Mohini, Nimita, and I planned to spend one Saturday together, just the three of us. We were going to a movie, to shop, and then out for dinner before taking Nimita home. The week before, Mohini and I had stood in a line for an hour to get tickets for a movie called Soona Dil, “Lonely Heart.”

Mohini and I talked about it all week. We’d forgotten how it was to be with Nimita alone, without Girishji. Finally it was Saturday. Mohini and I waited for Nimita right outside the Opera House, under the gigantic billboard outside the theater. Girishji had promised to bring her straight there.

I’d seen the billboard from a distance earlier in the week. In the photo, the hero and the heroine were holding each other. The couple was draped in billowy white clothes against a pinkish-beige morning sky, as if they were floating down from their beautiful bungalow in the clouds. Her hands were around his waist and his hands were cupping her face. Their lips were slightly parted, ready to be united. The flow of her dark hair and his dark head added vivid contrast to the rosy clouds. It was perfect.

Now, looking up from right below it, the picture had changed. The background was patchy and the faces were distorted and blurred. The parted lips of the couple had turned into seashells, and the heroine’s hair into kelp.

The Opera House Theater was old and had been built for plays. The seats were arranged in a semicircle and gave a grand effect. Mummy and Pappa had seen their first movie together here, which made it special to all of us.

The theater stood on a busy corner, where traffic from Chowpatty Beach, Charni Road, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Road, and Prathna Samaj got tangled up. Across the street, the fancy, air-conditioned showroom of Jivan Raman Jewelers was busy. Dressed in a khaki uniform and a khaki cap, their doorman kept opening and closing the heavy glass door, constantly bowing to the customers coming and going.

The afternoon was hot, and I wanted a bottle of sweet-and-sour Limca. It would cool me before the movie started.

The ticket window closed, posting a sign that read, HOUSE FULL.

“Aren’t you happy that we bought our tickets early?” Mohini asked.

“I’ll be happier when Nimita gets here, then we can get out of this heat.”

“She’ll come. Have patience.”

I dabbed my forehead with a handkerchief. A couple of black-market ticket sellers crept up to us. They flashed tickets in our faces and whispered, “Thirty extra, thirty rupees.” I knew I would never pay thirty extra rupees for a ticket.

Two policemen stood fifty yards away from us. The police were supposed to stop the black marketers, but they ignored them. I wondered how much the black marketers paid the policemen to keep their eyes, ears, and mouths to themselves.