In Progress

Happiness is, happiness is, happiness is…well, sometimes it is a warm gun. Sometimes a warm cup of milk. But most of the time, for Meera, it was the Regal Cinema. By the time she was fifteen, her mother let Meera take the bus the twelve blocks down sunny, suburban Merton Street to the dilapidated movie house by herself. It was a signal accomplishment, since Meera’s mother lived in a far more dangerous world, one in which shadowy attackers hid behind every birch on the street, and needles flourished on every prosperous lawn. Meera knew perfectly well that her middle-class (upper in every other country) community was not a dangerous place, not really. The movies told her that much. It was the city she needed to fear, the dangerous Big Apple, for example, where you could be a high powered lawyer one day, and one the run, the main suspect in an elaborate stock bubble scheme gone awry, the next. Of course, even if that happened, it wasn’t like you weren’t going to recover from it and win the heart of the lovely assistant DA by the end.

The end. Meera knew every story had a beginning, middle and end. She liked the endings the best, which is why she resolutely refused to see movies made in any language other than English. It wasn’t that she had a problem with subtitles, or dubbing, it’s just that the probability of the film having a happy ending was way lower. Meera’s happiest moments, the ones she thrilled to, anticipated while sitting in class or lying in bed waiting for sleep, were the last moments before the hero grinned, the music swelled, and the credits rolled. Her heart felt like it would burst when the romantic tension after rising for nearly two hours would finally spill over into that all-important kiss. Meera would hiss between her teeth when the boss would finally slap him on the back and give that sly declaration of a long-denied promotion finally being just around the bend. She hummed with pleasure when the little boy threw his arms around his sobbing mother, as the snub-nosed kidnapper was dragged off in cuffs, snarling his displeasure. Nothing made her happier than when justice was done.

Posted on May 2nd, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Fiction Shorts, Movies, Uncategorized