Darjeeling, Aug. 21: He is the local lad who has made it in Hollywood but sadly the town where Nari Avari grew up can’t watch his exploits on the big screen as the curtains have come down on both theatres, ironically once owned by his family.

Nari’s father Eric Avari owned Rink Cinema and Capitol Hall, the only theatres in Darjeeling, until 1984 when he sold them off and headed for New York.

Nari, his youngest son, who always had a penchant for acting, started off in small stage and TV shows and finally made it big in Hollywood blockbusters like Mummy, where he plays the librarian, and other movies like Planet of the Apes, Stargate, Sandler’s Deed, Beast of War and 13 Warriors. Nari, however, uses his father’s name Eric Avari on screen.

The Avari family had owned Rink Cinema since the early 1900s and in 1921, they took the Capitol Hall on lease from the Darjeeling municipality.

The Avaris were running the theatres till 1984, when the family left Darjeeling and both halls passed over to the Gargs.

That unfortunately was the time when cinemas across the country came up against stiff competition from television, which only worsened with the arrival of satellite channels, spelling the doom for several theatres.

Faced with bleak business, the Garg family dismantled the Rink two years ago and in its place, a swanky shopping complex, with two mini-theatres, is likely to come up by March 2004. The Capitol stopped screening films a few years ago and now stages musical shows.

Nari’s friends in Darjeeling like Rabin Subba, the director of Himali Boarding School, rues the fact that they are not able to watch Avari in action on the big screen and that too at the very place where he spent his childhood and youth.

“Sadly, though Nari has made a mark in Hollywood, which people from the hills can only dream of, he has been forgotten in his own town,” says Subba, who blames the lack of cinemas in town for the ignorance about his friend. Subba and Nari, who passed out of St Joseph’s School in 1969 and the joined St Joseph’s College, acted together in many plays during the student days in Darjeeling.

“Nari was always a good actor and I remember him playing Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar in school. In college, we had acted together in Beckett, with Avari playing King John while I was cast in the title role,” says Subba. “We again acted together in Anthony Schaffer’s Sleuth.”

Avari had formed a theatre group in Darjeeling called Polaris in the early 70s and had conducted drama workshops in Darjeeling.

“Since he grew up and spent most of his life in Darjeeling, he was really fond of this place, but then destiny had different things in store for him. He left for New York with his family, where he has scaled greater heights,” Subba says. Nari hasn’t visited Darjeeling since.

Avari’s friends in Darjeeling, though few in number, not only remember him as a good actor but also as a good sportsman who had even captained his school cricket team.