Dhana ‘Dhan’
“Come on, let’s go, Raju, let’s go watch a love movie, come on, let’s go, Raju…” In Nandigama, my relatives and close friends call me Nagaraju. Humming a parody of a movie song, Vijaya Babu signalled to me. I immediately picked up another tune and sang back: “Come, come, little boy, flying like a ‘time-pass’ bird, without even looking at your book, come on, come on…” and I gestured back at him. “They say it’s a really good love movie. Let’s go watch it,” he said. That’s the term he used for romantic films. It was a tiny room on the terrace of a house in the Sixth Lane, Arundalpet, Guntur. The owners rented it out to bachelors and students. My elder brother knew about this, so he spoke to the owner, rented the room for a month, and put the three of us, (Parthasarathy, Vijaya Babu and me) there — basically dumped us into that room. Out of the three of us, Parthasarathy, was the serious type — always with a book in his hand, deeply absorbed in studying. He had come along with ...
