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.