Shelf Life: Making Love, With Clothes

My Shelf Life column this month:

What did clothes mean to the ancient Indian poet?

You wouldn't think it to look at us now, but ancient Indians were a sexy people. The delight we took in the erotic seems to have been unabashed. Love-making was a legitimate form of aesthetic pleasure, often described in the allied arts of dance, music, art, architecture – and poetry. And as I dipped into The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems, edited by Abhay K., I found myself noticing how frequently our ancient poets mentioned clothes. 

Perhaps, you might say, it is unsurprising for clothes to come up when the subject is sex, and female beauty. “A wet, transparent skirt clings to her thighs,” writes the 11th century Bhojya Deva in 'Apparition on the River Bank', translated from Sanskrit by Bill Wolak and Abhay K, while Kalidasa's epic work 'Ritu Samhara' maps the seasons by looking, among other things, at women's changing attire. It is summer, for instance, when “young girls, proud and blooming, beads of sweat shining on their perfect bodies, take off their fancy garments and cover their high and pointed breasts with thin linen stoles”.

A cover of 'The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems'.

But real artistry lies in turning object into metaphor. Many an ancient Indian love poem describes a woman's response to finding herself unclothed, turning the literal fact of undressing into a charming motif – shyness. “She tries to find her clothes moving her hands/ and throws her broken chaplet at the lamp, she laughs shyly and tries to cover my eyes,” writes the eighth century Sanskrit poet Amaru, in Abhay K.'s rendition. “Have patience, my love,/ don't take off my clothes yet,/ Though parrot is asleep, mynah is still awake,” runs a Braj Bhasha poem by Keshavdas, also translated by Abhay K, while a poem from the Subhashitavali in A.N.D. Haksar's translation begins: “Wait a bit! Let go my skirt! Others will wake! O you are shameless!” 

In an extension of the shyness motif, the poets make the woman's clothes speak of her unspeakable desire. Over and over, the woman doesn't undress herself – her clothes have a mind of their own. “[A]nd with wanting alone/ her clothes by themselves/ fell down her legs,” goes another Amaru poem 'Did she vanish into me', beautifully translated by W.S. Merwin and J. Mousaieff Masson. In an older John Brough translation of Amaru, collected in Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse (ed. Alan Bold, 1978), the woman stops her ears and hides her blushing face in her hands, but her lover's coaxing words work their magic: “But oh, what could I do, then, when I found/ My bodice splitting of its own accord?” 

A book cover of Making Love: The Picador Book of Erotic Verse.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Frescoes in the portico of cave 2, Ajanta.

Another Amaru poem in the same anthology gives us a female narrator 'tricked' by a dexterous lover, who uses his feet “in pincer-fashion” to catch her sari “firmly by the hem”, obliging her (she says) “to move the way he ought”. And finally, there is Vijjakkaa in the Subhashitavali, capturing the voice of a woman being archly competitive about lovemaking, while pretending a disarming frankness: “Friend, you are very fortunate/ to be able to narrate/ the sweet exchanges full of joy/ in meeting with your lover boy./For when his hand my darling placed/ On the skirt knot at my waist,' I swear I cannot then recall/ any, anything at all.”

But not all ancient women were shy. In one cheeky Bhartrihari poem, we hear that “On sunny days there in the shade/ Beneath the trees reclined a maid/ Who lifted up her dress (she said)/ To keep the moonbeams off her head.” “All my inhibition left me in a flash,/ when he robbed me of my clothes,” writes Vidyapati, in Azfar Hussain's translation from Maithili. In Kumaradasa's 'She Bites Him', a woman pretending to be asleep has her clothes ripped off her by her lover: “Thief!” she cries/ and bites his lower lip --/ what a girl!”

A cover of the book 'Speaking of Siva'.

The Gathasaptashati, which means 'seven hundred lyrics' in Sanskrit and is also known as the Sattasai, is a collection of love poems written in Maharashtri Prakrit in the first century AD. Mostly in the voices of women, these lyrics are more frankly joyous about sex than most things us moderns can imagine. Sample the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation of one, from his 2008 volume The Absent Traveller: “He groped me/ For the underwear/ That wasn't there:/ I saw the boy's/ Fluster/ And embraced him/ More tightly.” And here is another, radical and beautiful in its cross-generational embrace of sexual experience: “As though she glimpsed/ The mouth of a buried/ Pot of gold,/ Her joy on seeing/ Under her daugher's/ Wind-blown skirt/ A tooth-mark/ Near the crotch.”

The Sattasai poems are a far cry from the stigma and hypocrisy now the norm in India, but clothes are still part of the hide and seek of sexual pleasure. It took another 11 centuries to produce an Akka Mahadevi, whose paeans to her beloved Lord Shiva allude to clothes only to reject them. “People/ male and female,/ blush when a cloth covering their shame/ comes loose,” she writes. “When all the world is the eye of the lord,/ onlooking everywhere, what can you/ cover and conceal?”  

When love is all-knowing, all-embracing, clothes have no purpose.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 7 Jan 2021.

A Kite for Sore Eyes

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Hardik Mehta's Amdavad Ma Famous and Prashant Bhargava's Patang, a city's universal passion for kites leaps off the screen in all its infectious energy and deeply immersive spirit

A still from Amdavad Ma Famous (2015), Hardik Mehta's award-winning documentary about the kite-flying festival of Uttarayana that takes place on 14 January in Ahmedabad.

 
“Ek din tum patang ka shauq kar loge, toh zindagi ke saatth saal tak woh shauq poora nahi hoyega [If you get into flying kites even for a day, you'll stay addicted for the next 60 years],” says an old Muslim cleric in Amdavad Ma Famous. “Yeh shauq aisa hai, bahut terrible shauq!” In case the maulana's words haven't convinced you, filmmaker and editor Hardik Mehta cuts from him to the sight of an old woman on a terrace – white sari, white hair in a loose bun, possibly older than the cleric – flying a kite with gusto.

Mehta's glorious 2015 short documentary, which won a host of awards across the world and was declared Best Non-Fiction Film at India's 63^rd National Film Awards, was set and shot during the festival of Uttarayan in Ahmedabad, when the whole city gathers on its rooftops to fly kites. The pivotal character is a young boy called Zaid Khedawalla, whose enthusiasm for the sport borders on the obsessive. Uttarayan is another name for Makar Sankranti, which falls on January 14 or 15 every year, based on the solar calendar. In the days leading up to the festival, Zaid wakes up very early in the morning to scout his neighbourhood for fallen kites. “By 10 am or so, he has gathered enough kites for the day,” says his father, laughing.

The fact that Zaid skips school to fly kites all day is a recurring theme in the film. His father tries to get him to go to class. The maulana tries to get the boys off the roof off the mosque. Mushtaq, caretaker of a bank building in the film's chosen neighbourhood of Astodia, tries to shoo them away, even locking up the terrace on some days. But Zaid, like thousands of other young boys in the city, is incorrigible. “You don't listen to your father, Zaid?” asks the filmmaker. “I do try,” grins Zaid. “But these kites are just too much fun.”

It is one of several charming moments in an utterly charming film. Mehta captures these boys in all their manic energy, but also locates them within the colour and chaos and community of a whole city abuzz with the same zeal – street markets selling varieties of kites, manjha-walas sharpening the thread with ground glass, ancillary products springing up to protect bike-riders from the sharp kite threads that criss-cross the streets at this time. Zaid's father later confesses that he was just as crazy about kites when he was Zaid's age. The crabby Mushtaq, who responds to someone calling the boys artists (“kalakaar”) by labelling them the face of the devil instead, is seen later in the film flying kites himself. When quizzed, his reply is hilarious: “I only fly the kites that have fallen on my terrace”.

Mehta's marvellous aides – he has a truly talented sound designer in Manoj M Goswami, and Alokananda Dasgupta has created a brilliantly uplifting soundtrack – help him make all sorts of other visual and aural connections. When Mushtaq speaks of the kites as bringing out the boys' “wild side”, Mehta cuts to monkeys clambering up and down the terraces, almost exactly in step with the boys. Dasgupta's soundtrack punctuates the bouncy ascent of all sorts of people – large, old, creaky – up roof ladders.

That heartwarming inclusiveness was also very much the point of Prashant Bhargava's lovely 2011 feature Patang, in which an Ahmedabad native, now settled in Delhi, returns to the city after many years during Uttarayan, bringing with him a teenaged daughter through whose fresh eyes we see Ahmedabad's old city. Patang contained one of Nawazuddin Siddiqui's earliest full-fledged performances, as the Ahmedabad-based nephew who bristles at his uncle's sudden descent upon the old family home.

But what is it about kites – other than the obvious and overdone fetishised idea of India as colour – that makes them cinema-worthy? Speaking to the legendary critic, the late Roger Ebert, about his film, Bhargava (who also died, tragically young, in 2015) said, “In India, kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old — together they look toward the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.”

I recently came across a definition of meditation in another film, Matthew Vaughn's 2005 Layer Cake, that makes sense in this context. A man with a passion for high-quality guns says to Daniel Craig's high-stakes drug dealer character: “Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”

As you watch the myriad faces in Mehta's film, intensely concentrated on the kite in hand, eyes lifted to the heavens, it suddenly seems entirely clear why these fluttering bits of paper have captured the human imagination for centuries. And we have kites to thank for something else – at least they're not guns.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Jan 2021

A love that breaks class barriers

My Mumbai Mirror column:

An unlikely relationship reaches across social boundaries in Rohena Gera's understated romance Sir.

It may seem difficult to recall in the cold light of the present, but cross-class romance once warmed the hearts of Hindi film audiences. The poor boy who won the heart of the rich girl (and the wrath of her family), was a staple of the single-screen era. Even then, the rich hero-poor heroine equation was less frequent -- and for that fantasy to extend to the master-servant relationship was rarer still. Rohena Gera's lovely film Sir, completed in 2018 and released online earlier this month, tries to turn that dream into reality.

Ratna (Tilottama Shome) works as the live-in domestic help for Ashwin (Vivek Gomber), who is due to get married to his girlfriend Sabina. When the wedding – and the relationship – suddenly falls through, the quiet Ashwin finds himself being hectored from all quarters. His overweening mother wants him to reconsider, his father seems to assume he can't handle his part in the family business and his friends want to steer him into dating again. Increasingly isolated, he begins to notice the unobtrusive warmth of Ratna's presence. She comes from a space of experience far removed from Ashwin's upper class Mumbai universe – a poor rural family, a hurried marriage, early widowhood with its attendant social and economic fallout -- but her halting words are both genuine and wise. The gulf between them is huge, but Sir manages to make us believe in the possibility that it might just be bridgeable.

The America-returned Ashwin has never been anything but polite to Ratna. But as his appreciation of her grows, he baulks more and more at the rudeness of those around him. Gera's deft script and direction is aided by the wonderful understated performances she draws from both Shome and Gomber, Shome in particular delivering scenes of great devastation with a quiet wallop – such as when a boutique manager responds to Ratna's entry by yelling for the watchman, or Ashwin's party guest makes a scene over her spilt wine. Gera makes clear that nothing said or done to Ratna is out of the ordinary; it is what the servant-keeping classes in India mete out unthinkingly. From Ashwin's businessman father dissing his construction workers to the neighbour who insults her child's ayah (Geetanjali Kulkarni in a great supporting role) rather than chastise the child, the film throws into relief Indians' constant othering of those less privileged than us. It is upper middle class common sense to think of servants as 'lazy' or 'cheats' or inept, 'morons' who need to be kept in check with low salaries, stark boundaries and harsh punishments. The more we want to exploit the poor, the more it suits us to think of them as less than human.

 

It is against this usual wall of invisibility that Ashwin's gestures – that would be common courtesy if Ratna were not a servant – stand out as excessive. It isn't just in his class that they attract attention, but also in hers. Offering to wait for a servant to finish eating, asking if she needs a ride home -- these are acts so unthinkable on an employer's part that they arouse the mockery and suspicion of other servants. And for Ratna, made vulnerable by both class and gender, they can lead to social extinction.

 

And yet, it is in Ashwin's spontaneous crossing of that wall, his apparently unconscious transcendence of the very boundaries society wishes us to guard, that the possibility of any real relationship lies. Because even as Ratna fears the weight of social censure, she demands the respect of social acknowledgement. “Main ganwaar hoon [I may be a country bumpkin],” she tells Ashwin, “Lekin main aapki rakhail ban ke nahi rahoongi [But I won't live here as your mistress].”

 

In Zoya Akhtar's powerful segment of the 2018 anthology film Lust Stories, another quietly efficient domestic help (Bhumi Pednekar) finds herself taking care of her young male employer (Neil Bhoopalam). The intimacy between them feels far from furtive, and the banter that accompanies such frank, lusty sex holds at least the glimmer of equality. But that distant promise is shattered when Bhoopalam's middle-class parents arrive, with a suitable girl in tow. In front of his parents and prospective in-laws, the good middle-class boy behaves impeccably – which is to say he betrays not the barest hint of his real relationship with the maid.

But perhaps that's the point. When something only exists behind closed doors, is it ever really real?

 

In contrast, it is Ashwin's insistence that he isn't afraid of what people might say that makes his attraction to Ratna so heartwarming. It may seem utopian, but that's why it feels like love.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Jan 2021.

A Reel Holiday

My Mirror column:

The grand tradition of the holiday movie, from Eric Rohmer to Luca Guadagnino, spins wisdom out of sun-kissed beach breaks.

There used to be many ways to take a year-end vacation. But with sightseeing, parties and travel all deemed dangerous post-pandemic, more and more people have had to be content with a movie-watching staycation. And when you can't escape dreary city life in reality, there is much pleasure to be derived from movies about other people's holidays.

So my vicarious vacation was centred on the late French director Eric Rohmer, who was a kind of patron saint of the holiday film. As central to the French New Wave as more flamboyant members like Truffaut and Godard, Rohmer was a film critic first. He edited the pioneering journal Cahiers du Cinema for years, before making his feature debut with The Sign of Leo in 1959. By the time of his death at 89, on January 11, 2010, he had over 50 films to his credit. One of cinema's gentlest, most perspicacious commentators on the vagaries of courtship and romance, Rohmer often placed his characters, usually young to middle-aged, and bourgeois, in a classic French summer vacation locale where connections and cross-connections could unfold at leisure. A quiet beachside country house is the setting for several of Rohmer's finest films in this vein: La Collectionneuse (1967), Pauline at the Beach (1983) and The Green Ray (1986), all beautifully photographed by Nestor Almendros and all currently streaming on a well-known online platform.

In La Collectionneuse, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) decides to spend a month alone after his girlfriend (Brigitte Bardot's sister Mijanou, to whom Bauchau was married in real life) leaves for London. Arriving at a friend's cottage, he vows to rise early every day, go for a swim, spend his time without any conscious purpose other than to enjoy his leisure. He is intent upon doing nothing, and doing it well.

But his plans of what we would call ‘me-time’ are easily disrupted, primarily by lustful thoughts of the charming younger woman with whom he happens to be sharing the summer house. The more studiously Adrien declares his lack of interest, calling Haydée ugly or ordinary or common, the more apparent it becomes that she's on his mind. In the wonderful tradition of Rohmer romances, our attention is directed as much to what happens as what does not, with Adrien's actions coinciding less and less with the claims of his self-examinatory voice-over. As an article in the French Review put in 1993, “Rohmer's prideful heroes charge into the summer with dreams of lush beauty and luxurious freedoms, only to be chastened by the heat, the boredom, and, above all, the aimlessness and acute self-preoccupation that are the dubious rewards of those who gain as much freedom as they desire.”

It isn't just Rohmer's heroes whose attempted holiday resets only reveal their confused mental states. In Pauline at the Beach Rohmer cast the delicately blonde Ariella Dombasle as the soon-to-be-divorced Marion, who is spending her vacation with her fifteen-year-old niece Pauline. On paper, Marion is the adult, and she does try to think of Pauline's needs -- as she imagines them. But as with Adrien, so with Marion. The more we hear about her romantic hopes for herself and her cousin, the more apparent it is that she has no idea what she's doing. Extricating herself from her mistake of a marriage, she is now so in love with le grand amour that she imagines it with the first man who seems vaguely interested – blissfully blind to the fact that he's only in it for sex with a pretty girl.

There are other echoes between the two films, like the way this form of vacationing throws together people of different backgrounds and ages, allowing for conversations that wouldn't happen in everyday life. And in both, the younger people emerge as the less confused ones. Both Haydee and Pauline, who volunteer their views a lot less than the others in their respective settings, seem much more clear-eyed about who is and who isn't a good match. While Marion throws herself at her pretentious older lover and tries to matchmake Pauline similarly (with Marion's own ex-boyfriend!), Pauline finds herself a more age-appropriate summer fling. Both she and Haydée in La Collectionneuse also emerge as perfectly capable of handling the unwanted attentions of dodgy older men.

Other filmmakers have followed Rohmer in depicting the vacation as a time to establish a new kind of routine, even discipline. In the British indie filmmaker Joanna Hoggs' meditative 2007 debut Unrelated, Anna (Kathryn Worth) joins an old friend's family on their Italian vacation, giving herself a break not just from work but also from a faltering marriage. Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015) has its rockstar heroine (Tilda Swinton) fully silent on her Italian vacation, to help her voice recuperate after an operation. Hoggs' camera lingers tenderly as an often distraught Anna jogs virtuously up and down a local hillock, and teeters on the brink of an affair with her friend's much younger son (Tom Hiddleston). Guadagnino's tone is even less Rohmeresque than Hoggs' melancholia, with his characters going straight for the jugular rather than circling gently around their issues. But there's something that these very different films all share: the realisation that holidays never achieve what we hope they will.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Jan 2021.

What Paava Kadhaigal tells us about pride and honour

My Mirror column:

A new Tamil anthology film makes a flawed but genuine attempt to grapple with the tragic effects of our national preoccupation -- ‘family honour’.

At the very end of Love Panna Uttranum, Vignesh Shivan's segment in the newly-released Tamil anthology film Paava Kadhaigal (‘Sinful Tales’), there is a textual postscript that tells us what happened to the characters after the film ends. One of the lines reads: “Veerasimman managed to escape from the village and went to live with his daughter in Paris”. I scoffed at it mentally when I read it. Because Veerasimman is the terrible casteist father from whom his daughters must escape if they are to live anything resembling free lives.

 

Love Panna Uttranum has many problems, not the least of which is the director's inability to handle the vast tonal shifts he’s going for, leaving his audience swinging between high tragedy and low comedy. But as the compendium's four tales about 'honour' drew to a close, I realised that Shivan's postscript wasn't as inaccurate as I'd thought: It is South Asian fathers (and often mothers) who need to find a way to escape the vice-like grip of patriarchy and caste; from social chains that bind them so tightly that they can no longer feel the blood running in their veins -- literally. If they break the codes of caste, community and gender, it seems that their children are no longer their children.

 

As I watched Paava Kadhaigal's various sets of parents harden their hearts against their offspring -- and worse, try to control their lives -- I kept thinking of the old Kahlil Gibran poem from his bestselling work The Prophet. “Your children are not your children,” it goes. “They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” The cool kids probably don't read Gibran any more, but it remains desperately resonant in the India of 2021, where our politicians know we'll eat out of their hands if they cater to our meanest, most controlling instincts -- especially with regard to our daughters. Ergo, the 'love jihad' bogey, recently given legal form.

 

This particular film happens to deal with Tamilian families. But parents across South Asia cling ferociously to the idea that their children are nothing but miniature versions of themselves; robotic agents put on earth only to carry out their bidding – or actually, the bidding of that ogre called society. Individual freedom can only seem an impossible dream when you've internalised the social order completely, and we see it in some of the most affecting films of recent years, from Nagraj Manjule's searing 2016 Marathi hit Sairat  to the ringing refrain that Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq made the title of her harrowing 2017 film, What Will People Say?.

 

But treating these parents as embodiments of evil -- as at least two of the segments here do -- is not useful. It seems to me crucial to look at the moments which even these narratives leave open, moments at which we see their vulnerabilities and the horrific double binds they seem to find themselves in. Paava Kadhaigal's first narrative, Thangam, directed by Sudha Kongara, puts the harshest lines in a mother's mouth when she tells her son Sathaar (a wonderful Kalidas Jayaram), who identifies as a woman and is saving for a sex change operation, to die so that his sisters can live 'normal' lives, ie find suitable boys to marry. In the last segment, Vetri Maaran's Oor Iravu, too, we see the real and depressing effects on the rural siblings of a courageous young woman (Sai Pallavi) who has chosen to marry her Dalit partner and migrate to the city. “After you eloped, Dad pulled us out of college,” says one younger sister to her when they meet two years later. Another sister's husband apparently left her when he heard there was a half-Dalit baby joining the family he had clearly married into for its unblemished upper-caste status. The younger brother, meanwhile, is publicly mocked for his sister's elopement to the extent that he drops out of college.

 

The third segment, directed by Gautham Menon, in which a young girl is raped, deals with the bogey of honour in a different context -- that of actual sexual violence. But here, too, the most interesting thing attempted by the film is the mother, whose traditional ideas of sexual purity as something that women must safeguard “like a temple”, push her brain in frightening directions.

 

Menon's short film feels muddled, though, in its attempt at showing us all sorts of different reactions. The brother's idea of vengeance and the mother's of penitence and surrender to fate, contrast with the father's shame as a failed protector, before finally embracing his vulnerability enough to allow the daughter to move on.

 

The most frightening character in the film, brought to unforgettable life by the marvellous Prakash Raj, is the father who steels himself against his favourite daughter. “She chose you over all of us, and I carried on as if she'd never been born,” he tells her husband with a muted bitterness. And yet it is this same father's attachment to the daughter that leads to tragedy. As he says to Sai Pallavi's Sumathi as the film draws to its excruciating close, “If I could let you go, I would.”

We really need that Gibran poem.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3 Jan 2021

Drives with a View - III

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Continuing our series on films about cabbies, we look at why Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese's 1976 creation, Travis Bickle, seems so eerily prescient today

Halfway through Martin Scorsese's 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver, we hear a campaign speech from a US Presidential candidate. “Walt Whitman, the great American poet, said, ‘I am the man, I suffered, I was there’,” intones the fictitious Charles Palantine. “No more will we fight the wars of the few through the hearts of the many....” Palantine's words, like most dialogue in Paul Schrader's much-mythified script, speak to -- as well as for -- the film's cabdriver hero, Robert De Niro in a career-making performance as the disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle.

Unlike Palantine and Bickle, Whitman was real. His poem 'Heroes' -- appropriately chosen by Schrader – was written in the voice of the soldier-as-everyman. “Agonies are one of my changes of garments./ I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,/ My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe...”

Other than this, Schrader's script isn't what one might call poetic. Taxi Driver is a New York film through and through, capturing the city in all its brutal, wry, laconic glory. Unlike many taxi drivers previously discussed in this column series, a cab ride with Travis Bickle rarely involves hearing his voice. Much of Scorsese's masterful tension is based on shots of De Niro's drawn, suspicious face framed in the rearview mirror as he listens to his fellow citizens in the seat behind him – and judges them harshly.

As a cab driver, Bickle is the perfect witness to the world around him. But he does not wish to be a mere witness. He sees the city as “an open sewer full of filth and scum”, a mess that needs to be cleaned up. The post-60s and pre-Giuliani New York of the film is riding high on a wave of freely available sex and drugs, and our hero wishes someone would rein it in. He wants to save it from itself. In one memorable scene, the wannabe Presidential candidate rides Bickle's taxi. When Bickle recognises him, he tells Palantine the city's dirt/immorality needs to be “flushed down the toilet” by whoever comes to power.

“Let me tell you something,” Palantine says earlier, “I have learnt more about America from travelling in taxicabs than in all the limos in the country.” The surround-sound of the campaign lets the film unfold against the backdrop of Palantine's catch-all slogan ‘We are the people’. 

Watching Taxi Driver in 2020 feels strangely prescient: Bickle appears as an early representation of a figure that has come to dominate post-Trump American political discourse; the White everyman who thinks of the country as having gone to the dogs and himself as the morally-superior saviour. As Bickle becomes increasingly unhinged, his monologues in the mirror – bookended by the famous “You talking to me?” line – refer to himself as a hero in the making: “a man who would not take it any more... someone who stood up against the filth”.

Travis Bickle is, in fact, a precursor to much else in the American nightmare of the late 20th and early 21^st century – a mentally ill man gripped by perpetual insomnia; whose sense of anomie and aimlessness leads him to gun violence. If politicians don't seem to want to 'clean up' society, he'll do it himself. But the subtext of what Bickle thinks needs to be 'fixed' is both racist and male chauvinist (though not uncomplicatedly). Meeting a White passenger who wants to murder the wife cheating on him with a “nigger” is followed by Bickle acquiring weapons – from a preppie, White, gun dealer who chooses Bickle over “a jungle bunny in Harlem” because he only deals “high-quality goods to the right people”. Bickle first uses the gun on a Black man who's amateurishly robbing his local cornershop. In one of the film's grimmest scenes, the unfazed Italian shop-owner waves Bickle off and says he'll take care of it. He then takes an iron rod to the thief's body, shouting “The fifth motherfucker this year!”

Another remarkable subplot reveals Bickle's deeply-conflicted relationship with sex and women. The same man who complains about the city's filth – this is a Central New York full of sex shows and prostitution – takes his pristine, almost prissy, date to watch a faux-instructional Swedish porn film. When she proceeds to shut him out afterwards, his interior monologue becomes bizarre and incel-ish: “I realise now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”

The other subplot about sex is Bickle's violent rescuing of Jodie Foster's underage sex worker – a plotline echoed in Schrader's self-directed film Hardcore (1979), in which a young girl runs away from a religious suburban family to become a porn actress, and goes back home in a strangely unconvincing last scene, like Foster's Iris.

What is truly disturbing about Taxi Driver's end, though, is that he is feted for murder. Violence, when committed against 'immoral' people, it seems, makes you a hero. That once-fictional battlefield seems eerily closer to today's reality.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 27 Dec 2020.

Everyone wants a happy ending

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Ludo tries hard to present the world as breezily anarchic, but it's hard to sustain while going on about good and evil

Anurag Basu likes to cultivate the idea of chaos, creating a tangle of threads so he can have the aesthetic pleasure of disentangling them. His latest film Ludo, which launched on a streaming platform earlier this year, takes that aesthetic conceit to its acme. A film with four different tracks needs a structuring motif, and Basu's choice is the popular board game with a board and counters organised into four primary colours. At first it seems that the only uniting factor among these disparate narratives is an unkillable don called Sattu Bhaiyya (Pankaj Tripathi), from whose gun -- and whose den -- all stories flow.

But while the four tracks appear to be treading their individual way to anarchy, Basu has clearly spent some time imbuing them with a fundamental premise. At the centre of each is a pair of individuals who seem like they ought to come together neatly: fill each other's blank spaces, so to speak. But they're also unlucky pairings, disunited by fate and selfhood. There's a bullied nurse and a bullied mall attendant; a neglected little girl and an ex-goonda separated from his own child; a besotted dhaba owner and his unrequited childhood love, reeling from her discovery of a cheating husband; and a pretty girl obsessed with hunting down the perfect husband, unlike the laidback guy she has fun sex with. There is also Sattu Bhaiya himself-- he who cannot be killed -- and the senior Malayali nurse Lata Kutty, to whom he takes an unexpected shine.

All of Basu's characters need rescuing -- but in each pair, there's one that we're told needs rescuing more. Abhishek Bachchan's Bittu, for example, is a sad man who wants his daughter back, and transfers some of his affections to the lost little girl he stumbles on one evening. The child (Inayat Verma) is named Mini, in Basu's clear tribute to the classic Kabuliwala narrative about another tall burly man who's actually a softie missing his faraway daughter. You'd think the child would be the more vulnerable one, but of course it's she who delivers the life lesson: if the object of your affections is happy elsewhere, you've just got to be happy for them. Bittu refuses to listen when his ex-wife delivers it as a stinging remark on confusing love and ego, but he absorbs it perfectly out of the mouth of a child.

Thankfully the little girl isn't implied to be exploiting Bittu – which does feel like the case with some of the film's other women characters. Aditya Roy Kapur's Akash seeks (and finds) casual sex on a matrimonial website. But it's his sexual partner Shruti (Sanya Malhotra) that we're told needs to be saved from her dream of finding a rich provider. Meanwhile Fatima Sana Sheikh's Pinky exploits Rajkummar Rao's unyielding affections all the way through school into adulthood, and even beyond – even her marriage to an ostensibly more suitable boy cannot prevent Alloo (Rajkummar) from being the only man she can turn to in a crisis.

Crisis, though, is what makes the film's boardgame-level philosophising work to the extent it does. “Jo bin matlab de saath, usi ka pakad le haath (When someone helps you without a motive, that's the one to hang on to),” Shruti quotes her grandmother as having proclaimed. The bullied twosome have no language in common – Pearl Maane's Sheeja can't speak much Hindi, Rohit Saraf's Rahul Awasthi certainly understands no Malayalam. As they find themselves launched on an adventure not quite of their making, the thrill of the ride is all they have in common. But when you see them at film's end, having exchanged their sad working lives for a hot pink car and fancy clothes, you wonder how long the spark can survive through such comfort. As Akash tells Shruti, in another of the tracks, having too little can make happiness hard – but having too much makes it impossible.

But for all Basu's attempts at Seventh-Seal-type commentary in the guise of Yamraj (the Hindu god of death), Ludo can't have only neat conclusions. As Yamraj says, “If the Kauravas were villains, what was Duryodhana doing in heaven at the end?” So Ludo leaves us with at least one un-deserved sad ending.

But the randomness he claims isn't really sustained – most characters get their just desserts, including Sattu Bhaiyya's deserved ludic one: paralysis followed by life with a loving caretaker, a vision of a lifelong future we've seen in previous Indian films, most visibly Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi. Anarchy isn't as easy as they make it out to be.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20 Dec 2020.

Drives with a view - II

My Mirror column:

Two Iranian films -  Jafar Panahi's 2015 Taxi Tehran and Abbas Kiarostami's 2002 Ten - use the taxi ride as a space for confession, comment and confrontation.

Early in Jafar Panahi’s 2015 Iranian docufiction Taxi Tehran, two passengers in a taxi get into an argument about the death penalty. “If they hang two people, the others would see,” says the man in favour. The woman argues against, saying that people mustn’t be hanged for such minor crimes committed out of need. “After China, we have the most executions in the world,” she points out. The more coherently the woman argues, though, the more rudely the man jeers at her. “You don't know jackshit,” he says at one point, accusing her of living in a world of fiction because she is a teacher – someone who he thinks reads too many books and spends her days with children.

Children in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, of course, have been the chosen carriers of filmic truth – especially in Panahi’s own film career, right from his 1995 debut The White Balloon and his 1997 feature The Mirror (which shares with Taxi Tehran the docufiction device of having an actor engage in conversations with real people). Taxi Tehran also contains a precociously sharp child – the director’s niece, who films everything on her mobile camera. Between showing us the articulate female passenger and the whipsmart little girl, it’s more than clear that Panahi intends us to laugh at the man’s words.

But the car is, in Taxi Tehran, very much a space of dialogue; a place where unusual exchanges can take place. Taxi Tehran was the third film Panahi shot illegally after the Iranian state banned him from making films, and it won him the Silver Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival. In the film Panahi turns his vehicle into a faux-taxi, picking up strangers, family members and acquaintances from all over the city and dropping them off at their destinations. Except we learn soon enough that some of these exchanges are staged – and in the finest Panahi tradition, it’s often difficult to say which ones.

The film is strewn with references to the ubiquity of the camera in our lives. From the niece who wants to make a film in a month and has already recorded a real-life crisis in the lives of some acquaintances, to the neighbour who brings Panahi footage from a security camera to describe something terrible that happened to him, to the state placing a political prisoner's visiting mother in a room with cameras, life seems increasingly something that unfolds on screen rather than off it.

But Taxi Tehran feels like an update on an older Iranian film which was also set entirely inside a car driven by one person – Abbas Kiarostami's Ten (2002). In the unforgettable first segment of that Palm d'Or-nominated film, a young boy shouts at his divorced mother for a long length of time as she drives him through the city. We don’t see the driver – played by the actress Mania Akbari – for the first few minutes, instead experiencing the claustrophobia inside the car build with the child’s terrifyingly adult remarks. “That makes three sentences and they’re all rubbish,” he shouts, or “I can't live with you because you are a selfish woman,” or “You'll never know how to talk and you’ll never be anything” - all of which make it seem like he is ventriloquising his father, from whom she has got a divorce. The boy constantly instructs his mother to “say it calmly” or “don't shout in the street”, while himself plugging his ears against her voice and yelling louder to drown her out.

Like in Taxi Tehran and in the two films about taxis that I discussed last week (World Taxi and Night on Earth), the car in Ten is an unspoken site of confession. Or sometimes, a refuge. When the driver’s seven-year-old complains that she starts talking as soon as they get in the car, she retorts unselfconsciously that there’s no privacy at home – the home she shares with the new husband she's so happy to have acquired.

Driving around the city seems to allow for long, frank exchanges, even with women passengers she doesn't know well. A sex worker whose face we never see insists that wives are also in a kind of trade with their husbands. “You’re the wholesalers, we’re the retailers,” she scoffs. Another woman who has lost a fiancé to a rival contender talks of another kind of exchange, the one we conduct with God. “Before, praying seemed ridiculous,” she says softly. “I used to say, you pray to force God to give you things.” But both she and the car’s driver now find themselves deriving a semblance of peace from their visits to a mausoleum.

If the content of Ten’s conversations reveals a society politically and legally skewed against woman, the form, too, has something to offer. Male drivers often block Akbari’s path, she has to keep demanding right of way. So there’s some quiet courage to be drawn from the penultimate segment in which her young son returns, and inquires about first and fifth gears. If he thinks his mother can teach him about driving, perhaps that’s not a bad start.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Dec 2020.

Book Review: Desire and Despoliation

A book review for Firstpost:

A recent English translation brings Shivani's 1978 novel 'Bhairavi' to new readers

Bhairavi: The Runaway begins in medias res, with the protagonist slowly coming back to consciousness in a room she does not recognise, surrounded by strangers whose presence terrifies her. An “old hag” with a man's dhoti wrapped around “her enormous stomach” and her bare breasts are “covered in blood-red sandalwood paste”; a younger woman with a face “as black as that of an African”; an ash-smeared naked sadhu with bloodshot eyes and half-grey, half golden dreadlocks — these are characters that might throw anyone off. Certainly our heroine Chandan, a conventionally pretty, fair young woman whom we are to understand is 'from a good family', is scared as well as repelled.

Chandan's experience has the sensory overload of a nightmare: the semi-nakedness of those around her, the stale smell of chewing tobacco on the sanyasin's breath, the cave-like room filled with smoke, and occupied by rudraksha beads, marijuana chillums, a skull or two, and a live pet snake. And yet, what begins as a petrifying glimpse of otherness soon starts to feel arresting, even beautiful. Maya Didi has a sagging but once voluptuous body and a radiant face that “must have ensnared many men in its youth”; the “black girl” Charan has a laugh that “lit up her whole face”'; the guru's “divine face” is “like a light tearing into a room”. This ability to stay with what was initially frightening, to allow one's gaze to be transformed — perhaps this was the gift Shivani's writing gave her readers.

Shivani was the pen name under which the writer Gaura Pant wrote from the 1960s to the 1990s, her fiction often first appearing in serialised form in Hindi magazines. Bhairavi was her fourth novel, published in instalments in Saptahik Hindustan and then as a book in 1978. Shivani was hugely popular, but as far as I am aware, only some of her short stories have hitherto been translated into English: Trust and other stories (Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1985); Krishnakali and other stories (Trans. by Masooma Ali, Rupa & Co., 1995) and Apradhini: Women Without Men (Trans. by Ira Pande, HarperCollins, 2011). (Ira Pande is Shivani's daughter, who has also written a deeply personal biography of her mother called Diddi, 2005). Priyanka Sarkar, Bhairavi's English translator, suggests in her introduction that the reason Shivani wasn't as feted as her contemporaries because “she was seen as a writer of 'love stories' and not a chronicler of society”. Other than Bhairavi, I have only ever read Apradhini, but based on what I know about the Indian, specifically Hindi, literary universe, I'd extend Sarkar's point even further. Shivani was probably not feted by the Hindi establishment precisely because she was popular, particularly popular with women — and not with literary-minded ones.

Reading Bhairavi: The Runaway revealed the possible reasons for that vast popularity. First, the story is fast-paced. Second, the central characters are all women. Men, whether fathers, husbands, lovers or sons, are often absent, and when they do appear, they're fairly one-dimensional figures whose sole purpose seems to be to drive the plot forward. Third, there's a racy, almost overripe quality to the narrative — a sort of Indian Gothic that combines two of this country's abiding concerns: mothers worrying about their daughters, and a deep-rooted fascination with ascetics.

What brings these two disparate threads together? A preoccupation with sex and sexuality — all the more powerful for being almost unspoken.

So on the one hand, we are told the backstory of Chandan, which is linked to the further backstory of her mother Rajrajeshwari — both revolving around the need to keep young women's sexuality in check, lest they lose their prized virginity and become unmarriageable. On the other hand we are plunged into the world of the Aghori ascetic, seeing through Chandan's eyes this storied space of Shiv-bhakt sadhus whose austerities, like those of other sects with an affinity to Tantrism, involve rituals that would be considered shocking by most ordinary Hindus. The 'ideal' Aghori embraces what others consider taboo — living off the cremation ground, drinking not only liquor but urine, consuming not just flesh but human corpses, and having intercourse with a female partner who is preferably infertile — the withholding of semen and the non-reproductiveness of the act being crucial. As the anthropologist Jonathan Parry argues in his classic study Death in Banaras, the Aghori route to siddhi (supernatural powers) not just allows meat-eating and intoxicants and sex, but makes them the very stuff of their sadhana (ritual practice).“For the tantrics, that which binds you — desire — is also what will set you free,” writes Madhavi Menon in her delightful book Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India.

Bhairavi offers the fascinated lay reader a glimpse of this tabooed universe, but Shivani was no anthropologist, and her Aghoris don't stick to the rules. Yes, the guru and his prime disciple Maya Didi do wander the cremation ground in search of enlightenment, seeking to attain mastery over life by surrounding themselves with death. But Shivani's narrative cannot go the whole hog. She makes their relationship non-sexual — or rather, unconsummated: Charan describes seeing them once at the cremation ground, “sitting across each other like a snake couple”, with Maya saying to the guru: “You are my only Shiva, Guru, and I am your Shiva Shakti”. Somehow, by keeping any actual sex out of it, Shivani manages to turn the relationship into something filled with sexual-romantic energy, even danger: a classic double bind that would be recognisable to all her readers.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary world, marriage continues to rule the roost, offering the only legitimate space for sexuality — if you're very lucky, some happiness is a possibility. But even marriage cannot protect women from the constant fear of sexual despoliation: Bhairavi has not one but two moments when (the fear of) rape becomes the motor of the plot. A woman can go from the grihasth (domestic) universe to the world of supposed renunciates, Shivani suggests implicitly, but she won't ever be free of this fear — if not on her own behalf, then on behalf of younger women. That's a bleak thought: one can only hope it's a little less true in 2020 than it was in 1978.

Bhairavi: The Runaway | By Shivani | Translated by Priyanka Sarkar

Simon and Schuster/Yoda Press, 2020 | 139 pages

This review was published in Firstpost, 27 Nov 2020.