My Mirror column:
A range of recent narratives,
including the quietly brilliant 2019 film Aise
Hee (Just Like That), offer a
perspective on the unexpectedly liberating possibilities of widowhood.
During a recent stint in a hospital room, I put on the
television at low volume, hoping to distract the slowly recuperating 70+ patient.
I searched fruitlessly for the things I knew he might enjoy – first for live
cricket, then the news in English, old Hollywood films, or perhaps a soothing
nature channel. But none of these seemed to be part of the already prohibitive ‘package’.
A hospital staff member walked in and said, as if solving a non-existent
problem: “
Uncle ke liye?
Arre bahut saare dhaarmik channel hain.”
How breezily we decide what the
old ought to like. I was reminded immediately of the astute, delightful 2019
film
Aise Hee, in which an old lady’s
desire for the simplest of things – a stroll by the riverside, an ice cream, or
just interesting company – raise eyebrows and then hackles across not just her
family but the neighbourhood and then the city. Written and directed by
debutant , the film received a Special Mention at Busan Film Festival and the
Film Critics Guild award at MAMI, while Mohini Sharma won MAMI’s Special Jury
Mention for Best Actor (Female) for her wonderful performance as an Allahabad-based
woman who rediscovers a taste for life after her husband of 52 years suddenly
dies.
For all our post-liberalisation
embrace of consumerism, for the vast majority of Indians choice remains an
illusion. The lives of old people, in particular, are regulated by a rack of
rigid social expectations that offer very little room for individual
expression. Of course, it's worse if you’re a woman. And if you’re a widow,
your last link to life’s everyday pleasures is deemed to have automatically
snapped when your husband dies – even in 21
st century India.
Some of this is simply an unthinking re-inscribing of deprivations ritually
visited upon caste Hindu widows for centuries – in a brutal early scene in
Aise Hee, a posse of younger female relatives
matter-of-factly divide up Mrs Sharma’s wardrobe of saris without even asking
her. It is simply assumed that she must exchange her
suhaagan colours for
vidhwa whites, or at least dull greys and beiges.
The widespread assumption is
that as a widow, she will continue the socially approved life she lived with
her husband – going for
paatth,
religious recitation, and attending the yoga circle in the neighbourhood park.
But she is simultaneously expected to curtail her existence, literally reduce
the space she takes up in the world. Her son, who lives on the ground floor of
the family house with his wife and children, takes it for granted that unlike
his father, his mother can be squeezed into one of the downstairs rooms while
the upper floor is rented out for some extra income. When his mother resists,
gently but firmly, in the direction of a quiet financial independence, even
dealing with bank passbooks herself, there is shock. When she actually buys an
air-conditioner for her own bedroom, there is outrage.
What makes
Aise Hee a joy to watch, though, are Mrs Sharma’s new friendships –
with an old neighbourhood tailor whom she persuades to teach her embroidery,
and later with a 20-something single woman she meets on the ghat. And what
Kislay’s subtle telling makes unmistakeably apparent is the extent to which
contemporary Indian society frowns on such one-on-one connections: cutting
across religion, gender and class in one instance (the tailor is Muslim), and
across age and class in the other (Sugandhi works in a beauty parlour and isn’t
a ‘respectable’ companion for an elderly widow).
Aise Hee reminded me
of a short story called
Compassionate
Grounds by Tanuj Solanki, part of his collection
Diwali
in Muzaffarnagar, in which an ageing
housewife whose husband has died worriedly contemplates the possibility of
taking up a compensatory job in his government office. “I’ve only read
Grihshobha and
Kadambini after
my BA. Not even the newspapers. The last time I dealt seriously with books was
when I could still help with you with homework,” she tells her 26-year-old
daughter. The documentary
About Love, which I wrote about last week in another context,
also featured a woman bemusedly describing how living with a dominant husband
seems to have stunted her brain. When I’m with him, says the filmmaker’s
fifty-something mother, I just do what he says.
Another powerful recent portrait
of a spirited old woman suffering the stultifying effects of marriage – and the
unexpected liberation afforded by widowhood – is Heena D’Souza’s short film
Adi Sonal,
which was the best part of last year’s anthology film
Shuruaat Ka Twist.
Neena Gupta is simply marvellous as a traditional, ritual-bound Sindhi
housewife who understands marriage as being about serving her husband – and
clearly expects her daughters-in-law to do the same. Until she doesn’t.
In an odd coincidence, in both
Adi Sonal and
Aise Hee,
there is a younger woman played by the same actor, the wonderful Trimala
Adhikari. In fact in all these narratives, we see the lives of the old partly
through the eyes of the young, which is perhaps a good way for young audiences
to empathise with the protagonists. But what we also see are the lives of the
young through the eyes of the old. And in those older eyes, there is
bafflement, curiosity, and sometimes envy.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Jan 2020.