It was very easy to miss Gupta Video while walking around Golpark (Kolkata). The thin, sliver of a lending library was sandwiched between (I think) a toy-shop called Children’s World and a row of shop windows, below some bank. It was carefully guarded from view – from the main road, that is – by flower-shops that jostle with each other at the edge of the pavement. If you run a Google search, it’s like to throw up a photograph from ten years back, when the space had already been converted into a baggage store (while retaining the name Gupta Video, probably to avoid legal complications).
We – by that I mean our parents – had purchased a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) sometime in the late-90s. I think it was occasioned by some Karate demonstration I had participated in, which was being televised on Doordarshan. It was a beautiful device with a circular control that contained All the Buttons and could be rotated to fast-forward or rewind the tape. It had rounded edges, as opposed to the more angular devices we grew up around, and buttons that felt less mechanical and more soft. It even came with a remote control that could be used to change channels on our Toshiba/Oscar 14 inch television.
About once or twice a month, we would pop by Gupta Video to borrow a cassette. The shop was very narrow and deep. On the left, ran a long counter, behind which the librarians sat. The passage on the right was not wide enough to fit two people, shoulder to shoulder. Towering above and all around were walls of video cassettes. The actual cassettes were behind the counter; along the passage were the sleeves, their faces visible.
I wish I remembered the names of the people who ran the store. They would, over time, develop a reasonable sense of users’ tastes, which meant they could recommend titles if someone showed up without a specific film in mind. One of my clearest memories is of borrowing Star Wars: A New Hope from Gupta Video – and the subsequent disappointment of finding they had given us episode 4. We watched it nonetheless but made it a point to complain about this slip during our next visit. They said that Star Wars only had episodes 4, 5 and 6. There was no immediate way of finding out at the time that episodes 1, 2 and 3 would come out in the years to come.
The excitement of bringing home a video cassette was laced with unpredictability. More often than not, the cassettes would be wound up partly or fully, as most users didn’t bother to rewind the tapes after watching. When they were partly wound, it felt like discovering markings in a library book – a trace of some previous user’s experience. Having to rewind tapes really tested my patience, I remember. Sometimes, the viewing would have to wait even longer, as unclean tapes could affect the head of the player. Baba would insist on running the head-cleaning tape once, before re-inserting the borrowed cassette.
That wait – between the borrowing and the viewing – is still such a powerful memory. It’s not something I ever felt in a library because there you can start flipping through the pages even while standing at the counter. With VHS, you had to wait till you were home and had cozily settled in.
Gupta Video wasn’t our first experience of borrowing from a video cassette library, though. A branch of our family lives in Uluberia. They had a VCP (no recording, only playback) for as long as I can remember. They had a local library, which had a very limited selection of English titles and decent collections of Hindi and Bangla cinema. Our staple at Uluberia was the Bruce Lee series. I wasn’t that interested in the plot at the time, so the action sequences looked more or less interchangeable to me. One day, an older cousin announced that there was a new kind on the block, called Jackie Chan. Grudgingly we gave it a shot, but I wasn’t very impressed.
Curiouser and Curiouser 