The smells of others

My Mirror column:

Nicholas Kharkongor's Delhi-set dramedy Axone traces some of the fault lines that mark the urban Indian melting pot.

Growing up between cultures, I learnt long ago that smell was most people’s strongest, most intimate sense – and thus the one that lent itself most easily to kneejerk reactions, especially with relation to food. Members of my family’s staunchly vegetarian side, North Indian Jains of the not-even-egg variety, have sat me down as a child to tell me how difficult they found it to keep their own food down while having their nostrils assailed by the fried fish smells wafting down from a tenant’s house.

Nicholas Kharkongor’s film Axone, recently released on an online platform, is named for the strong-smelling fermented soya bean paste that forms a necessary ingredient in many traditional northeastern dishes. Often spelled akhuni, axone has a distinctive smell that you can’t ignore – which makes it a useful metaphorical marker of difference. And differences that cannot be ignored make for a strange but potent cocktail of attraction and repulsion.

That mixture of attraction and repulsion appears sharply in the film, in the alternately lascivious and judgemental gaze that Delhi folk turn upon the young northeasterners in their midst – being judged by the women for wearing ‘Western’ clothes and having boyfriends, while being the object of the men’s unsolicited attentions. But that attraction and repulsion also plays out, perhaps unintendedly, in Axone’s own cinematic form. The film plays out the food/smell motif against a tenant-landlord scenario in one of those urban villages in Delhi that thrum with the sounds of many languages, focusing on a group of friends from the Northeast who have to make an akhuni-flavoured pork curry for a last-minute wedding feast. That food-and-wedding narrative, though, feels like a mere sweetener, an attractive hook on which to hang a script full of bitter – abeit necessary – pills. Kharkongor's central concern is the racism, sexual predatoriness and aggression that migrants from the Northeast are forced to suffer in Delhi (and most other Indian cities). But what he does is to take that disturbing narrative and plonk it down in a Delhi-set middle class comedy that has become a Bollywood subgenre from Do Dooni Chaar and Vicky Donor to Queen to Badhaai Ho.

So alongside the central group of friends, we get a fairly detailed glimpse of the landlord's family: the hard-nosed landlady (Dolly Ahluwalia doing a version of her alcohol-swigging Punjabi grandmother from Vicky Donor), her layabout son-in-law (Vinay Pathak) and her overenthusiastic grandson, the curly-haired Shiv (Rohan Joshi). Shiv's multiple machinations and largely well-meaning mistakes form some of the film's warmer bits of comedy, but his father and grandmother's characters feel derivative and ungrounded. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that the homogenous lower-middle-class Punjabi milieu, a staple of so many previous Delhi films, has finally been extended to a whistle-stop tour of the very real admixture of so many Delhi neighbourhoods like Humayunpur, where locals rent out parts of their properties to people from across India and beyond.

Axone gently impresses upon us that everyone judges each other, using community and skin colour and language to make easy categorisations. If the Hindi-speaking landlords claim not to be able to tell northeastern faces apart, or remember their names, then the Nepali girl, too, can't get her head around her African neighbour's name – and the African neighbour, in turn, makes an assumption about her based on her looks. And the whole group of northeastern friends keep their distance from the landlord’s son, whose interest in them is very much a curious fascination with the coolness their clothes, their English-speaking-ness, their music represent for him.

Kharkongor’s real sympathies, though, lie with Chanbi, Upasana, Zorem and Bendang (played by Lin Laishram, Sayani Gupta, Tenzing Dalha and Lanuakum Ao), each of whom is dealing with their own troubles. Even here, however, his script constantly points out how their relationships with each other, and with themselves, are inflected by the politics of identity and belonging. These include some small observations that shape the plot – like the perceived difference between being Nepali and being northeastern, and other observations that don’t quite go the distance – like the fake American accent or the Bollywood lyrics that are needed to get by in a world in which those languages have bigger markets. But whether it be the northeastern man who feels emasculated by racist North Indian violence, or the northeastern woman exhausted by nonstop sexual slurs and harassment, Axone brings home the trauma and injustice of the migrant northeastern experience as perhaps no Hindi film has before.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Jun 2020.

Shelf Life: High Heels, Parkar-Polka and Other Dressing Dilemmas

My Shelf Life column for June 2020:

Clothes mark the lines between modest and modish in theatre actor Vandana Mishra’s memoir, translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto

Thespian Vandana Mishra, née Sushila Lotlikar, was born on January 26, 1927, years before her birthday became known as India's Republic Day. Some of the loveliest parts of her vivid memoir, I, the Salt Doll, unfold in a time before that – her 1930s childhood in a chawl, her initiation into 1940s Bombay theatre. In her recounting, from the very start, her life seems like a stream flowing alongside many others, into the vast sea that was India.

The Mumbai of Mishra’s childhood held open the doors to that India, in all its glorious variety. And clothes were crucial to parsing that city. The Parsi ladies little Sushila admired in their “georgette saris and blouses without sleeves”, were clearly marked off from her teachers at the Lamington Road Municipality Boys and Girls School, who all wore nine-yard sarees – but “differently from the Saraswats”. Dr. Saibai Ranade, her mother's gynaecologist employer, wears the more modern five-yard sari, always in pastel shades: yellow, blue or pink. The girls wore frocks when very young, but shifted to “parkar-polka: a blouse and long skirt” in the fifth standard. Girls' clothes changed again at puberty: “By the time a girl was 14 or 15, she would move from parkar-polka and would be swaddled in saris forever after.”

Clothes in Mishra’s telling always mark the categories people are born into – gender, age, caste, community. But they must not mark you, the individual. If anything, they are a way of not standing out. Her municipal school has no uniform, but she says that “you couldn't tell the rich kids from the poor ones”. There is remembered beauty in the collective sight of clothing: the chawl's young women dancing in their parkar-polkas are like “a series of yellow, green and jamun-purple fountains...” But individual clothing is rarely mentioned. If it is, it must have a purpose beyond vanity. Her Aai's (Marathi for mother) silk sari is worn for ritual purity. Young Sushila's own outfits get mentioned only when marking a first: her first parkar-polka, “Dharwadi khunn with a broad border”, and her first sari, “pink with a green border”, bought for two rupees.

Two rupees was standard for an ordinary (cotton) saree, as against fourteen for a long-lasting “but flashy” georgette one. Flashiness was a constant danger—one that the middle-class girl-child internalised early. Sushila once tells a classmate's mother she is wearing too much powder. She gets slapped for rudeness, but the school's Pathan guard comes to her rescue. That moral front against make-up, in which little Sushila and the Pathan are on the same side, is a funny story. But it presages the book's repeated emphasis on modesty, on not dressing up, not attracting attention. It is boundary work that only gets exacerbated when the middle-class Marathi girl finds herself in a space meant for professionally dressing up: the theatre. 

Mishra came from a Konkani family of Saraswat Brahmins. When she was two, her accountant father died suddenly. Sushila's Aai – clearly a remarkable woman – refused to stay in the village, shave her head or stop educating her daughters. The family returned to Bombay. Aai did a midwifery course, and began educating three children on her nurse's salary. Then tragedy struck again: a horrible acid attack which kept Aai three months in hospital. Once home, she needed care. With her elder sister in Pune training to be a nurse, and her elder brother about to matriculate, it was Sushila who left school.

There is a powerful simplicity to the way Mishra describes these momentous events. One wonders if there was an equal simplicity to life itself. During her Aai's recovery, for instance, neighbours simply take over the family's upkeep, like others did when her father died. The family then scrapes by on savings, until an opportunity knocks: the chance to join Parshwanath Altekar's Little Theatre Group, at ₹30 a month.

Within months, on Nov 1, 1942, Sushila was asked to fill in for an actress who had stalked out, and found herself in a Mama Warerkar play. She was a hit, and soon became an actress of some repute on the Gujarati stage, and later, in the city's Marwadi theatre.

Suddenly, she is accosted everywhere: an admiring tailor offers to make her four blouses for free; a shoe-man offers her sandals. These are good working men. But there is also the local lech-cum-astrologer who offers to build her career, wooing her with an “expensive sari”. In the narrative of middle-class self-preservation, Sushila must throw that 'gift' in his face. She does.

But the real turnaround comes when she begins to wear high-heeled sandals “which made a tick-tock sound”. The chawl's caretaker tells her mother she is “walking around with a lot of pride”. Her mother warns her, she switches to Kolhapuri slippers, and simplicity is enforced.

In Krishna Sobti's autobiographical Hindi novel A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, another young middle-class woman born in the 1920s is forced to abandon her education midway. Sobti's narrator recalls quarrelling with her hostel roommate over her high-heeled sandals “clacking about at night”. But in the book's last scene, as she walks to a job interview, it is “the click of her heels” on the asphalt that bolsters her confidence. Sometimes it is nice to feel like you stand out.

This column was first published in The Voice of Fashion, 18 Jun 2020.

Driven from home - II

My Mirror column (31 May 2020):
 
The second of a two-part column.

Balraj Sahni's suffering rickshawala in Do Bigha Zamin (1953) inaugurated a migrant worker narrative whose themes continue to resonate tragically, in our films and reality.

The migrant narrative in Indian cinema is that no-one leaves home if they don't have to. In Muzaffar Ali's Gaman (1978), which I wrote about earlier this month, Ghulam (Farooque Shaikh) only decides to leave his Awadh village when he realizes that there is no work for him there, and increasingly little income. The local landlord has taken advantage of Ghulam's father's death to gobble up the better portion of his land. And Ghulam has a friend (Jalal Agha) who has been talking up the city as a place overflowing with money. The city is as much of a last resort in Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (1953), which I started to write about last week. The protagonist Shambhu (Balraj Sahni) is desperate not to lose his land to a cheating zamindar, and the city seems the only possible way to earn the money he needs. But it is the 1950s, and Shambhu has no friends in Calcutta. He hears of one villager who works as a 'boy' in Firpo's Hotel. “What's a 'boy'?” Shambhu asks. “Must be some important position, he wears a fancy uniform,” comes the answer. A similar ironic register reappears a little later when Laloo the shoeshine boy points out the Grand Hotel to Shambhu's little son Bachhua as the place where he lives. He neglects to spell it out: on the pavement.

The pavement does end up being a temporary home to Shambhu and Bachhua, just as it is to Raj Kapoor in films like Shree 420 and Phir Subah Hogi. And on the pavement, that very first night, they find themselves beside a man who yells in his sleep, reliving every night the mill accident in which he lost a limb. That accident reference seems to presage the dangers of industrialisation: the dangers the machine can pose to the human body. The accident will hit closer home later in the film, through a chilling scene in which a pair of urban lovers make two rickshawallas race each other. And you see it instantly then: that what is dangerous is not the machine, but the human being callous enough to treat other human beings like machines.

Not all humans in the city are callous, though. In Roy's vision of the city, the poor help each other out, forging bonds across region and language and community. The Bengali woman who controls the slum has adopted the orphaned girl from Bihar as her 'granddaughter'. The sick older man in the adjacent kholi (Nazir Hussain) whom Shambhu helps out becomes his route to pulling a rickshaw.

Young Bachhua makes fast friends, too. He learns to polish shoes from Laloo, and at one juncture, befriends a pickpocket. Alongside making direct references to Awara, DBZ uses the pickpocket as the figure against which the honest hero must define himself. But Bachhua's plotline with the young pickpocket is also a way for the film to step away from being preachily unrealistic. Through Bachhua's eyes, we see how the temptation of dishonesty rises with the sheer impossibility of trying to make an honest living when you have no access to capital. And in his pickpocket friend's attempt to help him, we see quite clearly that the thief can be a good friend. Most remarkable, though, is the scene where the pickpocket jeers at Bachchua for imploring him. Begging, DBZ suggests perspicaciously, is against the honour of thieves.

But unlike in Bicycle Thieves, where we empathise with the adult protagonist who finds himself reduced to theft, DBZ's empathy has a limit. The boy can be forgiven for a lapse, but the adult man cannot succumb at any cost. Balraj Sahni's portrayal of Shambhu takes the dignity of labour to its acme, continuing to take two little girls to their school when their middle class father can no longer afford the cost of the daily rickshaw ride.

That theme of heroic honesty was repeated in several other films that decade, about migrants who came to Calcutta from even further away – the dry-fruits trader from Afghanistan in the case of Tapan Sinha's 1957 Bengali film Kabuliwala, remade in Hindi in 1961 by Hemen Gupta with Sahni in the lead role, and the cloth-pedlar from China in the case of Mrinal Sen's breakout film Neel Akasher Neechey (1959). But in DBZ, as in so many Indian classics of the 1950s, from Pyaasa to Shree 420, the hero's exhortation to honesty is couched in terms that pit the city against the village: “Kisaan ka beta hoke tune chori ki? (You're the son of a farmer, and you stole?)” Shambhu berates Bachhua.

But heroic honesty does not bring any of these migrant heroes either joy or justice. What seems to govern these tragic lives is the accident. The accident that injures Shambhu in Do Bigha Zamin propels the family into an abyss from which they look unlikely to emerge at film's end. The accident recurs in later Indian films about migrants – Gaman in 1978, or two other films I wrote about recently, Liar's Dice, which premiered at Sundance in 2013, and I.D. (2012), which should be watched more widely. In Gaman, an accident kills another taxi driver: someone close to the hero. In Liar's Dice, the female protagonist makes her way to the city because her migrant husband has stopped answering messages (just like Nirupa Roy's Parvati did in DBZ) -- and learns that an accident has claimed him.

In Chaitanya Tamhane's quietly astounding Court (2015), a sewage worker's accidental death is sought to be pinned on a Dalit shahir's song about suicide. But as every worker knows, when no safety nets are provided, an accident is just a euphemism for institutionalised murder. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2020. The first part of this column is here.

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020

In the Family Way

My Mirror column:

Films about parental figures — real and imagined — made revealing viewing at the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Actor Manoj Bajpayee occupies the front row at the 2018 edition of DIFF, which took place in November at the Tibetan Children's Village school in McLeodganj

The seventh edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), which ran from November 1 to 4, was full of films about parent-child relationships. It wasn’t a consciously chosen theme. “As in previous editions, a pattern emerged organically from the choices we made,” wrote DIFF’s directors Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in their festival brochure.

Deliberate or not, even just the names of the films on this year’s schedule made for a recurring motif. In many conversations at the fest, the multi-generational, multi-linear Taiwanese drama Father to Son was mistaken for Of Fathers and Sons, a documentary based on exiled Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki’s two years shooting with a radical Islamist family in a north Syrian village. The Sri Lankan debut feature House of My Fathers added to the confusion.

Beyond the films whose titles declared themselves, however, there was Ee.Ma.Yau, Lijo Pellissery’s brilliant satirical drama about a Malayali Catholic man trying to arrange the grand funeral he promised his fisherman father, and the spare, rather too studied The Red Phallus, Tashi Gyeltshen’s symbolic unpacking of patriarchy in rural Bhutan through the tale of an atsara (a traditional clown) and his unhappy teenaged daughter. Dominic Sangma’s debut feature Ma.Ama, which I didn’t get to watch, ‘resurrects’ the filmmaker’s late mother (and casts his real-life father as the 85-year-old Philip Sangma, who has waited 30 years to be reunited with his dead wife).

The non-fiction films, too, gravitated towards this filial theme: Avni Rai’s documentary about her father, Raghu Rai: An Unframed Portrait, is as much about his photography as their relationship, while the fascinating, blackly funny The Beksinskis: A Sound and Picture Album (2017) reconstructs the complicated relationship between a famous Polish painter Zdzislaw and his radio journalist son Tomek, drawing on 300 hours of private video footage that extends from the period before Tomek’s birth till after his death. (The Beksinskis were also the subject of a more traditional biopic in 2016: Jan P Matuszynski’s feature The Last Family, which I saw at IFFI last year, didn’t have the advantage of ironic self-examination made for more harrowing viewing.)

Stills from Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence & Hamid, respectively the opening and closing films at DIFF 2018.

What was uncanny to me, though, was something else: the fact that in so many of the other films, child protagonists created a cross-generational bond with an older adult — often in lieu of a parent. In the Ukrainian filmmaker Dar Gai’s road movie Namdev Bhau: In Search of Silence, the festival’s opening film, a Mumbai chauffeur frustrated with the cacophony of the city sets out a solo trip to Ladakh’s Silent Valley, only to find himself in the insistent company of a twelve-year-old boy travelling mysteriously alone in Ladakh. The boy’s ceaseless confident chatter contrasts starkly with the silences of Devashish Makhija’s Bhonsle, in which a retired Marathi constable takes a fearful Bihari child under his wing.



Makhija’s Mumbai, all shadowy corridors and low-lit, barely-furnished rooms, couldn’t be more different from Dar Gai’s picture-postcard mountain vistas. Even when the locale is comparable, the effects are far apart. Namdev Bhau’s chawl always looks bright, the sunlight as inescapable as the chatter of Namdev’s family and neighbours, while Manoj Bajpayee’s Bhonsle occupies what must be the most silent chawl ever seen on the Hindi film screen: a place where even make-or-break fights about chauvinistic community claims on the city don’t spill over beyond the few carefully chosen protagonists. Stagey as that often felt, and despite the predictable turning of its sole female character into fodder for competing masculinities, I was far more moved by the connection between Virat Vaibhav’s petrified Lalu and the taciturn but fair Bhonsle than by Dar Gai’s too-neat, emotionally manipulative conclusion.

Child actor Virat Vaibhav in a still from Devashish Makhija's disturbing Bhonsle (2018)

Emotional manipulation and tidy coincidences also reigned in DIFF’s closing film, Aijaz Khan’s drama Hamid, set in Kashmir. An eight-year-old boy whose father has joined the state’s growing list of ‘‘disappeared persons” tries to phone Allah to send his father back, and ends up calling a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) man called Abhay stationed in Kashmir. Abhay’s initial dismissal of it a prank is jettisoned by Hamid’s touching faith. The angry, aggressive Abhay is quite far from being God. But, as the film cloyingly suggests, the goodness of adults might be a function of children’s faith in them.

A still from the sassy, satisfying 'children's film' Cross My Heart (2017, dir. Luc Picard). 

I was more wholehearted charmed by the Canadian film Cross My Heart, in which a girl threatened with the prospect of herself and her beloved little brother being split up into different foster homes abducts an old lady. Director Luc Picard cleverly makes twelve-year-old Manon’s act unfold against the 1970 October crisis, when political kidnappings by the Quebec Liberation Front had won some victories for Quebecois autonomy. But what makes the film moving is the imminent breakdown of the family and Manon’s heartfelt, if childish, desire to create a replacement for it — complete with a surrogate grandmother. What the children require of their baffled abductee is to read aloud bedtime stories — and make them a Mickey Mouse costume.

Fictive kinship, in most of these films, serves as a bridge across social and political barriers: the Bhaiyya-Marathi divide in Mumbai, the Kashmiris and the Indian state, and the English-French division in Canada. Perhaps the family — even in the imagination — does still have the power to summon our best selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 11 Nov 2018.

A Place in the Crowd

My Mirror column:

A new film looks at our striving for space in the city — and the solidarities that might help us find it.

Those of us who live in cities spend most of our time being unhappy in them, and about them. Tu Hai Mera Sunday sets out to show us how we might reverse that, if we try. It’s a goal worth striving for — the happiness, as well as the idea of a film that tries to spark city-love in us — and Milind Dhaimade manages to take us with him much of the way.

It's true that the premise is a little too obviously metaphoric: a group of middle class Mumbaikars are aching to play their Sunday football game, but suddenly find all their options closed off. The search for a space where they can play together provides the literal and emotional underpinning of Dhaimade's narrative. And since his intentions are clearly warm and fuzzy, one probably shouldn't grudge him the by-the-numbers representativeness of the all-male gang he places at the film’s centre. There’s one Muslim (Avinash Tiwary), one Goan Christian (Vishal Malhotra), one Parsi (Nakul Bhalla), one Gujarati Hindu (Jay Upadhyay) — and a fifth (Barun Sobti), whom we assume to be Hindu and North Indian precisely because he is presented as unmarked by community or region to the point where he can be coded merely as “accha aadmi”.

The way to watch this film is to stop being cynical, and summon up instead that moment of wonder you have in the Mumbai local or the Delhi metro, when you look around you and see yourself as part of the marvellous mixture that is our urbanity: the sabzi-chopping working women heading to the end of the line, the graceful Gujarati matriarchs with their seedha palla saris, the burkha-wearing young woman on the way home from college, the salwar-kameez-clad officemates venting about their terrible boss. It doesn’t happen often, true, but surely you’ve had those moments, too — in which strangers come together for purposes great or small, and make the city seem, for that infinitesimal instant, a place we all inhabit together.

Dhaimade chooses sport as his unifier across community and to a lesser extent, across class, age and gender — and frankly, it isn't a bad narrative device through which to examine both the possibilities and the limits of our togetherness. It seems quite believable that the Muslim man about- town Rashid, who could never marry his Hindu sweetheart, can have two Hindus (and Parsis and Christians) as football buddies. Or that Gujju family man Jayesh, running from his family, might spend his Sundays with a bunch of unattached younger men. Or even that Arjun, the self-proclaimed “accha aadmi”, might woo a potential love interest by taking her aged dad off her hands and into his football game every Sunday.

But the film is juggling many things, and so at some point the football is abandoned in mid-air, while we follow each of our protagonists into their particular struggles. Some of these individual tracks are spelt out as romantic — such as the sweetly winsome one between Barun Sobti’s Arjun and Shahana Goswami’s hard-to-impress Kavi, or the awkward but heartfelt rescue attempt by Nakul Bhalla’s Mehernosh when his colleague is being mistreated by their asshole boss. Others contain unspoken questions, and are the more interesting because of that: like the connection between the very single Rashid and his mother-of-two neighbour (the sparkly-eyed Rasika Dugal); or Dominic, so used to his mother’s anxiety and his brother’s antagonism that he finds himself confused by the easy warmth of his brother’s new girlfriend.

Spatially, too, the film alternates between private or domestic spaces where class particularities are invariably more marked — the posher variety of cafe that keeps unground coffee beans on the table, a chawl where loud quarrels are the norm, a joint family home overrun with children and rituals — and the sort of gathering-places that would make up an ideal Habermasian public sphere: a city beach, a relaxed Irani cafe, a train station, a dive bar.

Dhaimade's film makes quite clear his attachment to these free or at least not-too-expensive public spaces, sites that also represent the culture of a pre-liberalisation era.

There is nothing wrong, exactly, about such a desire; many middle class people share it, which is why the closure of a Samovar in Bombay or a Volga in Delhi is greeted with a flood of nostalgic reminiscences. But perhaps we ought to look unequal access in the eye: an Arjun can choose to go to the Irani cafe or the expensive new one, a Rashid or a Jayesh Bhai, not so much. And there is something striking and sad about the fact that the search for space in Mumbai must eventually land the characters — and the film — in Goa.

Still, this is fiction, after all, and several happy endings are provided. One of them makes what is, I suppose, a practical suggestion: find a terrace from which to gaze out at the city skyline, and the height might make it seem less oppressive. But well, as Shahana Goswami's character tells us, even to access a building rooftop like that you need to know the name of someone who actually lives there.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 Oct 2017. 

Homing in, zooming out

My Mirror column:

Among 1957’s biggest Hindi hits was Musafir, a triptych of tales about a house and its succession of tenants, which inaugurated the career of Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

"Laakh laakh makaan, aur inmein rehne wale karoron insaan. In karoron insaanon ke sukh-dukh, hansne-rone ke maun-darshak -- yehi makaan (Lakh of houses, and crores of people who live in them. And the mute witnesses to these people's joys and sorrows –these very houses),” runs Balraj Sahni's voiceover as the camera pans across a cityscape, finally settling on one such makaan as the setting of this particular story.

What I just described is the opening sequence of Musafir, a triptych of tales about three different families, connected only by the house they rent in succession. The third film in my series of columns on the top Hindi hits of 1957, Musafir was the tenth highest box office grosser that year, and has several points of interest about it. For one, it was the directorial debut of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who had come to Bombay from Calcutta with Bimal Roy in 1950. Mukherjee had worked as Roy’s editor at New Theatres for five years, and in making the journey to Bombay at 27, he joined a group of young Bengali men with various kinds of cinematic ambitions. These included the actor Nazir Husain, writer Nabendu Ghosh, assistant director Asit Sen and dialogue writer Pal Mahendra. The second bit of trivia that makes Musafir interesting also relates to a young Bengali man — Mukherjee shares writing credits on the film’s script with the filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak.

From where we stand now, the raw, powerful Ghatak of Subarnarekha or Titash Ekti Nadir Naam and the warm, gentle Mukherjee of situational comedies like Chupke Chupke may seem to represent two unbridgeable poles of the Indian cinematic universe. But in the late 50s the world was young, the lines between the artistic worlds of Calcutta and Bombay, and those of 'art' and 'entertainment' were still permeable. Thus the man who would become one of the cinematic trinity of grandly ambitious Bangla high art wasn't so distant from the man who would come to stand for the mild-mannered, middle class Hindi comedy of manners. The year after Musafir, 1958, two films released – one was Bimal Roy's marvellous Nehruvian-era ghost story, Madhumati, which was written by Ghatak, and the other was Ghatak's own directorial venture, Ajantrik, in which it is another inanimate object – a car rather than a house – that is at the centre of the human stories Ghatak chooses to tell.

Musafir itself combines Mukherjee's lightness of touch and prodigious talent for characterisation with Ghatak's flair for the melancholy and for the recurring motif. Most of the film unfolds, as was Mukherjee's wont, within the four walls of a house. But Musafir also contains the sense of a streetscape – we view the house first from the chai shop window, and the chatty tea-delivery-boy (Mohan Choti) appears in each narrative. In fact it is he, along with the genially repetitive landlord (David), the gossipy Munni ki Ma, and the friendly neighbourhood drunk Pagla Babu, who stitches the film's three parts into a sociological urban whole.

Like Subodh Mukherjee's Paying Guest, which I wrote about two weeks ago, Mukherjee's first film deals with what was then a relatively new urban world, increasingly unmoored from feudal certitudes. The tenants who are anonymous until they aren't, family units whose legitimacy cannot be vouched for by foreknowledge, village elders or caste networks; nosy neighbours (like Munni ki Ma) who make it their business to establish the traditional 'rightness' of those who have moved into the area. In the first segment here, for instance, Suchitra Sen plays a new bride who yearns to be accepted by her in-laws despite her runaway marriage. The possibility of a nuclear family unit is one she rejects instinctively as inferior to the real thing.

Mukherjee's interest in these new populations, free-floating in space but not quite ready to give up on their connections to community, family, tradition – remained a persistent theme in his films in later years. Tenants, landlords and the negotiation of neighbourhood rules are central to his comedy Biwi Aur Makaaan (1965), and also to the Jaya Bhaduri-Amitabh Bachchan starrer Mili (1975). Both Mili and Bawarchi also begin by visually laying out the neighbourhood, and then using a voiceover to zero in on the one home whose internal dynamics we are to have the privilege of witnessing.

In Musafir, these dynamics seem to involve older men who, despite their 'good' intentions towards their families, are such sticklers for discipline/rules/

rationality/tradition that they end up tyrannising wives and daughters, as well as any non-conformist younger men – the young man who marries without parental permission in the first story; the jobless Bhanu (a very youthful Kishore Kumar) in the middle segment, who can't stop playing the fool; or the heart-stopping Dilip Kumar as the violin-playing tragic alcoholic of the last segment (clearly inspired by O'Henry's 'The Last Leaf'). The lawyer brother of Usha Kiron, or Nazir Hussain as the irascible father with money trouble, and Suchitra Sen's father-in-law in the first segment are all men determined to to be merciless, grown-up patriarchs who must be humoured like children – and one can see in their caricaturish excess the roots of Utpal Dutt's character in Golmaal, or Om Prakash's Jijaji in Chupke Chupke. 

Musafir has some rough edges, and its tonal shifts from tragic to comic are not always successful. But it is an interesting film, if only for the many ways in which it foreshadows Mukherjee's future filmmaking career.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Aug 2017

Alone Together

My Mirror column:

Living in collectivities can not only produce new relationships, but also new forms of individuality, as two powerful European films reveal.

I write this column from a friend’s charming old wooden Himachali house: a huge open balcony to welcome the sun and tightly shuttered rooms to block out the cold. The house is only opened for the summer, when she retreats here from the heat and dust of Delhi, bringing a variety of people with her. This summer’s assemblage consists of the friend, her 15-month-old baby, her 50-something male friend (whom I met here), the baby’s 18-year-old maid, and me. There are also two friendly locals who come in to help with provisions, cleaning and additional babysitting. Barring occasional expeditions to the river or the village, the emotional and material life of the household revolves around the next meal, the cooking of which is subject to the all-important task of Feeding The Baby. It has been an interesting exercise in communal living.

Serendipitously, while I’ve been up here, two friends in Delhi have been calling with updates on their respective rental searches: where to live, is the question – and whom to live with? Most people share domestic space with others at some point in their lives. Middle class young people leaving family homes often move to organised communal quarters – school or college hostels, or shared university flats. Shared homes remain the norm in early careers, too, for financial reasons.

But if you’re single and can afford it, then living alone, it seems, is the unspoken top of the hierarchy. The older one gets, the more unusual it becomes to live with anyone who isn’t either family or a romantic partner. The socially normative heterosexual coupledom at the core of these living arrangements is so deeply embedded as to really only strike most of us in absentia.

It is true that once your personal rules are set, to live with others is to test the limits of your adaptability. Unlike youthful communal spaces, whose appeal often lies in the suspension of childhood’s rules (or in breaking institutional ones), shared domesticity in later life is likely be based on the establishment of new ones.

In Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune (2016), an architecture professor called Erik Moller inherits a house he dismisses as too large for his family. “Living together is about seeing each other,” he says, telling a broker to sell it for a million. But his wife Anna and teenaged daughter Freja have other ideas. Anna loves Erik, but two decades in, she needs newness – and what better way to create it than by inviting new people into a new sort of domestic life? “You speak all the time, and it’s sweet when you do, but it’s as if I’ve heard it all before. I need to hear someone else speak, otherwise I’ll go mad,” she says to her befuddled husband, proposing that they turn the many-roomed mansion into a commune. Friends bring in other friends, and soon there is a collective, a united front interviewing potential applicants.

And so, without any rebuilding, a classically bourgeois European home becomes a space that challenges the norms of bourgeois family life. Decisions now are made not to preserve coupledom, but a more expansive domesticity. It is not that familial love ceases to exist, but rather that the commune allows difficult emotional burdens – like a child’s terminal disease – to be shared across more shoulders. Meanwhile new freedoms and new proximities mean that people fall into new relationships – and sometimes out of old ones. The self-important Erik, increasingly lonely as the commune fills Anna’s emotional needs, starts an affair with a student. Anna, shaken but deep in her own love affair with the commune, invites Erik’s lover into it, saying: “There should be room for you, too. That’s what it’s all about.”
I happened to watch The Commune within a day of watching Swiss-born director Hans Steinbichler’s 2016 German-language feature The Diary of Anne Frank, in which, too, an unlikely assortment of people find themselves holed up together – though in rather more involuntary circumstances. Steinbichler’s is the latest cinematic version of the famous diary, kept by the Jewish teenager during the Nazi-ruled wartime years that she and her family lived hidden above a workshop. Unlike the deliberate newness inaugurated in The Commune, the Franks’ communal life in the annex strives to recreate their home. It is a forced exile into which they take as many possible accoutrements of their bourgeois life, from clothes and dinner sets to books and the writing instruments that make possible Anne’s startlingly frank record of emerging selfhood.

These things – the thingness of these things – help sustain something of the illusion of normalcy, but life in the commune produces its own effects. There is something about the inauguration of a collective domestic arrangement with people you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to live with that pushes buttons and expands boundaries. We are far from the free-spirited world of Vinterberg’s childhood memories, but here, too, the new freedoms and new proximities conjure new relationships – and alter old ones.

The communal life certainly allows for more openness than the traditional family unit, and yet in its difference, it can feel closed off from the world. Both the teenaged Freja in The Commune and the teenaged Anne develop an enhanced sense of privacy, not just because they are exploring their sexuality, but because they are beginning to see themselves as separate from their parents. The breakdown of the old family unit perhaps also enables each of the girls to see her parents separately, as individuals. Embracing the collective, it turns out, can be strangely individuating.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 June 2017.

Haunted by Homelessness

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

When it comes to city housing, Hindi films have often painted a bleak picture, and CityLights is as dark as they come. But now even our fantasies only promise homes for the rich.

Hansal Mehta's CityLights returns us to what used to be a persistent theme of Bombay cinema: the search for a home in the city. An authorised adaptation of last year's British-Filipino film Metro Manila, CityLights brings its protagonists - Deepak (Rajkummar Rao), his wife Rakhi (Patralekha) and their daughter Mahi - from a Rajasthan village to big, bad Mumbai. (In what is one of the first signs of the hoariness of the plot, Deepak is escaping the clutches of a moneylender.) Within hours of arrival in the metropolis, they have been tricked out of their savings by the promise of a home. 

The enormity of that first betrayal is depicted in an early scene that is bleak, and powerful. Rakhi has already started cleaning the empty flat as her own when the construction workers return. There is an unspoken, brutal marshalling of class here: seeing a woman squatting on the floor with a jhadoo, the city workers assume she is a hired cleaning woman. Because of course no-one who looks like a bai can possibly be at home in this relatively comfortable space. Bai, tum ghar jao, they say to the baffled Rakhi, who continues to sweep at first. Then, as realization dawns on her (and them), she roots herself to the floor. It is a harrowing moment of cinema: the frail young woman clinging literally and metaphorically to the ground beneath her feet, as the men try their best to drag her out of the flat.

Rakhi is removed, of course, and when we next see the family, it has floated into that vast amorphous population of the urban homeless. They move from pavement to pavement for a few days, until a bar dancer helps arrange temporary shelter in a half-constructed multi-storeyed building. "When this flat is ready, it'll go for three crores!" declares the tout with that strange pride in something he will never own. Then he pockets a hundred rupees a night to let the family sleep on the bare floor, amid the exposed bricks and beams and dangerous open parapets.

The shadowy spaces of the half-constructed building are a favourite locale for Bombay cinema: most often as the site of action sequences, or a villain's den. CityLights is perhaps the first film to use the space as ironic shelter for the homeless, the city view spread out below less grandly picturesque than cruelly anonymous.

Watching CityLights reminded me of Gharonda (The Nest, 1977), about another young couple's ill-fated striving for a home. Though of course that unusual Gulzar screenplay -- directed by Bhimsain -- was about middle class office-goers: people who did not have ready cash, but could conceivably save up for it. And Gharonda's protagonists do try, working overtime at odd jobs. Sudeep (Amol Palekar) puts up film posters at night, Chhaya (Zarina Wahab) takes on a modelling assignment. But the Rs. 5000 down payment they need to book an LIG flat -- via a munshi known to Sudeep's roommate - is too large to generate so quickly. Sudeep's monthly salary is only 600. So they borrow money to pay the munshi, and in the lovely song 'Do Deewane Sheher Mein', fill the half-done building with their dreams of domestic bliss.

But a house in Bombay is no place for dreaming. It is a matter of life and death. The munshi disappears with the money; Sudeep's roommate commits suicide; Sudeep himself, broken by the turn of events, turns bitter and desperate. And as in CityLights nearly four decades later, acts of desperation only drag you further into the quagmire. Sudeep ends Gharonda as a ghost of his former self - walking away into the horizon, dwarfed by the tall buildings of Bombay.

Amol Palekar as Sudeep in Gharonda

Abandoned buildings were also the scene of a very different sort of film about homelessness and injustice, earlier this summer. All across Mumbai, according to the Amitabh-Bachchan-starrer Bhootnath Returns, are apartment buildings on whom work has stopped because they are haunted. They are haunted by the ghosts of those whose lives were lost in their construction - from engineers who fell to their deaths to displaced jhuggi dwellers. The good ghost Bhootnath (Bachchan) combines forces with a little boy from Dharavi (Partho) to get these hapless souls justice, so that they go peacefully into the next world and our ghostbusters can get paid by the building mafia.

Once upon a time, mainstream Bombay cinema sold a dream - the dream of the poor boy who would grow up to be Amitabh Bachchan, and buy the building for which his mother had once broken stones as a labourer. Sometimes that dream was a mass one, as in the marvellous scene in Coolie when Bachchan smashes the villain's chandelier as he says, to give every coolie's house a light like that one. The middle class film in the same period - even a film as sensitive as Gharonda - simply did not encompass the labouring classes in its imagination. The one time that manual labourers appear in Gharonda, they pause their work obligingly to turn into a gigglingly indulgent audience for the middle class couple's song of home ownership. (It is another matter that the song's desires remain unfulfilled).

In 2014, Bollywood has offered us two visions. On the one hand, the darkly cynical denouement of CityLights, in which we learn that there is no such thing as a free gift - or a free home. On the other, a feel-good tale in which Bachchan -- now a ghost of his former self -- gives corrupt officials lessons in citizenry. But to what end? So that the work of building houses for the rich can continue. For the rest, a home in the city is no longer even held out as fantasy.

Published in Mumbai Mirror.