The reel life of MS Sathyu - 1

My Mumbai Mirror column for July 12:

In honour of his 90th birthday on July 6, a look back at some of MS Sathyu's notable contributions to Indian cinema: Garm Hava, Bara and Galige

AK Hangal, Balraj Sahni and Farooque Shaikh in MS Sathyu's Garm Hava (1973)

The director Mysore Srinivas Sathyu turned 90 on July 6. We owe to Sathyu what remains Hindi cinema’s most honest, painful appraisal of the early effects of Partition: the 1973 film Garm Hava, which I have written about in a previous instalment of this column. Born in 1930 in the then princely state of Mysore, MS Sathyu graduated from Bangalore’s Central College and moved to Bombay in 1952. There he became associated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), staging plays like Aakhri Shama (1969) in collaboration with the poet Kaifi Azmi, with the great Balraj Sahni in the lead as Mirza Ghalib. He entered films as an assistant director on Chetan Anand’s Ladakh-set saga of the Sino-Indian War, Haqeeqat (1964).

Eight years later, Sathyu’s feature debut Garm Hava had him working with Sahni and Azmi again. Azmi and Shama Zaidi (Sathyu’s spouse) crafted a brilliant screenplay, based on an unpublished story by Ismat Chughtai. Set in Agra, the film achieves a fine-grained sense of the everyday ways in which amplifying socio-political divisions push a reasonably well-off Muslim family to misfortune. Sahni delivered an unforgettably moving performance as an ageing shoe-manufacturer adamant not to leave for Pakistan, despite the harsh winds that seem intent upon sweeping him away from home. Garm Hava was Sahni’s last film role, and Farooq Shaikh’s first, as Sahni’s son Sikandar. It is  Sikandar's uncertain future – as an unemployed young man, but also as a young Indian Muslim – that the film ends with.

Sathyu, who lives in Bangalore, hasn’t made many more films. A theatreperson at heart, he has spoken in interviews of being branded a political filmmaker after Garm Hava, and of funding remaining an uphill battle. But two of his other features are currently available to view, both in Kannada with English subtitles. Galige (1994) is playing in the Indian cinema section of an online screening platform, and in honour of Sathyu’s ninetieth birthday, the Bangalore International Centre is screening Bara (1980), free to watch until July 16, with an online conversation with Sathyu scheduled for 5pm today, July 12.

Neither Bara nor Galige have the emotional heft of Garm Hava; it is hard to match either the increasingly prescient texture of that narrative, or the subtlety of the performances by Sahni and Shaikh, as also the fine ensemble cast, including Jalal Agha and Gita Siddharth. But both films offer unusual perspectives on Indian politics and society, in very different styles. Bara (The Arid Earth), adapted from a Kannada story by the great UR Ananthamurthy, is about a young IAS officer called Satisha (Anant Nag) whose attempts to improve conditions in his district are constantly obstructed by bureaucratic and political wrangling.

The idealistic hero was not new, but the corruption was laid out in greater depth than most Indian films in 1980. The chief minister turns out to be conducting a behind-the-scenes battle with a minister from the region, and will not declare the district famine-affected for fear that his rival will take credit for relief. The minister, meanwhile, is in cahoots with a corrupt trader called Gangadharswamy, whose blatantly illegal stocks of grain escape police checks even as small-time traders are jailed for ‘smuggling’ one sack of rice. The most fascinating character is Bhimoji, a local advocate-activist-politician who is Gangadharswamy’s bete noire, as well as being Satisha’s (and our) entry point into the realpolitik that actually governs the place he is supposed to run.

In some respects, Sathyu sanitised the character: removing, for instance, Ananthamurthy’s frank reference to Bhimoji’s pimping before becoming a politician. But the film also gave Bhimoji more complexity than Ananthamurthy’s text (available in a 2016 English translation from Oxford University Press). For example, in both the film and the book, Bhimoji decries Gangadharswamy’s land donations as staged, essentially fake handouts to his own supporters – but the film also depicts Bhimoji’s own ‘counter-occupation’ of the donated land as being staged for local journalists.

 

Another interesting aspect of the adaptation touches on cow protection or gau-raksha, whose shadow upon our politics has grown much darker in these forty years. In the story, one Govindappa appears nervously at Satisha’s office to ask him to chair a reception committee to welcome his Guru, who is coming to inaugurate a cow shelter that will save cows from the drought. Sathyu makes an interesting shift: he makes Satisha’s father a temple-building gau-raksha votary, someone who gets farmers to send their drought-starved cattle to him instead of to the butcher. In the film, the father brings the gau-rakshak to Satisha’s office. In a perspicacious change that seems to presage today’s religio-politics, this character, Govind Rao, is announced as “an MSc in chemistry from Banaras Hindu University”, and displays no nervousness – he has already printed Satisha’s name on the invitation, without asking him.

Other departures from the text, though, flatten the film. Ananthamurthy gave Satisha an interesting angsty self-reflexivity: his “instinct for adventure” matched by his worldliness in marrying “into a family which shared a deep concern for the country’s poverty though without ever experiencing hardship itself”. Satisha’s wife Rekha, with her mixed religious elite background, her Miranda House-JNU education and her aesthetic-historical appreciation of the town’s ruins, is something of a type. Shorn of these details, she seems even more stilted in the film, though she does propose that her husband dig bore wells. Ananthamurthy’s Satisha is ambivalent about his own ethical display; he “was aware that the couple’s humanism might seem greater than it was through the magnifying lens of the humble local people”. Sathyu’s Satisha, with no such doubting interior, manages to humble himself before a local. Like a hero.

The first of a two-part column.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 July 2020.

Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone

My Mirror column (10 May 2020):

As India's labouring poor are locked into cities and die tragically in their unaided attempts to get home, Muzaffar Ali's 1978 migrant classic Gaman acquires new layers of meaning.

In an early scene in Gaman, a hesitant Ghulam Hasan (Farooque Shaikh) gets off a train at VT Station and manages to find his way to the jhopadpatti that appears to be his childhood friend Lallulal's (Jalal Agha) Mumbai address. He pauses beside a group of young men chatting by the roadside. “Sunoh bhaiyya,” says Ghulam softly, his tongue still travelling along the slow perlocutionary path of his native UP village. “Woh kya hai ki kya Lallulal Tiwari yahan rehta hai?” 

The retort is quick and stinging, and the word now jumps out at us, an untranslated social footnote that will not be suppressed: “Apun tumko bhaiyya dikhta hai?”

One of the others deigns to direct the lost newcomer to the tin-roofed shanty (“third gali after the municipal toilet”) that the affable Lallu shares with several other men, and Ghulam quickly becomes one of its occupants. But Muzaffar Ali's 1978 directorial debut, a film made three years before his much more famous Umrao Jaan, never lets his viewers forget that this rickety roof over their heads is both temporary and tenuous. Shelter in the big city is so precious a thing that Lallu's labelling of it as his “Taj Mahal” is both a bad joke and thoroughly heartfelt. And the emotion only heightens through the film, as Lallu and his sweetheart Yashodhara (Gita Siddharth, of Garm Hava fame) yearn ever more for a place of their own so they can marry, while even the rented kholi is threatened with demolition.

For Ghulam though, it is the village home he has left behind that calls out to him, in the shape of letters bringing news of his ailing mother and his lonely wife Khairun (Smita Patil), whose face drifts up from his memories and looms large over the cityscape that he learns gradually to traverse. Aided by older men from his native region, so-called bhaiyyas, Ghulam becomes, like Lallu, a taxi driver in Mumbai. The film is full of shots of Shaikh in a taxi, his sad eyes seeing but not quite seeing the urban crowd he is now part of. “Hiyan bheed ka kauno hisaab naahi,” as he tells Lallu wonderingly.

Muzaffar Ali's use of songs is perhaps his most affective talent, and it is powerfully evident here. In the picturisation of the film's magisterial anthem of urban desolation “Seene mein jalan, aankhon mein toofan sa kyun hai/ Is sheher mein har shakhs pareshaan-sa kyun hai? (Why does the heart burn, why is there a storm in my eyes/ Why is everyone troubled in this city?)”, our gaze travels past blocks and blocks of urban housing, and cars seen from above, like unending queues of ants, and we hear Shahryar's line: “Ta-had-e nazar ek bayabaan sa kyun hai?” “Why is there a wilderness as far as the eye can see?”

One of Gaman's achievements as a film about the migrant experience is that the distance between the village and the city feels insurmountable, despite the technologies that bridge the two. That feeling is gestured to in the film's very first shot, when a letter is being laboriously typed with one finger (on a typewriter that, in one of those surreal moments that populate the watching of so much in 2020, bears the brand-name Corona), and the camera moves up from there to the telegraph lines that stretch across a bucolic rural landscape. A great deal of screen time is spent on trains and buses – and at moments of particular emotion, Ali inserts a distant shot of a plane in the sky, like some imagined modern-day pigeon-post of the heart.

Conditions of labour and lack of money make it nearly impossible for the poor migrant to go back home, even when nothing is ostensibly stopping him. In the third month of a shockingly unplanned and heartlessly implemented lockdown, when lakhs of India's working poor are being forcibly kept from going back home, Gaman's final sequence bears a terrible new weight. Farooque Shaikh bundles up his few belongings in his lovely old-style trunk (the objects of the feudal Awadh village were still beautiful) and arrives at VT, hoping to depart as spontaneously as he had arrived. But more than half the money he has saved in a year will go on just the journey home, he thinks, and his feet stop where they are. We leave him standing behind the collapsible gate that enters the platform, locked down in the city while his mind climbs onto the train, over and over.

I'd like to end this column with another moment from Gaman, when Ghulam is actually on a train. He and Lallu are going to meet Yashodhara. They are already late when the train suddenly stops. What happened, asks Ghulam the newbie. Must be an accident, says Lallu. It turns out a man has been killed under the train’s wheels. “The bus would have been faster,” says Lallu. “Yahi gaadi mili thhi marne ke liye! (Did he have to choose this train to die under?)” rues another man. “Patri se hataane ka aur gaadi start karne ka. Passenger log ka kaahe ko time barbaad karne ka (Get him off the tracks and start the train. Why waste the time of passengers?)” says a third voice.

Ghulam looks distraught. “Wait and watch,” says Lalloo. “You’ll get used to it like all of us.”

Watching Gaman in mid-2020, it feels sickeningly clear that all of us are now passengers, whose time can’t be wasted on mourning those the train rolls over. The numbers rise every day.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 May 2020.

An ill wind: Revisiting Garm Hava

Last Sunday's Mirror column:

Newly restored, MS Sathyu's iconic film about post-partition times resonates more than ever in our polarised present.

A restored version of Garm Hava released yesterday under the PVR Director's Rare banner. It is nowhere near as wide a release as this 1973 film deserves, but if it is playing anywhere near you, go watch it. Because Garm Hava remains, nearly forty years after it was made, the most affecting, nuanced film we have yet produced about the experience of Partition.

It is by no means a flawless film, but this column isn't about that. There are too many reasons why you should watch it. Garm Hava is not just MS Sathyu's first feature as director, but also Farooque Shaikh's first film role - and Balraj Sahni's last. Sahni, who delivers an exceptionally subtle performance as an ageing shoe manufacturer called Salim Mirza, is the pivot around whom the film revolves.

Based on an unpublished short story by Ismat Chughtai, the screenplay (co-authored by the poet Kaifi Azmi and the screenwriter Shama Zaidi, who is also Sathyu's wife) steers Mirza through the bitter months of 1948, as his quiet determination to stay on in the place of his birth receives one body blow after another.

"Full-grown trees are being cut down in the wind," muses Mirza to a tangawallah, as he returns from having seen off yet another branch of his family that is moving across the border. "It is a scorching wind," responds the horse-cart driver, "Those who do not uproot themselves will wither away."

The film is set in Agra, but shot through by the idea of Pakistan. But 'Pakistan' here is an empty signifier, denoting nothing except departure. From the very first scene, where Mirza sees off a train, with a hand gesture somewhere between benediction and goodbye, we are inserted into a world in which people are either leaving, or thinking about it - and if they are not, then there's someone telling them they ought to.

One of the leavers is Salim Mirza's elder brother, Halim Mirza, whose doublespeak is captured with economy by Sathyu's technique: splicing moments from his rabble-rousing 'nationalist' speeches, denouncing as cowards those Muslims who have "abandoned their heritage" by going to Pakistan, with him telling his wife that there is no room left for Muslims in India. It is clear that he is as opportunistic as the Muslim Leaguers he condemns. Another Pakistan-bound character is the duplicitous Fakhruddin, though not before switching loyalties from the League to the Congress, and placing as many obstacles in Salim Mirza's path as possible.

But the film does not for a moment suggest that all those who left for Pakistan were somehow opportunistic, or cowardly. Garm Hava is astute enough to show us multiple points of view. When the business seems impossible to revive, Mirza's elder son succumbs to the chance of greater opportunity in a Muslim-majority country.

Salim Mirza may hold out against going, but Garm Hava produces a powerful sense of how difficult it had become to stay.

The same picture is painted by a book called In Freedom's Shade, a recent exemplary translation of Azadi ki Chhaon Mein, Begum Anis Kidwai's enormously thought-provoking memoir of the immediate post-Partition years. Kidwai's encounters were largely with a poorer class of Muslims than the Mirzas, people who had even less economic ballast to keep them where they were. They are either people in camps who have fled their homes with few belongings, or poor peasants from the villages around Delhi. But what Garm Hava shares with Azadi ki Chhaon Mein is its depiction of how little the formal assurances of the secular state were backed by people's lived experience. What Gandhi and Nehru promised (and tried to do) was one thing, and what state functionaries did was quite another. Again and again, Kidwai encounters poor, uneducated Muslims who have been told by officials - senior army men, thanedars, patwaris - that they must leave, because the Indian government can no longer be held responsible for their safety.

Like Azadi..., and unlike the corpse-filled trains that have become numbingly overused shorthand for Partition, Garm Hava doesn't want to shock us with our history of violence. (The only physical attack in the film is a brick that hits Mirza during a minor riot; even the blaze that engulfs his karkhana is barely shown, though Sathyu has recently suggested that he might have done these scenes differently if he had the budget.) 

What it shows us instead is how enmeshed religious identity is in the socio-economic climate -- right from this foundational moment of our nationhood. The baniya moneylender and the bank both refuses Mirza a loan, since Muslims may go off to Pakistan, leaving behind unpaid debts. The family haveli, registered in the name of his brother Halim, is seized by the Custodian of Enemy Property, and goes to a Sindhi businessman (AK Hangal in an unusual role). Meanwhile, prospective landlords turn Mirza away with that phrase we have so often heard thereafter: "We don't take non-vegetarian tenants." Even young Sikandar (Farooque Shaikh) must deal with job interviewers who make unsolicited suggestions that he might do better in Pakistan.

Sathyu's decision to keep these landlords and interviewers invisible is an interesting one. One wonders whether it is meant to insert us, his viewers, uncomfortably into the place of these interlocutors. And then one wonders why more films in this country don't set out to make us uncomfortable, just once in a while. God knows, we need it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Nov 2014.

Being Farooque Shaikh

My column for Mumbai Mirror today:

How did the late actor manage to make the ordinary man so extraordinarily memorable? Did the women he romanced on screen have something to do with it?

Farooque Shaikh was one of the great unsung pleasures of growing up in the 1980s. It's become a little too easy to diss the decade, but filled as it was with coy Jeetendra-Sridevi mahadramas and ceaselessly gory vigilante movies, with even Amitabh Bachchan sliding down a slippery slope from Naseeb and Coolie to Aakhree Rasta and Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, it is hard to counter the general low impression. It seems sometimes unimaginable that there continued to be, during the same period, a little corner in which gentle, middle class romance and even gentler humour was allowed to exist. Farooque Shaikh was a permanent occupant of that corner. 

Sachin Kundalkar's Aiyyaa has a superbly revealing scene where the movie-mad Meenakshi (Rani Mukherjee) shocks the good, middle class young man who's come to 'see' her by confessing that she has no idea who Deepti Naval and Farooque Shaikh are. In disbelief, Madhav tries to sing "Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya", hoping to jog her memory with the Jagjit Singh song from Saath Saath that defined romance for countless sincere teenagers. But Meenakshi is unmoved. What was so special about them, she asks him. Nothing special, says Madhav - the whole point of these people was that they were so normal, so un-starry, so much like us. Meenakshi, whose entire dreamlife consists of herself dancing filmi-ly through her favourite Madhuri-Sridevi hits, has no idea what to make of this. If it is regular people you want to watch, she asks in some confusion, why on earth would you go to see a film? 

Most of Farooq Shaikh's cinematic appearances would indeed not have made Meenakshi happy. Whether he was playing the studious economics student in Chashme Buddoor, or the socialist young man who walks out of newspaper offices in Saath Saath, or the boy at the bus stop in Ab Aayega Maza, Shaikh was almost always cast as the quiet, unflashy, committed type. He was always middle class - a bright student trying to make things work with scholarships or articles or tutions, or a salaried young man, worrying in an everyday sort of way about money. The grand gesture was not for him - neither right for his temperament, nor for his pocket. He might be the young man who was so clearly in love with the girl that it was written all over his face - but he wasn't going to do anything foolish to try and impress her. 

But this non-wooing behaviour had a side effect that was also crucial to the Farooque Shaikh persona. It meant that his heroine - charmed by this bumbling, unusual sincerity, or even by the sometimes embarrassing moonhphat quality - was almost always the one to make the first move. Or at least she would make it clear that she was as interested as he was. This was certainly the case with Saath Saath, where Deepti Naval plays the idealistic rich girl, it is she who falls for the stubborn grit of the leftwing poet - and makes it apparent. Shaikh's college idealist may be opinionated and confident in his political views, but he is not the one to openly profess things like love. 

In Chashme Buddoor, too, Naval's Neha is a super-confident girl, amused and almost sly when faced with the exaggerated ridiculousness of Rakesh Bedi and Ravi Basvani. She does seem much more tongue-tied when she first meets Farooque Shaikh's Siddharth. But they're both a bit shy, and she makes it fully apparent that she likes him. Even the circumstances of their first meeting are interesting - it is she who appears at his doorstep, and not the other way round. 

Even in the lesser-known Ab Aayega Mazaa, directed by Pankaj Parasher, Vijay's (Shaikh's) first accidental encounter with Anita Raaj's Noopur - at a Delhi bus stop, no less - is turned into an extended conversational opportunity not by him but by Noopur. It is the businessman's daughter who insists on giving him a ride in her chauffeur-driven car when it finally turns up. At a later scene at the same bus stop, Noopur deliberately misleads an older woman into believing that she is a gullible girl who needs protection from an advancing "goonda" - only to walk off arm in arm with Vijay when he arrives. 

As the rare male hero who was comfortable and believable as someone attracted to strong, demanding women, Shaikh got some roles where he was going to turn out to be the weak one. There was Umrao Jaan, of course; there was Sai Paranjpye's Katha, where he was the sharptalking winsome cad; there was Kalpana Lajmi's affecting portrait of an adulterous relationship, Ek Pal, where Shaikh loves and leaves the unhappily married Shabana Azmi. 

Even in the lightest of comedies, like Ab Aayega Mazaa, Shaikh is the guy whose girlfriend gets to tell him not to try and boss over her -- "rob mat jamao". In Saath Saath, too, when the financial pressures of domesticity drag Shaikh's character over to the dark side, it is his wife (Naval) who remains captain of the ship, guardian of his conscience. It is this rare ability to portray equal romantic partnerships - and unequal ones tilted in favour of women -- which made Farooque Shaikh truly unique.

*Some typos in the published newspaper version have been corrected here. 

Mocking 'filmi-ness': more on Chashme Buddoor

A guest column I did for Business Standard:

A still from Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor (1981)

Sai Paranjpye's Chashme Buddoor, a light-hearted and mild-mannered comedy which also gave us an unforgettably sweet romance between a bespectacled, padhaaku Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval as the irresistible but real girl next door, was recently restored and re-released in theatres alongside a new David Dhawan remake. A distressed Paranjpye has charged Dhawan with having killed her delicately funny film by injecting it with double entendres, bawdy jokes and a general crassness so antithetical to the sensibility of the original that to call the new Chashme Baddoor a remake was a travesty.

I watched both films last week, and I have to confess that while the old one has lost none of its delicate charm, the new one is a rambunctious and rather enjoyable ride. The new film, like the old one, centres on a trio of young men (inaugurating a whole Hindi film tradition of male friendship movies since). One is the sincere student who reads Economics textbooks for pleasure, while the other two spend their time gadding about the empty leafy avenues of 1980s Delhi in search of girls. Or to adopt the celebratory whoop with which they greet every sighting of young female flesh - "shikaar!". The reference to prey may sound shocking, but there's something about Omi and Jomo's unthreatening comicness that makes it not just alright but hilarious. And yet the indiscriminateness of their attentions is enough to indicate the unabashedly joyful sexual basis of their interest. Paranjpye's world may have been innocent, but it was not coy.

That frank vision of youthful (male) hormones is a clue to what made Chashme Buddoor such a remarkable film: its absolute outsiderness to the conventions of the Hindi movie - and even more, the quirky, tongue-in-cheek way in which it chooses to play with those conventions.

In 1981 - the year in which Chashme Buddoor released - the top 10 grossers at the Hindi box office included four Amitabh Bachchan starrers (Yaarana, Kaalia, Naseeb and Lawaaris) replete with dramatic father-son battles and villainous villains on whom revenge had to be wreaked. Other films in the top 10 were a colonial fable involving revolutionary Indian pirates and evil Britishers (Kranti), a reincarnation-revenge-romance (Kudrat), and two stories of star-crossed young lovers (Ek Duuje Ke Liye and Love Story). This was the cinematic universe that Chashme Buddoor emerged into - a universe whose high drama and heroic stunts it both distinguished itself from, and gently but thoroughly mocked. From the first scene, in which the Mehdi Hassan classic of the scorched heart Yeh dhuan sa kahan se uthta hai plays as accompaniment to our heroes' silent communion over a shared cigarette, to having them imagine their romantic conquests as a medley of old Hindi film songs, Chashme Buddoor never stops making fun of our filmi-ness.

Sai Paranjpye was not unique in this sort of mockery. The urban "middle class cinema", represented among others by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Gulzar, enjoyed poking fun at the more unreal aspects of Hindi films. One of their favourite things to mock was the ubiquitous double role. Gulzar pushed it to its limits (and returned it to source) with Angoor (1982), his superb adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, giving us not one but two pairs of twins. And Mukherjee's Gol Maal (1979) used the idea of fake identical twins as the masterful basis of its comic plot. (Rohit Shetty's reworking, Bol Bachchan, 2012, was grotesque, among other things, because it created a "real" humshakal for Asin - seemingly unaware that Gol Maal's humour was based on mocking the proliferation of twins.)

But Chashme Buddoor went further than those. There's the marvellous scene in which Amitabh and Rekha appear to demonstrate a Hindi movie-style wooing - and how "the technique" falls flat in real life. Earlier, Jomo (the late Ravi Baswani) pretends to be a Bombay producer "talent-scouting" in Delhi, and, in his imagination, Deepti Naval giggles delightedly to hear that "there's a bit of a vacuum in the industry after Jaya ji" that she can fill. In the scene as it actually unfolds, Jomo is crisply rebuffed: she never watches Hindi movies.

Yet, when Naval and Shaikh fall in love and find themselves in a flower-filled Delhi park, they cannot but burst into song. "How do those people in the movies think up rhyming words and tunes on the spot?" muses Neha to Siddharth, before seguing neatly into a half-jokey rhyming song, holding a large flower up like a microphone. And while the climax sets out to stage a kidnapping so that the hero can rescue the heroine filmi-style, Paranjpye decides to play with our now-established expectations by turning the fake kidnapping into a real one. We may laugh at Hindi movies, she seems to say, but we also inhabit them.

David Dhawan, self-declared acolyte of Manmohan Desai - a specialist in mistaken identities and long-lost reunitings if ever there was one - has made a much louder, filmi-er, lowbrow film than the original. But it is also a cheery, self-conscious send-up of the raucous comedies for which he became famous in the 1990s. And in that combination of self-consciousness and inhabiting lies his tribute to Chashme Buddoor.

Film Review: Farooq-Deepti nostalgia not enough magic for Listen… Amaya

The main draw of Listen… Amaya is the fact that it brings back together two actors who’ve given us some of the tenderest, most identifiable romantic couplings in the history of Hindi filmdom: Farooque Shaikh and Deepti Naval. In a cinematic universe so dominated by grand gesture and loving excess, it seems almost wondrous that they managed to carve out a space for the middle class romantic encounter, transforming the everyday into quiet on-screen magic.

In a lovely little scene from Sachin Kundalkar’s otherwise curiously confused Aiyyaa, Rani Mukherjee’s Meenakshi shocks her prospective husband Madhav (Subodh Bhave) by telling him that she’s never heard of the Deepti Naval-Farooque Shaikh pairing, leading him to break into a spontaneous rendition of Jagjit Singh’s ‘Tumko dekha toh yeh khayaal aaya’ from Saath-Saath. Seeing Madhav so overcome, Meenakshi asks what was special about them. Nothing special, replies Madhav – that was the point – that they were so normal, so un-made-up, so utterly un-filmi. The movie-mad Meenakshi, who spends her technicolour daydreams dancing her way through Sridevi-Madhuri-Juhi hits, is genuinely flummoxed. If you wanted to watch regular people, she muses, why would you go watch a film?

No-one who has ever actually watched Saath-Saath, though, is likely to ask that question. A marvelously affecting example of the Naval-Shaikh romantic pairing, Raman Kumar’s film contains several classic Hindi movie elements – the new girl in college; the radical poet-writer-hero; the poor boy-rich girl romance; the rich parents opposed to the relationship – but it uses them to craft a narrative that is perhaps unique in our cinema. Because the crisis in the film – our sense of impending tragedy – is created not merely by people or things extraneous to the central characters, but by an internal transformation within a central character. Shaikh’s Avinash, a committed socialist student who storms out of newspaper offices rather than re-write his pieces, finds the economic pressures of domesticity bending him into a rather more pliable employee than the idealistic girl who fell for him could ever have imagined.

In that transition— from the unflashy, stubborn grit of the college-going Avinash to a man who seems almost enthusiastic as he adopts one sharp practice after another to advance his publishing career—we see the brilliant range of Farooque Shaikh as an actor. The bumbling confusion of the good boy encountering the possibility of romance – think of Chashme Buddoor – and the garrulous sharp talker whom you probably shouldn’t believe but whom you cannot fail to be charmed by – think of Katha – are, in Saath-Saath, merged into a single character. Naval, too, transitions with consummate ease from the demure girl with the dancing eyes to the woman choked by the tears in her throat.

In recent years, both Naval and Shaikh have had their chance to return to the big screen – and in two memorable instances, to actually flex their acting muscles: Naval in Nandita Das’s Firaaq as a middle-aged Gujarati housewife in post-riot Ahmedabad and Shaikh in Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, as an oily bureaucrat adept at the power games of a rotten polity, shifting expertly from obsequious to threatening.

Sadly, Listen… Amaya doesn’t offer them any such opportunities. What it does do is to bring the two of them into the same frame for the first time in decades, giving their loyal following—all us Madhavs in the real world—a chance to bask in the nostalgic glow of their togetherness. Being the attentive, natural performers that they are, Shaikh and Naval—playing widowed upper middle class 60-somethings who have found companionship and comfort in each other—carry most of their scenes with an easy warmth. Swara Bhaskar plays Naval’s daughter, making fairly believable both Amaya’s rather-too-childish mood-swings and her discomfort with the fact that her mother could possibly share a life (and a bed) with another man—even if he’s as teddy-bearish as Farooque Shaikh.

And yet much of this film seems stilted and coy, a picture postcard version of upper middle class life that fails ever to come to life. Part of the problem is that these characters are given very little by way of location—and what there is seems like something of a la-la-land. Deepti Naval’s coffee-shop-owning Leela Krishnamurti – archly referred to by her cool young customers as Mrs. K – seems to have led a life in which even the early death of a husband did not catapult her and her young daughter into any kind of financial stress. The café-cum-bookshop, set in a perpetually rainy (!) Delhi bungalow-with-garden, doesn’t seem like it would actually pay even for its own upkeep. Farooq Shaikh’s Jayant, too, is given only a personal history, not a professional one. In the film’s present, he lives in his own lush bungalow-with-garden, and spends his time taking amateur photographs. This is a supremely comfortable Delhi in which everyone has a superbly-appointed tasteful house, young women can leave their jobs at the drop of a hat and not have to find another one, and stories one wrote as a nine-year-old can become the basis for coffee table books about “memories” that have Oxbridge-accented publishers lining up for sequels.

“Live by what you believe in, even if it kills you,” Amaya’s dead father apparently used to say. It is a statement that might have encapsulated the difficult dilemmas of Saath Saath. Somehow, in a world so utterly bereft of conflict or danger as, it feels like empty rhetoric. Amid the perpetually steaming coffee cups and rain-drenched windows of Listen… Amaya, it’s just another coffee table line for a coffee table movie.

Published on Firstpost.