We make love in this suddenly limousine-sized auto with my mom firing away details of where she has left the spices and which vessels contain the curd that need to be consumed immediately. Although I am covered by H, I seem to reply to her in chaste Tamil. My seat starts moving to the front and H is still with me. Mom doesn't seem to mind.
I wake up with a start, with the last scenes of the movie running on in my head (no "The End") and I rush back to play the reels of the last time I met H (15 years ago, when I had no clue what making love was). Did I ever think of her like that? Was I even close to her?
Pan to a scene with children rushing through the all important halls of classrooms in the most unimportant attire of school uniforms. H, I and a few others are sitting under this tree having our "tiffin". I offer her some of mine and she offers some of hers. We discuss the questions from the test we wrote recently. I head off to play basketball with my pals. She sits there and watches.
Pan to the autorickshaw. Where did this scene come from? Did I even exchange mails with her? Never. Mails... hmmm. I need to write one to Prof. U before I forget. Chant it, else the night will make you forget. So I chant "Prof. U, Prof. U, Prof. U, Prof. U" if only this chant could send me into that "happy" state like in "Layer Cake" ( a movie I bought recently. Not worth it).
Drugs.
Pan to Ray Charles. Jamie Foxx is so smooth as Ray Charles in that clubhouse, singing "What'd I say" and swinging on his chair in the grips of his music and the heroin. Man, I wish I was sitting next to him and feeling his pulse, the high, the smell of sweat, the Raelettes cooing into the microphone, Ray bumps against me and wonders who is sitting next to him. He smiles and pulls the mic between us. We start singing together, but it is a track that only the two of us know. The musicians are bobbing their heads to the beat letting it sink in and then they start out playing their instruments so wonderfully. The Raelettes join in and wink at me. I nod my head (I don't wink at girls, I tell Ray). He offers me a syringe.
"Go for it, E. You will be a writer like none this world has seen. But you need this."
"Heck no! Ray. I ain't no junkie." (I wonder why my voice is shrill and where on heaven's earth did I learn to speak Afro-American!?)
"Son, junkie to this world, which will be at your feet then", he scratches his shoulders and smiles a big toothy smile,"You will be where no one can touch you."
Mom is screaming from the audience. I see a couple of my friends at another table half in the shadows of maniacally dancing boys and girls chanting "Go for it E." My friends (some bloggers too) are all wearing hats and shake their smiling heads. I look at Ray and then at the needle in his left hand. We are still singing this song (and it has a vague resemblance to the tune I had composed after watching Ray Charles, the movie) but everyone else seems to be singing "Go for it, E" in the same tune. Funny thing happens then... I wake up.
Cut.
It's a wrap.