Growing up and growing apart: My breakup with Bollywood
Like any basic brown girl, my adolescent love for Bollywood was paralleled only by my love for Taco Bell Mexican pizzas. Hold the beef, beans instead.
The year was 1995, the movie DDLJ (or for the uninitiated, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge).
Surprisingly, it wasn’t love at first sight. The only memory I have from sitting through the three-hour-10-minute film at the pre-renovation Naz 8 Cinema in Fremont is the intermission, during which my nani (maternal grandmother) and I stood in the endless line for the restroom and she mistook liquid soap for hand lotion, which caused quite the stir.
It was only two years later that we were re-introduced. It was the summer of 1997 and my nana (maternal grandfather) had come from Bombay on one of his extended visits to see us and stay home with my brother and me during our three months off from school. On one particularly scorching day, my best friend had come over, and as we contemplated what to do for the next several hours, she told me about the amazing Bollywood movie she had recently seen — DDLJ. We charmed Nana into chaperoning us on the walk to Sushma Emporium — one of the few Indian grocery stores in San Jose at the time — to rent the VHS, and then finagled an extra stop at the drugstore for candy. It was only half a mile away, but in the mid-day heat and…
