Life in the shadow of death

My Mirror column:
Thinking about how AIDS has been represented on the screen, from the USA to France to India, throws up a set of tragic tropes, with one exhilarating exception

The award-winning actor Nahuel Perez Biscaryat in Robin Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute 

In May this year, a Tamil film called Sila Samayangalil (Sometimes) was released on Netflix. Directed by Priyadarshan, the film is set in the waiting room of a medical clinic. It gets certain things right, deftly establishing situations and characters.


A salwar-kameez-clad receptionist (Sriya Reddy) arrives insensitively late, given that people have been queuing since 6.30 am, and proceeds to talk on her cellphone. The depersonalised waiting room is typically unwelcoming, with its immovable rows of uncomfortable chairs, its notices about rules and timings, and the annoying automated voice-over in which counter token numbers are announced.



As is so often the case in India, however, that sanitised veneer of bureaucratic efficiency stops short of ensuring a functioning water dispenser, or preventing bribery. Despite a tendency to over-dramatise his actors' responses, Priyadarshan produces a sense of how this shared experience (the lack of drinking water, the collective irritation at the receptionist) shapes this rather motley crew into a community – especially as the seven people who’re waiting realise they’re all here for the results of the same thing: an HIV test.

There are six men and one woman, each with different reasons why they think they might have contracted the virus. Ashok Selvan’s relatively calm Balamurugan volunteers his story first, then Prakash Raj’s petrified Krishnamurthy, and so on – until we, the audience, have been given a whole range of possible ways in which AIDS might spread. By making the talkative Bala a pharmacist, the film takes the easy route to information dissemination, telling rather than showing.


I was struck by how wary Priyadarshan seems to be of his viewers’ moral judgement, how little he trusts them to sympathise or forgive anything that might depart from the monogamous heterosexual norm. Some of the male characters – though by no means all – are allowed a single ‘mistake’, but even so, they judge themselves very harshly.


Others have tragic stories about blood transfusions and saving accident victims. As for the sole woman character, she is visualised as being infected in the most non-agentive way possible – as a victim of anonymous sexual violence.


There is, of course, nothing ‘wrong’ with any of these narratives. All of them gesture to real possibilities where a person might get HIV without having, as the film’s characters repeatedly say, “done anything wrong”. But it is worth noting how studiously a film released two months before the Indian Supreme Court decriminalised consensual gay sex by scrapping the relevant parts of Section 377 avoids the slightest mention of men having sex with men.


I came upon Sometimes last week, when thinking about World AIDS Day, which was instituted in 1988 by the World Health Organisation, and thus celebrated its thirtieth year on December 1. And I couldn’t help but think about how far we are from making a film like 120 BPM – Beats Per Minute, Robin Campillo’s award-winning 2017 film about ACT UP activists and the battle against AIDS in 1980s Paris.

120 BPM, among whose many richly-deserved awards is the Golden Peacock at last year’s IFFI, is both a pulsating account of a political movement and a profoundly affecting personal narrative. Campillo moves with consummate fluency between brilliantly detailed scenes of political agitation and intensely intimate scenes that take in love and sex, friendship and family. And yes, death. For death is what hovers over all the AIDS films that have ever been made, right from the originary 1993 moment of Philadelphia. Its early Hindi ‘adaptation’, Phir Milenge (2004), in which Ron Nyswaner’s protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, was split into two characters, played by Shilpa Shetty and Salman Khan, and Salman died. As did Sanjay Suri in My Brother Nikhil (2005), an early AIDS drama in which Onir managed to give Hindi cinema an openly gay and yet sympathy-worthy protagonist, even if it had to be wrapped up inside Juhi Chawla’s saccharine-sweet sister act for public consumption. At this year’s IFFI, I also watched Yen Tan’s painful 2018 drama, 1985, in which a young Texan man goes home for Christmas but cannot bring himself to tell his family that he is gay, let alone what he really needs to, that he has AIDS.


1985 and My Brother Nikhil have many tropes in common: the ultra-masculine unsympathetic father, the clueless childhood girlfriend who can’t understand why the protagonist won’t reciprocate her love, the devoted monogamous partner – and the close sibling who will be the one to remember the hero after he’s gone.

Young people living under the shadow of death: that is what unites these disparate films. In Sometimes, too, it is the possible death of innocents that the film plays on. The AIDS film repeatedly shows how love in these situations comes with the terrible condition of illness: taking care of the one you love is a literal responsibility.


120 BPM, too, is tragic, with perhaps the most excruciating and moving depiction of slow death by disease that I have seen on film. And yet, somehow, what the film leaves one with is a remembered energy, a sense of endlessly articulate debate and endlessly flamboyant action, stretching from past to future.

In one of 120 BPM’s many stunning moments between the protagonists Nathan and Sean, Nathan describes being 19 and driving from Aix to Marseilles with an older man he has just met. The highway is jam-packed with cars, and Nathan imagines dying there, in a car accident, and their blackened bodies being discovered, and people wondering what they were to each other. It is a strange, dark vision, and yet acutely appropriate to the AIDS film – a vision in which desire and death, anonymity and intimacy, past and future are forever, and tragically, intertwined.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Dec 2018.

Book Review: AIDS Sutra

A book review, for Biblio:  

 

AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India.
Edited by Negar Akhavi; with a Foreword by Amartya Sen.
Photographs by Prashant Panjiar.
 

Random House India, New Delhi, in collaboration with Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2008, 340 pp., Rs 395. ISBN 978-81-8400-039-9

 

An anthology should be, by definition, varied, but rarely does one come across one whose various parts complement each other with such élan. Aids Sutra contains pieces by sixteen writers of different ages and persuasions, each focusing on a different aspect of the HIV-AIDS epidemic and often, a different part of the country. So, for example, we have Jaspreet Singh’s quietly gutwrenching visit to a Delhi home for children with HIV, Sunil Gangopadhyay’s engaging take on Sonagachhi, replete with anecdotes both historical and autobiographical, Siddhartha Deb’s bleak but superb account of the conditions in which Manipur’s young people take to drugs, or Mukul Kesavan’s thoughtful elucidation of the world of Bangalore’s kothis.

Styles, too, vary enormously. CS Lakshmi’s ‘At Stake, The Body’ chooses anonymity as a haven for the voices of sex workers she inscribes with a kind of collective economy, while Nikita Lalwani’s ‘Mister X Versus Hospital Y’, whose very subject is the right to confidentiality, is anchored around a life story disclosed in a single conversation. In a book such as this, where much of the writing is based on specifically arranged encounters between the authors and the people they’re describing, observations need to be particularly fine-grained, and many of the authors recognize the need to abandon the conceit of objectivity. But there are those who cling to the illusion of old-style ethnography (or old-style documentary) – the narrator as a fly on the wall, seemingly observing people and place without recogiszing how his presence contributes to the nature of the scene, or alters it. William Dalrymple is one of those whose style gives away nothing of himself. The first two pages of his essay on devadasis, ‘The Daughters of Yellama’, for instance, form a stream of dialogue: first one woman speaks, then the other. There is precisely one sentence spoken by the author. But they are responding to some invisible third party. It is as if an interview had been transcribed without the questions asked.

In stark contrast is the piece by Shobhaa De, who takes it upon herself to describe, in admirably frank detail, her response to the discovery that her “children’s driver”, Shankar, had AIDS. She is frank, first of all, in admitting that she knew very little about a man who had worked for her for several years – and how normalized this ‘not knowing’ is for upper middle class people. “People who work in our homes, and who are an integral part of our lives, become almost invisible – their presence reduced to an almost shadowy figure at which we shout daily orders. ‘Go here. Get that. Be back on time… So you need leave? Again? Didn’t you just take a day off last fortnight? Why does there seem to be a weekly emergency in your village? How many times do your cousins die?’ All this is said briskly, everybody is so damn busy, so preoccupied. There are a thousand things to do. Who on earth looks up to notice boils on their driver’s scalp?” She is equally honest in admitting that the discovery forced her to confront a host of inner demons: “I imagined all kinds of unpleasant things. He must have got the virus from visiting prostitutes after this wife left him. Maybe he was gay, and had multiple relationships? Had he tricked his wife into marrying him? …Where was my liberal self when I needed it most?”

Vikram Seth also tells a quasi-personal story, of a poem he once wrote in the voice of a man dying of AIDS. But apart from gesturing to the way in which the fearful voice of the poem’s narrator echoes the ill-informed, panic-stricken reaction Seth remembers from California in the 1980s, the piece remains disappointingly slight – and impersonal. His account of reactions from readers then is interesting for the historical light it casts on the life of the disease. But Seth is so tightly focused on trying – and failing – to reconstruct the moment of the poem’s writing that he refuses the opportunity to meditate on wider questions, personal or political.

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, like De and Seth, elects to tell a story whose origin lies in past personal experience, though in Shanghvi’s case it is not, strictly speaking, his own. ‘Hello Darling’, about a flamboyantly gay filmmaker called Murad, doesn’t do too bad a job of recreating the not-so-far-away world of 90s Bombay, in which Murad’s slick first film about homosexuality was enough to give him “a patina of notoriety” and a lot of press. But his asides about American “bug parties”, or discrimination against HIV positive patients in India – seem tacked on, and even Murad’s story never quite achieves the “darkly nostalgic” tone Shanghvi aims for. Perhaps the problem is Shanghvi’s amateurish prose, teetering perpetually on the brink of purple: “…the greatness he aspired to was one elusive eel. Unable to deal with fate’s tumult, Murad fled to New York… to live his life on high tilt – artistically, independently, hedonistically”, or worse, “Having given filmmaking his best shot, and failing nonetheless, the dark music of HIV played in the background as the echo of salvation”. What does emerge without a doubt, though, is that the stigma – and resultant secrecy – that surrounds HIV cuts across class: a publicly homosexual, glamorous, Page Three figure feels as compelled to keep his positive status secret as a middle-aged Marathi chauffeur.

The most rewarding pieces in the book are those where research is woven into a personal narrative, one that makes visible the layers through which perception is filtered. One such is Amit Chaudhuri’s careful account of the HIV wings of Bombay’s hospitals, and the doctors who run them. Chaudhuri is, as always, simultaneously reflective and detached. His memories of younger days may inform his experience of the city, but with Chaudhuri, memory is not nostalgia. His estimation of Bombay is clear-eyed (and at this moment when the city is the subject of so much impassioned prose, especially welcome): “As I walked with streams of happy people on Perry and Carter Roads, I sensed again this city’s reserves of optimism, which makes it unique among the world’s cities: but was reminded, too, from my own life here, of what I’d forgotten – its infantilism, its susceptibility to charm and excitement, a susceptibility that, in the early 21st century, has its own unforgiving momentum.”

Also clear-eyed is Chaudhuri’s unraveling of the various registers within which the history of AIDS treatment unfolded: partial information from abroad, professional rivalries, increasing but ill-informed media attention, issues of prejudice, sexual morality and secrecy. And at every juncture, he is attentive to the crucial question of class. For instance, visiting hospitals like GT (Gokuldas Tejpal) and JJ (Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy) for the first time, Chaudhuri recognizes that his “not knowing” such landmarks must be placed in the context of a classed urban geography, in which public hospitals do not need to figure for ‘people like us’. More importantly, within the hospital, class matters. Though it may no longer affect access to Anti Retroviral Treatment (ART) (JJ Hospital became the first to offer free ART in 2004, and others have followed), knowledge of and attitudes to healthcare have much to do with levels of class and education. Chaudhuri correctly points out that ART is “incomplete but, as of now, indispensable knowledge [that] partially removes HIV from the hysteria that surrounded it in the eighties and nineties”, but deaths continue to occur even among those who are diagnosed in time, often because working class patients stop the treatment when symptoms recede.

Class and social background are also important variables in Sonia Faleiro’s hard-hitting portrayal of the complex relationship between sex workers and the police. Faleiro’s piece is significant for its twin insights – first, that the police’s relationship with sex workers is not merely one of law enforcement, but of regular economic and sexual exploitation, and second, that it will not do to paint all policemen as agents of evil: they themselves are cogs in a larger, deeply flawed system. “Policemen’s attitudes mirror that (sic) of the society from which they are drawn. If the average policeman comes from a small town or village where people generally equate sex work with promiscuity, disease, and lawlessness, then he will, unless his training teaches him otherwise, carry those sentiments to work. What makes this mirror image dangerous is that the police have the power to act on their bias.” While this means that there are a large number of policemen like Madhav Rao, who tells Faleiro that sex workers are meant to be beaten, chased away (giving her the title of her piece, ‘Maarne ka, bhagane ka’), it does not preclude the possibility of there being others like Ram Naik, for whom the sex workers of the neighbourhood he patrols are the women he knows best.

Kiran Desai’s account of the Kalavanthalu women – a subcaste of “hereditary courtesans and temple dancers famous for their elegant beauty” – breezily builds up an image of a “normal” Andhra village, only to tear it down : “I notice an overabundance of beds”. Her sure-footed descriptions, of brothels with all the stuffiness of a middle class home, and others that are no more than hovels, are interspersed with statistics, local proverbs and all-female banter, expertly but gently rendered: ““And who likes the sex? Any of you girls?” And immediately they all jump on one woman… yelling, “She! She! She! She does!”

There are other pieces well worth reading that I haven’t mentioned for lack of space, and a measured introduction by Amartya Sen that deals with much more than the economics of HIV. The book also contains some exceptional -- albeit badly printed -- photographs by Prashant Panjiar, adding yet another layer to what is already a generous, nuanced introduction to one of the most complex issues of our time.

Published in Biblio: A Review of Books
Vol. XIII, Nos. 11 & 12, Nov - Dec 2008
To see this article as it originally appeared, with photographs, go here.