‘Verily, memory is a tricky wench’ (and other wisdom in HM Naqvi’s The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack)

[Did this book review for Scroll]
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Reading HM Naqvi’s second novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack, I was faced with a tricky question, which goes something like this: what if an author does a good, authentic-seeming job of capturing a narrator’s distinct, idiosyncratic voice – and yet this voice itself is so affected, so rambling and at times grating, that even as you admire the book’s achievement and seriousness of purpose, the reading experience often becomes a drag? **

I speak of the narrator-protagonist Abdullah K, known as the Cossack (we learn why around a hundred pages in), a 70-year-old resident of Karachi, or as he writes it, Currachee. (“This orthographic tic can be attributed to my affinity for the sonorous, indeed alliterative quality of the colonial appellation for the city – after all, I came of age during the Raj – but the long and short of it is that it’s my city and I’ll call it what I want.”) Abdullah is a brilliant man in many ways, but a notably unaccomplished one – if you define “unaccomplished” as having little tangible to show for the grand projects he has been working on or contemplating. “I am more phenomenologist than historian,” he tells us; he claims to be writing “a mythopoetic legacy” of his city’s patron saint Abdullah Shah Ghazi.

Now, as the book opens, a few situations descend on him, creating both peril and a renewed sense of purpose. First his old friend Felix Pinto (“the Last Trumpeter of Currachee”) asks him to look after his adolescent grandson Bosco for some time. (“You know things. Teach him something. Character building and all that jazz.”) Then, Abdullah learns that three of his four brothers are planning to dispose of their ancient family estate, the Sunset Lodge, the only place he has ever known as home; the fourth brother, Tony, may be his only hope, if he can locate him. Meanwhile fate also throws into his path a young woman named Jugnu, obsidian-eyed and caught in gangland trouble, and the possibility of a dangerous romance arises.

So here is a man who, at an advanced age, is at risk of losing his moorings – and his most prized possessions, including his library – but has also at the very same time acquired a surrogate family, which brings with it new responsibilities and new fire. It’s almost as if fate had said: let’s get this chap to stop pottering around and procrastinating and theorising, and give him things to do, as well as new things to think about.

*****

Conceptually, there is much to relish in this ambitious novel, which arrives eight years after Naqvi’s award-winning debut, the dynamic Home Boy. If that book was about three young Pakistanis in post-9/11 New York, this one has another protagonist who is an outsider in his own way, even though he is a Muslim in Pakistan. The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack is filled with memories of a cosmopolitan Karachi, made up of jazz clubs, bars, cabarets and musicians with such nicknames as Caliph of Cool (I was reminded a little of the smoky, glamorous world described by the Urdu writer Ibn-e Safi in his Jasoosi Duniya series) – a place that might be less inclusive today than it was in the 1950s and 60s heyday of Abdullah and Felix. It’s clear that they miss that world and feel sorely out of place in the current one.

Along with its many references to the city’s cultural and sociological history, this book is also a study of a complex man. Naqvi conveys the sympathetic side of Abdullah – we see his loneliness, his eagerness to please beneath the pedantry and archness that might easily put people off, his fear that he might lose his new “family”, his sense that time has passed him by. “You will be judged by what you finish, not what you begin,” he recalls his dying father say, and those words hang over his life like a giant neon sign. A running motif is the difference between knowing and doing – between, say, providing a scholarly discourse on the culinary history of a region and cooking a meal yourself in the thrill of new love.

All this is so promising. And yet, there is the matter of Abdullah’s actual prose, which may test the patience of even readers who have a high threshold for showy writing. I would have to quote entire passages to properly make my case, but consider even short declarations like “Verily, memory is a tricky wench.” (There are many occurrences of “verily” and “veritable” in this book.) Or “Nobody has offered me any biscuits & I do relish a biscuit, a splendid genus incorporating everything from the modest saline to the vanilla wafer.” Or the random appearance, in the middle of a regular sentence, of an all-capitalised observation like “Apparel Doth Maketh the Man”. Or this bit about a woman who is suspected of being a 'transvestite': "What to do? Discreetly explore the topography of her nether lands with my divining rod whilst she is asleep? What if I discover a bitter gourd in the brush?"

It bears mentioning that The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack has a Foreword and an Afterword, which present the main text of this novel as an actual written manuscript, received by one of Abdullah’s acquaintances (I won’t say who) and edited together. In other words, perhaps this is his lifetime’s accomplishment, his mythopoetic legacy, the thing that he sat down and completed, making him something more than a dabbler or a dallier. And this makes the floridity of the writing more plausible: one can believe that someone like Abdullah would, when putting pen to paper, make conversations more ornate than they actually were, allow himself to get carried away, or just amuse himself by repeatedly using words like “espy” where “see” would do.

Up to a point, this sort of thing can be cute or create a drolly comical effect – but to me at least, it started to feel tired after a while. The writing in Home Boy had many stylistic flourishes too – the main characters, who think of themselves as global citizens until hard reality strikes, speak a language that mixes the rhythms of gangsta-rap with Punjabi slang – but there was an energy and an internal rhythm to that book, which I felt lacking here.

Perhaps it’s the burden of expectations: I went in thinking this book would be wildly funny, and on that score I was disappointed. Take the prolific use of footnotes. This is a device that can be put to very good use in a humorous narrative requiring sharp or witty asides, but here the footnotes often just contain random information, including things that could have been added as a paragraph in the main text without affecting the narrative flow. (Incidentally, the one footnote I was genuinely grateful for is a detailed recipe for orange pulao!) This again is something that might be “true” to the meandering thought process of a narrator like Abdullah, showing off his store of knowledge on various subjects including his city’s history. But we, the readers, must still deal with it.

*****

Eventually the prose became such a barrier that I only dimly registered what was happening at the plot level in the book’s second half – as Abdullah reunites with his brother Tony (and his new wife) while also trying to stay clear of gunmen, and figure out what Jugnu is up to. And yet, somehow, I never quite lost interest in this protagonist, or stopped feeling concerned for him.

Reading some passages, I thought of a certain variety of old gentleman (it’s always a man) who routinely stands up from the audience at the end of a literature-festival session, ostensibly to ask a question but really to supply autobiographical detail in a baroque tone. The wannabe poet, now 86 years old but convinced as early as age 10 that he was destined for great things. (It didn’t work out, of course: now, decades later, he is fated to sit among the audience, watching pretenders.) Or more specifically, the gentleman I once saw at a Chandigarh fest who, apropos of nothing, stood up and went on about how he had been the first man in his city to get a vasectomy.

The point is, it’s possible to be irritated by such people and their self-obsessed hijacking of an occasion, while also feeling sorry for them and realizing how, with just a minor twist in fortunes or personality, they might have been the ones sitting on stage, blabbering about their bestselling books.

I felt a comparable sympathy for Abdullah, who, beneath the occasional pomposity of his tone, is like a lost, lonely child. Little wonder that one of the book’s most resonant passages – a very short one – has him walking through a house during a mourning ceremony for a distant relative and overhearing a conversation about someone with great promise and potential but fated to be a failure. We realise, though he himself does not, that it is him being discussed. It is one of the rare times in this book where we get a break from Abdullah's constant expounding and information-imparting and are privy to someone else’s perspective on him – and the results are unexpectedly moving.

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** This might be likened to an actor playing a screechy or obnoxious character as the lead role in a film. The empathetic viewer might recognize that the performance (and the script) is honest, not an exercise in overacting; but what does one do with such knowledge if this unlikable or irritating person occupies nearly every minute of the film’s running time?

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[Some of my earlier book reviews and author interviews for Scroll are here]

Right said, Fred (a chance encounter in Guwahati)

This is about a massively improbable, and very pleasing, encounter/reunion at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Guwahati, where I curated and moderated two sessions last week.

Some context: I have spent a great deal of time on tennis messageboards over the past 13-14 years (ever since my Rafa Nadal fandom -- often chronicled on this blog -- began), but the most I was ever an active participant was around 2006-2010, when the Tennis World website was on Typepad and facilitated long, in-depth conversations. During one of those phases, I had a few exchanges — including genial arguments — with a poster named “Freddy”, one of the nicer, more balanced Federer fans on the board. One exchange was particularly vivid: it had to do with sports fandom as deriving from the personality connect you sometimes feel with a particular athlete. If I remember right, Freddy was shaking his head at what he saw as Rafa’s false humility and his “sandbagging” — his habit of constantly undermining his own chances, always saying “very difficult, I’ll have to try my best, no?” even when the next match was against a low-ranked opponent.

I countered that I didn’t think this was fakery at all, that Nadal quite likely really had that diffident side to him — a side that didn’t believe he belonged up there with all-time greats like Federer. And I mentioned that in a very different context, I understood something about “sandbagging”. I was often accused of it by friends in school when I came out after an exam all depressed and hangdog-like, convinced I had done badly, but subsequently got high marks. This wasn’t dishonesty, it was how I really felt at the time. It may have been chronic pessimism, or a constant fear of letting oneself down; it’s also possible my friends were so OVERCONFIDENT — or so sure about their own answers when we exchanged notes after the exam — that there was always likely to be this sort of mismatch between our expectations and our results.

(Incidentally, I wrote about this aspect of my Rafa fandom in this First Post piece in 2011)

Anyway, I had no idea about — or interest in — Freddy's real identity (I think I assumed that was his actual name — it wasn’t self-evidently a chatroom pseudonym), and I didn’t seriously consider the possibility that he was Indian. But returning to the present and to a series of chance happenings:

* At Guwahati, I attended the “Sports is stranger than fiction” panel discussion — only because my friend Shamya Dasgupta was moderating it and because the writer Shehan Karunatilaka, whom I was meeting after a long time, was on it.
* During the session, one of the panelists, Sriram Subramanian — about whom I knew nothing beyond what was sketchily said in the session introduction—mentioned the randomness of his Ivan Lendl fandom in the 1980s, and how it led to an antipathy for Lendl’s rival Boris Becker, and so on.
* This story touched a chord, but it still wouldn’t have led anywhere — I’m not the sort to go up to someone I don’t know after a session and start chatting about something he said — except that later that evening I was sitting with Shamya at the hotel bar when Sriram came by and joined us. 
* In the inevitability of small talk, I brought up the Lendl thing, and this led to a chat which created an escalating sense of deja vu: we found ourselves talking about TennisWorld and the many colourful commenters there in the good old days, and next thing I was asking him if he had ever posted there himself and what name he used… and you can guess the rest.

So here, many years after our cyberspace conversations, “Freddy” and I end up meeting in Guwahati of all places: he travelled there from Pune, I from Delhi. And even with both of us participating in the same festival, the probability of running into each other, much less having a tennis-related conversation that would connect these dots, was vanishingly small.

Moral of the story: if sports is stranger than fiction, life is stranger than sports, and lit-fests are stranger than Manmohan Desai films. 

(Also, when a diehard Federer fan and a diehard Nadal fan pose together for photographs, you know the world belongs once again to the Serbian Prince of Darkness. But that's for the next tennis piece.)

Flashback series – why you should watch Waqt (1965)

[the third entry in my Film Companion series. From the cosy, black-and-white Mem Didi in my last column to the lavishly mounted and colour-drenched Waqt – it’s like going from a low-budget B-movie to a Cecil B DeMille epic. But perhaps the better Hollywood analogy would be with a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama – glossy, opulent but capable of shifting between the grand moment and the intimate one] 
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Title: Waqt
Director: Yash Chopra
Year: 1965
Cast: Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor, Balraj Sahni, Achala Sachdev, Rehman

Why you should watch it:

Because it’s a near-perfect summary of the “masala” film before the term was commonly used

Here are my dominant childhood memories of watching Waqt on TV:

*A middle-aged couple with three children – conservatively dressed mummy-ji, daddy-ji types – exchange lovelorn glances as the man sings to his wife at a mehfil of friends and family,
*An earthquake strikes just as a businessman, flush on material success, boasts about his fortunes,
*In a daring-for-the-time scene, set in a swimming-pool changing room, two young lovers get out of their wet costumes, press against the wall separating them and whisper sweet nothings to each other, *Swanky convertibles race each other in a sequence which offers the grand conceit that an Indian landscape – with potholes, random construction work and vegetable sellers in the middle of the road – could be a setting for this sort of thrill,
*During a trial, a man opens a cupboard to demonstrate an action to the court, only to have a life-sized dummy fall on him from inside.

These and many other setpieces make up this sprawling work, a progenitor of the lost-and-found multi-starrer of the 1970s (Yaadon ki Baarat, Amar Akbar Anthony), as well as a lovely-looking film packed with glamorous people conducting romances, AND a courtroom drama built around a murder. Can we say “masala”? That term has been over-used in descriptions of mainstream Hindi cinema, but rarely has it applied so well to a film as to this one.

For the stars, the gloss and the clothes

This was Yash Chopra’s first colour film, and it anticipates the lush vistas and romances of films like Kabhi Kabhie, Silsila and Chandni. In her memoir, the celebrated costume designer Bhanu Athaiya notes how invigorating it was to work with so many different character types, situations and settings. The outfits worn by Sadhana and Sharmila Tagore became so popular, she says, that girls in Delhi bought movie tickets for their tailors so they could see the designs and replicate them. (“We introduced the churidar pyjama and sleeveless fitted kurtas with a side band that brought complete attention to the body form.”)

Given this, the actors were at an advantage from the start. Raaj Kumar is always an acquired taste (and his performance as the oldest of the three separated brothers involves some eccentric choices), but even he manages to look suave here. There is an unusually energetic, fast-speaking performance by Sunil Dutt as the garrulous Ravi, and the more obviously glamorous stars – Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor – look terrific. (Kapoor has a one-dimensional role, but the line “mere paas ma hai” would fit his character here as well as it did in Chopra’s Deewaar 10 years later – though in Waqt, he is the one named Vijay!)

For the way in which a complicated narrative is woven together, and the use of the “adalat” as an allegorical place where justice is served on multiple fronts

The film’s arc moves from a genteel if aspirational world represented by Lala Kedarnath (Sahni) and his wife to a more modern space: sleek cars, jewel thieves breaking into high society. Things get a bit slack for a while as relationships are formed and a love triangle collapses, but the pace picks up in the final third; the many narrative strands are masterfully brought together in the “Aage bhi jaane na tu” song sequence – and finally, in the trial.

With all the hyper-realism of today’s cinema, contemporary viewers have become sheepish about – or outright dismissive of – the grand courtroom scene of yore, which is a pity. What a cast of actors and characters comes together in Waqt’s court scene, and how many small and big dramas play out!

Incidentally one of the least-mentioned members of the large cast is the veteran Motilal, as the prosecutor in the climax. Though long past his heyday here, Motilal was once regarded, along with Ashok Kumar and Balraj Sahni, among the first exponents of “naturalistic” (as opposed to theatrical) Hindi-film acting. Which means that watching him and Sahni briefly share screen space here is a historical document of sorts.

For a reminder that even in the good old days, rich Indians were happy to manipulate their poor drivers into helping cover up their crimes
Decades before Aravind Adiga wrote The White Tiger, or certain real-life cases came to public notice before being hushed up, here is Chinoy Seth (Rehman), all elegant largesse when it comes to mundane matters, but showing his fangs when big things are at stake. “Duty din ki ho ya raat ki, inkaar nahin karoge,” he tells his soon-to-be-driver at their first meeting. Things get worse for the poor employee, who will soon understand that the “raat” in that sentence could also mean a nighttime of the soul.

For being blasé about the little awkwardnesses that come out of dramatic family reunions
 
Raju ends up being big brother-in-law to the woman he was trying to woo for much of the film; Ravi must deal with the fact that his adoptive sister and his real brother are in love and getting married.

For the snarling but hapless Madan Puri

Here is one of Hindi cinema’s most ineffectual bad men. The stocky Puri, always dressed as if he left his house uncertain whether to commit a bank robbery or attend a cocktail party, shrieks in anger and pulls out a sharp knife whenever something annoys him – but he never seems able to do anything useful with the weapon, and is swiftly overpowered (even by the un-muscular Rehman). Time may heal all wounds, as the film’s title and screenplay keep reminding us, but as this unfortunate villain discovers, it also wounds all heels.

[Earlier Flashback pieces are here]

That tingling sensation (or, Attack of the Killer Chairs)

[My latest column for The Hindu is about how 4D can turn a regular movie scene into massage therapy... or whiplash]
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As discussed before in this space, many factors determine the effect a movie sequence has on a viewer: your mood on the day, your emotional connect with the setting, the degree to which you relate with a character. But as a recent experience showed me, a scene’s impact may also hinge on whether the chair you are sitting in is violently shaking.

Going in to watch Damien Chazelle’s First Man, I had heard that the opening scene – in which Neil Armstrong narrowly escapes a rocket-plane accident in 1961 – was a marvelous bit of filmmaking, both for the claustrophobia-inducing sense that we are in the shuddering cockpit with Armstrong, and for the pre-echoing of things to come: we know that this man will walk on the Moon years later, after an inter-space journey much more complicated and fraught than his current adventure.

Unfortunately, I barely registered what was happening to Neil, because I was worried about the state of my own vitamin D-deficient bones. Without realizing it, I had bought tickets to a 4DX show. This apparently means the sort of immersive experience where your chair performs calisthenics each time something bumpy (like a plane ride, or an astronauts’ training session, or maybe just two people dancing the salsa) happens onscreen. Midway through, my friend was thanking her stars that she hadn’t brought her father along as initially planned. To reference the titles of other Chazelle films, the experience was less la-la-land and more whiplash.

****

So I couldn’t fully appreciate First Man – though I made up for it by listening to the beautiful Justin Hurwitz soundtrack at home, sitting on my boringly stationary sofa. And yet, much as I would have liked to watch the film without all these accoutrements, I was also left with the feeling that the 4D could have been more imaginative. 

All we got was chairs shaking every few minutes, and on one occasion a small quantity of cool vaporous liquid sprayed at us from the side. (I forget now what was happening in the film to necessitate this: did Neil’s miffed wife throw a glass of wine in his face?) There were so many other unexplored possibilities. For instance, in the climax, when our hero makes it to his zero-gravity destination, our chairs could have detached themselves from their moorings and floated about the large hall with us in them, like versions of the Star Child in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It is also exciting to think about what this technique may accomplish for Indian cinema. When we stand up for the national anthem before a screening, or watch an Akshay Kumar film (or stand up when the national anthem inevitably plays during an Akshay Kumar film), perhaps nozzles will spit itchy tricoloured powder into our eyes, making us feel even more patriotic than we already were? Or imagine a show of Tumbbad – a cautionary horror story about greed – where gold coins are sprinkled into the audience; when we bend to collect them, a neon-lit, battery-operated version of the demon Hastar snarls at us from under our seats.

Much can also be done with 3D holograms, which are relatively easy to project out of a screen in such a way that the audience feels the image is flying at them. That scene in Andha Dhun where evil Tabu defenestrates an old woman? How much more thrilling it would be if, at the moment of the assault, a spectral Mrs D’Sa were to appear shrieking and flailing over our heads.

*****

Notwithstanding our conceit that such bold innovations are the prerogative of our own age, none of this is new. As far back as 1959, the American producer-director William Castle used a vibrating device – the Percepto – on selected chairs during the screening of his B-horror film The Tingler; the device came into effect during the film’s creepiest scenes, which involved a wriggling creature attacking its victims’ spines.

My favourite part of that story, though, is that the Percepto was accidentally used during a tearful scene in the Audrey Hepburn-starrer The Nun’s Story (a film as austere and high-minded as its title sounds). In the Netflix age, I feel we could do with such mix-and-matches to enliven our theatre experience. Imagine: you’re on the last scene of Badhaai Ho, Neena Gupta’s baby has made its long-awaited appearance, and instead of a hologram of a gurgling little cherub dropping virtual flowers and glitter and baby spittle on our heads, the screen dispenses a tired-looking Amitabh Bachchan in pirate regalia, waving his sword feebly and calling out to his bird.

If that won’t get lazy viewers away from their laptops and into the halls, nothing will.

[Earlier Hindu columns are here]

The flashback series: why you should watch Mem Didi (1961)

[The second in my 1950s-1960s series for Film Companion – this one about a very charming film that I have also written about in my Hrishikesh Mukherjee book. The first piece, on Kala Bazaar, is here]
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Title: Mem Didi
Director: Hrishikesh Mukherjee
Year: 1961
Cast: Lalita Pawar, David, Jayant, Tanuja, Kaysi Mehra

Why you should watch it:

For the beautiful chemistry between three elderly character actors

It is generally agreed that Hindi cinema is currently in a very good phase for the “character role” – such as the middle-aged parents played by Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao in Badhaai Ho, who would rarely if ever have been placed front and centre in a mainstream film of an earlier age.

But consider Mem Didi. This film has a bubbly romantic track all right, featuring two appealing if inexperienced young actors: the 17-year-old Tanuja and the Aamir Khan-lookalike Kaysi Mehra. In the second half, the narrative focuses on the obstacles facing the happiness of these lovebirds; they get disproportionate space on posters and DVD covers too. However, the real centerpiece of this film, and the single most compelling thing about it, is the marvelous interplay between three unglamorous character actors who were better known for small stock parts in movies of the time. David Abraham, Jayant, and Lalita Pawar bring credibility to every scene they are in, and are responsible for making the village in which much of the story is set feel like a real, lived-in place.

A brief synopsis. Bahadur Singh (David) and Sher Khan (Jayant) are two lovable rogues who exercise a benevolent dominance over their community, but meet their match when Rosy (Pawar), swinging her umbrella and fists, moves in and demonstrates that “didi-giri” can trump “dada-giri”. The initial clash of wills gives way to comradeship, and soon the two men become godfather figures to Rosy’s teenage foster daughter Rita (Tanuja), who is in a hill-station boarding school.

For being the first truly lighthearted and whimsical Hrishikesh Mukherjee film – pointing to the way ahead

This was Mukherjee’s fourth film as director, made when he was starting to come into his own, breaking out of the shadow of his mentor Bimal Roy and his close friend Raj Kapoor. Hrishi-da’s directorial debut Musafir (1957) was made largely with Roy’s crew; his second, Anari (1959), was shot at RK Studios and feels like a Raj Kapoor-helmed film, a lighter version of Awaara perhaps. It was with the third and fourth films, Anuradha and Mem Didi respectively, that Hrishi-da truly began his own innings. And of all these, Mem Didi is the first film where the dominant quality was breeziness – with comedy getting the upper hand in the comedy-drama jugalbandhi that would persist throughout his long career.

This is not to say that Mem Didi doesn’t have a few maudlin moments – it does. But given that the basic plot involves a poor old woman toiling away to get her child through school (now there’s a trope from movie melodrama if there ever was one!), it’s remarkable how the film steers clear of prolonged sentimentalism and always finds a way to veer back to the chirpy or the idiosyncratic.

And again, much of the credit goes to the performances of the three senior actors. Casting the hard-edged Lalilta Pawar in a role like this was a master touch: much like Thelma Ritter in the Hollywood of the 1950s, Pawar had the ability to undercut a sentimentally written scene with her dry personality. Even when Rosy is weeping or fretting, you know a zinger or a sharp glance is just around the corner.

Similarly, having the stout and genial David – of Bene Israeli background – play a proud Rajput would never have made sense on paper, but it works brilliantly in practice. And the big burly Jayant, with his Pathan accent, might remind you of Baloo the bear shuffling around. With two other actors in these roles, the characters might have come across as mean or nasty (in scenes like the one where Bahadur flexes his muscles to intimidate a doctor, or where they coolly change the time on a restaurant clock after arriving late for dinner) – but these two are consistently endearing. Some of the looks they exchange – after their first, emasculating encounter with Rosy, for instance – are worth the price of admission. Watch how they go in the blink of an eye from strutting around like wannabe Samurais in a Kurosawa film to walking away sheepishly, with hands behind their back, like errant schoolboys, after being chastened.

In fact, in the early scenes, the film’s plot often plays second fiddle to Bahadur and Sher Khan’s desultory conversations. There are many casual little moments, which exist almost for their own sake – or to create a certain mood – rather than to take the narrative forward.

For Tanuja, singing and dancing with a dog

In Anari, Raj Kapoor briefly cavorts with a street dog while singing “Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe”. In Mem Didi, Hrishikesh Mukherjee – so well-known for being a canine lover that a 1970s magazine profile of him was titled “Hrishi-da in a house full of bitches”! – takes the theme a few steps forward by picturizing a song sequence that is entirely built around a conversation between Rita and a village stray. “Beta, wah wah wah!” she sings (you’ll find the words listed as “Beta, woof woof woof!” in some places), while the dog adds its own howl to the chorus and then prances around holding an umbrella.

It’s a lovely, spontaneous little moment. It’s also one of the few times in the film that the pretty young heroine gets to be as funny and as cool as the old folk.
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Trivia: Mem Didi was loosely based on Frank Capra’s 1933 film Lady for a Day, itself taken from a Depression-era Damon Runyon story. Coincidentally, Capra remade Lady for a Day as A Pocketful of Miracles in 1961 – the film was released just a few months after Mem Didi. (And to extend the remake theme, Hrishikesh Mukherjee remade Mem Didi in 1983 as Accha Bura, with Amjad Khan playing the role his father Jayant had played in the original.)