My Name is Gladiator

The man standing before us raised a furtive eyebrow.

“So, what will it be?”

We gazed down at the elaborate merchandise. Catching the glint of the iridescent street lamps, dozens of see-through plastic sleeves winked into the evening. The goods were stacked atop each other in neat rows. It felt like we were on the production set of the film, Blow.

It was the year 2000. My sister, dad and I had just completed our monthly visit to purchase pirated DVDs, on Muscat’s famous Ruwi High Street.

Ruwi high street is everything a street should aspire to be. Pink and purple neon lights, gold shops with twinkling displays, tailors stepping on sewing machine pedals, and 1 Rial shops- where everything you buy is a “BARGAIN! ONE RIAL OR LESS”! (I fail to understand why people look down on dollar stores and their equivalents. My mum has a bright red alarm clock from the 1 Rial shop which has outlived several smart phones across the household).

Parking the car at a distance, we would follow the smoke spirals puffing from the mouths of vending stalls. There were shawarma shops and juice stands. Fresh popcorn smells gusting from the marble steps of the cinema hall, which unfailingly aired Shahrukh Khan movies. SRK was a perennial hot favourite amongst South Asians and West Asians alike.

When the movie Gladiator came out in the early 2000’s, my sister and I were obsessed. Ruwi high street was where we bought our own copy: it was more precious than gold. We watched the DVD so many times that it became a mass of scratches, much like a worn fighter in the Colosseum. Our favourite scenes were undergirded by a common denominator: the gleaming pectoral muscles of Maximus Decimus Meridius. Whenever the moment came for Russell Crowe to take off his helmet and shock the stadium into a rapturous quiet, my sister would mouth his speech word for word, her spectacles reflecting the light of the television screen.

During the pandemic, I revisited several movies and shows from the 90s and 2000s. With the carnage around us, I found myself unable to digest fresh material, unless it came by my eyes in the form of a book.

I rewatched Sex and the City and discovered that not only was Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) just as irksome to me now as she was back then, but the show had not aged well. All the women in it were supposedly leading lives of independence, but their conversations centered wholly around men. It was a woeful failure of the Bechdel test.

I then watched Buffy pummel vampires five times her size into the ground (this was much better, especially for a pandemic funk). We even rewatched the Titanic when we had a small family reunion. I wondered why people had called Kate Winslet fat back in the day because- hello, body positivity- and I always thought she was gorgeous anyway.

Thinking back, I don’t believe I was ingesting this content for any fresh information that it accorded me: I was just maxed out. Like when your hand slips when pouring a glass of water and everything spills over the brim, and the tablecloth is just a besieged mess. Instead of residing in the carnage of the present, I was revisiting this material for the snugness of memory. While I watched, I would recall who I viewed these movies with, and how old I was. I would remember how the biggest drama in my life back then was not doing well on my Hindi exam. (As South Indians, we do not speak Hindi at home. I was also one of those punctilious GPA-loving students, which made me dislike Hindi classes even more. Years later, I can happily speak the language now- although all my genders are mixed. Gender is fluid anyway, so who really cares?)

Another repeated drama was my dreaded acne outbreaks. They would unfailingly occur before a class party, which I would attend, forlorn, with a massive blob adorning the centre of my forehead. There would always be that one classmate clad in formidably baggy jeans, circa Y2K, who would say, “DUDE- what’s that thing on your forehead?”

Like you don’t know. Twit.

My desire to linger in the past during the pandemic also made me think of the marriage between mobility and memory.

People who move for work, chasing dreams, following spouses, in search of their first car: mired in the present, yet cradling the past in their hands. Not unlike using a shield of pirated DVDs to ward off the trials of navigating a new and alien geography.

Migrants holding on to memory is a theme that has come up so much in my work as a labour researcher. A delivery worker in Bangalore recently told me how “the food is just so awful here.” Funny, because I wholeheartedly disagree, except of course for preferring Tamil Nadu sambar over Karnataka sambar. I am aware that this could be flabbergasting to some readers. Alas, I cannot lie about sambar.

Neeraj (name changed) told me how he had moved to Bangalore from Haryana a few months ago in search of a job, but he finds city food inedible because he grew up on a farm. He described his farm for a long time, losing himself in the threads of memory. How despite Haryana’s deathly summers, it is so green, and there is no sleep you get like the sleep in your own bed. They had some livestock at home too. His dad wanted him to take over the farm, but gosh, it is such physically enervating work.

“I miss the milk you get at home,” he said. “This city stuff is like water.”

Getting back to the present, he said, smiling, “Anyway, I will bring some food with me next time I go home.”

I recently read the Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra. It is a lovely, poignant work of fiction on life as a child in Chile, under the Pinochet regime. One of the most striking metaphors Zambra uses in the book is his description of secondary characters. Describing secondary characters as people who stage minor appearances in pieces of literature, he says that children are really the secondary characters in the lives of adults, until they become adults themselves. Perhaps because adults make decisions like where to live and when to move. And because adults are listening to the radio to learn about who went missing in this political climate, while the children are playing with paper planes outside, blissfully unaware.

The Ways of Going Home made me think of how memory is so different as a child, and revisiting the same places as an adult can sometimes be oddly incongruous with memory. Zambra’s references to secondary characters also made me think that maybe memory is wonderful as a DVD shield; a way of finding solace. But coming back to the present is key. Perhaps it works as long as the present doesn’t become a secondary character in your life.

It has been raining copiously in Delhi these days. Like all readers, monsoon showers always make me want to curl up with a book (Paul Murray's "Bee Sting" is my current read).

I will read just before I turn in for the evening.

But perhaps, just for tonight, I shall rewatch the Gladiator.