Book Review: Anuja Chauhan's 'Club You To Death'

Decided to update the blog in the new year, with pieces I've written in the interim. This is a book review I did for Scroll in 2021 and hadn't put up here. Some of you might still find it of interest, especially since ACP Bhavani Singh's career continues with Anuja Chauhan's more recent book, The Fast and the Dead (Oct 2023).

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Anuja Chauhan’s new novel may be a whodunnit, but its people are its pleasure, as usual

In ‘Club You To Death’, the popular writer with a perfect ear for conversation uses crime as a vehicle to portray the ‘beautiful people’ of Delhi society.

Early in Those Pricey Thakur Girls, Anuja Chauhan’s thoroughly enjoyable novel set in 1980s Delhi, there’s a scene where the retired Justice LN Thakur and family pile into the khandaani Ambassador to see off their daughter Debjani aka Dabbu for her first day as a newsreader at DeshDarpan (an obvious fictional stand-in for Doordarshan). Chauhan’s latest book, set in present-day Delhi, opens with a charming display of similar familial intimacy, squabbling but deeply affectionate: the retired Brigadier Balbir Dogra and family, four generations “stuffed into a rattling, eight-year-old Maruti Swift”, head off to play Tambola.

The similarities don’t end there. In Thakur Girls, Debjani’s glamorous job (DD newsreaders were then the acme of fashion) had the family dhobi excited to iron her sari and the Bengali Market chaatwala refusing to charge for golguppas because he had seen “Baby” on TV. In Club You To Death, the fetching young lawyer Akash “Kashi” Dogra is flaunted proudly as a customer by his Nizamuddin street barber, plays cards with the drivers parked under his house and chats affably about politics with old security guards who call him Kashi Baba.

The feudal quotient is a smidgeon less – it is 2021, after all – and Chauhan has moved a teeny tiny bit leftward in the transition from Hailey Road to Nizamuddin, making her new protagonist a jhuggi-defending lawyer. But Kashi enjoys much the same cosy relationship with the world as Dabbu did. He’s just woke enough to express some discomfort with it.

The privileged insiders

With his rented shared barsati and JNU-trained activist-architect girlfriend, Kashi Dogra may think he’s stepped away from privilege. And maybe he has travelled some distance from studying at the Doon School and dating a rich industrialist’s daughter. But Chauhan is too smart a writer to let even her likeable hero rest on such self-congratulatory laurels. When Kashi judges someone for having made up a new name and identity, Chauhan is quick to have another character reflect privately “that it is only people with great privilege who can afford to think like this”.

In this obliviousness, ironically, Kashi is following in his father’s footsteps. Brigadier Dogra belongs to that class of people that’s more than comfortably off, with their children attending the best schools (often the same schools they themselves went to), swinging the best jobs (sporting the old school tie does no harm) and generally getting a much better shot at success than 99% of the rest of the population. But they remain convinced they’re not the elite, because – as Brigadier Dogra splutters “Elite people go to five-stars and seven-stars”.

The Dogras? They go to the club.

Anuja Chauhan’s heroes and heroines have always come from the tiny sub-section of India that’s privileged enough to measure its privilege in memberships rather than money. So it’s perfectly fitting that her new novel is set in an institution emblematic of that class: a club that sounds a lot like the Delhi Gymkhana, dealing with a political milieu that sounds a lot like the present.

Speaking the language

As always, Chauhan knows her characters inside-out, turning out pitch-perfect comic set-pieces where pretty much everyone comes in for some needling, from pompous military heroes to poor little rich girls from The Vasant Valley School. But almost everyone also gets a degree of understanding. It helps that Chauhan is adept at dialogue, rendering each character in a suitably Englished version of their specific Hindi-mixed lingo, endowed with just a little extra colour and cusswords.

“It’s my own fault! I was the one who had bete-ka-bukhaar, and kept hankering for a son in spite of having such lovely daughters!” says a posh Punjabi mother berating her loser of a son. “I wanted to tell him ki listen, behenchod, we have a huge-ass CSR wing and we do a lot!” rants an heiress defending herself against the charge of being rich and oblivious. “Banerjee, apne saand ko baandh [Tie up that bull of yours],” says the friendly male who’s text-warning a woman about her boyfriend’s seductive ex.

Ever the old advertising hand, Chauhan constantly ups the linguistic absurdity quotient in delicious little ways: old Brigadier Dogra insisting on calling his wife Mala-D; a line of sculpted semi-precious stone lingams being called Shiv-Bling, or a potential scandal involving an army hero getting hashtagged as “Fauji nikla Mauji! Hawji Hawji!”

The perfect outsider
In a gleeful departure from her previous work, though, Club You To Death serves up murder as the main course – of course, with a breathy little romance to make the medicine go down. The setting offers plenty of scope for political intrigue, classist snark and just plain gossip, and Chauhan sets to work with relish, plotting the crime onto all its possible social and cultural axes. For starters, the murder is committed on the day of the club elections, one of those sorts of events that occupies mindspace in a proportion inversely related to the power at stake.

The rival candidates, both insiders, seem equally keen on winning. But could either – the retired military hero or the classy female entrepreneur – really want the job enough to kill for it? Or is the murderer just trying to pin the blame on one of them?

Second, there’s the victim, with his own secrets. Was the dead Zumba instructor a self-made Robin Hood, or a devious social climber? Was he playing his rich clients, or were they playing him?

And finally, there’s the wider socio-political context: such unsavoury news doesn’t bode well for a club already in the bad books of Delhi’s new rulers (not least for its connections to the old ones). As new rivalries and old secrets tumble out of the DTC closet, the citadel of Lutyens’ Delhi privilege begins to seem rather doddering and vulnerable. It’s a clever trick – especially when we wonder if it’s just true.

Either way, having crafted this perfect insider atmosphere, Chauhan places the case (and us) in the hands of the perfect outsider. A policeman who’s upper caste and English-speaking but not quite Club Class, ACP Bhavani Singh is somehow observant enough to imagine other people’s compulsions, be they of caste, class, gender or something else. Instead of the Singham-variety cop “who makes the criminals piss their pants”, Bhavani makes “all the crooks leap up grinning, and ask him how his granddaughters are.”

Stolidly incorruptible, staunchly non-violent and persuasively gender-sensitive, the old Delhi Police officer feels even more like a form of wish-fulfilment than Chauhan’s dishy romantic heroes. So, of course, we dearly want to believe he might exist. Much of the pleasure of Club You To Death comes from watching the amicable old policeman piece the case together quietly, his “little grey cells” keen enough not to draw attention to himself.

Under the radar, as Chauhan well knows, is the best way to fly.

Published in Scroll, 10 April 2021.

How cinema uses the horror of train accidents to tell a story

My TOI Plus column: the last in my series on trains in Indian cinema.

 

Through Indian film history, trains have often delivered not just the thrill of danger, but all the terrifying finality of death.  

A screenshot from Do Anjaane (1976), in which the train holds the key to trauma -- and to release

Over the last few weeks, this column has touched on some superbly-realised visions of the Indian railways as bringing people together, including Gulzar's Kitaab, Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Sonar Kella, and most recently, Shyam Benegal's 1986 television series Yatra. But perhaps one reason why trains appear so frequently in cinema is that their visual and aural power can be harnessed as metaphors for both one kind of experience and its opposite. Trains may often produce a sense of comfort, continuity and kinship with strangers. But they are equally capable of evoking fear, horror and a sense of rupture. The railway accident is not just about physical trauma, but the terrible finality of endings.

The metaphor-laden vision of the train accident - the train as something that causes death – appears in Indian cinema as early as 1936. Achhut Kanya, made by the German director Franz Osten for Himanshu Rai's studio Bombay Talkies, featured established star (and Rai's wife) Devika Rani as the 'untouchable' heroine Kasturi, whose relationship with the Brahmin hero (Ashok Kumar, then an industry newbie) ends in tragedy on the railway tracks. An annotation on the archival film website cine.ma describes Achhut Kanya as “[a] circular story told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted with death in the form of the relentlessly linear railway engine”.

The film uses the train in multiple ways. It begins, for instance, with a husband and wife in a car, who are stopped at a railway crossing by a guard who insists that the hour before the train arrives, is a time of ghosts. Soon after, the couple find a little shrine to Kasturi nearby, and a local ascetic tells them the story of how she lived and died here – ie, the story of the film. Kasturi was the daughter of a railway crossing guard, and an early scene evokes her childish pride in her father's power to stop the train by waving the red flag. Stilted though the staging seems 85 years later, there's an undeniable pathos to the fact that the same railway guard's daughter dies trying to stop the train. One could extend that thought: If the train represents modernity, the 'achhut' girl's belief in it - and in her hold over it - fails her miserably.

The figure of the approaching train continues to be an agent of death, as I have written in previous weeks, in the films of Bimal Roy and Satyajit Ray. More than the accident, it is the possibility of suicide that appears in these narratives and many others throughout the middle decades of the 20^th century. Over and over again, young people driven to hopelessness by the harsh, relentless city, find themselves walking towards the train tracks, or climbing the stairs to a railway bridge to fling themselves off it.

By the 1970s, as I've argued earlier, the association between trains and violence becomes an increasingly common motif, at least in Hindi films. Trains conjure up both the excitement of speed and the horror of accidental death, making them a thriller staple. The technological fantasy suggested by a film like Parwana reached a kind of acme (or nadir) in The Burning Train (1980), an action thriller-disaster film about the creation and sabotage of “the fastest train in India”. But the violent train scene from that decade that has stayed with me from watching it as a child is Dulal Guha's Do Anjaane (1976), in which the duplicitous Prem Chopra pushes his friend (Amitabh Bachchan) off a moving train, to aid his romance with his friend's ambitious wife (Rekha).

Watching Do Anjaane again this week (while trying to ignore its deeply misogynistic take on women's ambitions), I found that the film is actually built around train-related trauma. It starts with a rather smug Bachchan drinking and driving alone. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a train approaches. It seems to be coming right at him. He lets out a scream and swerves wildly, hitting a tree. As he is revived after the accident, we learn that he had lost his memory from the previous trauma of his brush with death. The encounter with another speeding train triggers its return six years later – and leads to a complex revenge plot, in which that murder attempt is recreated for a Bengali film called Raater Train ('The Night Train').

In 2007, Sriram Raghavan made a thriller called Johnny Gaddaar, crammed with cinematic references, including a long quotation, from Parwana: The train scene. Like Bachchan in that film, Neil Nitin Mukesh in Johnny Gaddaar commits a crime whose success depends on getting on and off trains, cars and planes. But in Johnny Gaddaar, the crime itself involves treacherously pushing his friend Shiva off a train - unlike Parwana, but like Do Anjaane.

 

After Shiva's disfigured corpse is found, the gang wonders how a strong man like him was physically overpowered and killed. Or was he killed at all? In the 1957 classic Pyaasa, a beggar's disfigured corpse on the train tracks is taken for the hero Vijay (Guru Dutt), letting him stage his demise. No-one cites Do Anjaane or Pyaasa in JG. But first the murderer's fear and then the others' suspicion that Shiva isn't actually dead suggest a long film-steeped history -- for the characters, and the filmmaker.

Sometimes, as in Achhut Kanya, the train feels like destiny – you rush towards it, imploringly, but it does not stop. And sometimes you manage to turn away at the very last instant -- as with Kishore Kumar in Naukri, or the incredible Pyaasa scene where the world-weary Vijay ponders the train tracks, but then crosses over safely, unlike the ill-fated beggar behind him. The train passes, only the wind stings your cheeks, and it feels like fate has not yet come for you. 

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Jun 2021 and TOI Plus, 5 Jun 2021.

The train ride as a technological fantasy

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:

In popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still content to live in the dream.

Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in Indian cinema starts to appear as a space of sophistication and luxury. Whether in 'art films' like Satyajit Ray's Nayak (which I mentioned last week), or a full-on commercial Hindi film like the racy Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train, the upper class railway compartment represents high standards of comfort and hospitality. This is true despite the fact that Ray, ever the realist, has a senior Calcutta executive in Nayak express annoyance that he can't even get a beer on the AC Deluxe Express (precursor of the Poorva Express, the train between Calcutta and Delhi before the Rajdhani Express came along three years later in 1969). (The fellow isn't entirely to blame for hoping, given how much the train pantry car echoes the atmosphere at one of Calcutta's Anglophone clubs, where no evening would flow without alcohol.) He gets a Coke instead, though the waiter only comprehends when told “Coca Cola”. Still, the service on these filmi trains is polite, English-comprehending and very classy -- restaurant-like, in an era when few people ate out often. There is also a degree of fascination with waiting rooms and railway restaurants: places you could only access as a passenger on the long-distance train network. The murders on the Calcutta Mail in The Train hinge on one passenger being seduced away from the coupe by the prospect of a meal at the railway restaurant with a sashaying Nanda.

MK Raghavendra and others have marked that the train in the 1950s and 60s often mapped onto the idea of India – such films as Bimal Roy's 1955 Devdas, whose nationwide journeying hero I have mentioned in another context, but also nationalist films with train songs depicting children: 'Aao bacchon tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustan ki' from Jagriti (1954) and 'Nanha-munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' from Mehboob Khan's Son of India (1962).

It is true that even in those decades, trains were occasionally linked to crime: murder in Shart and smuggling in Aar Paar (both 1954), not to mention the goofy Half Ticket (1962) with Kishore Kumar as the comic hero who becomes an unsuspecting mule for stolen diamonds on a train to Bombay.

But as Akshay Manwani suggested in a 2015 article, it was really in the 1970s, with films like The Train, Shor (1972) and Do Anjaane (1976) that the thriller element begins to dominate Hindi cinema's portrayal of trains. Speed, danger and the accident ally with the sense of danger that comes with being isolated in a train compartment, often miles away from the nearest outpost of the law. You can easily kill a man on a train – or, as in Do Anjaane, push him off it – with no witness, and the police will only arrive much later, in another place. The moving train is a world unto itself.

For me, though, the film that exemplifies this marvellous sense of excitement about trains comes right at the start of decade: the 1971 Parwana, directed by Jyoti Swaroop (who also made Padosan and ought to be much better known). It is perhaps best remembered for Amitabh Bachchan's performance as one of Hindi cinema's earliest jealous lovers: his tall, serious Kumar is scarily believable as the brooding artist whose romantic obsession crosses over into violent vengefulness. But it also displays some unusual detailing for a commercial Hindi film of its time, not just in its liberal characters, but with regard to things like characters' surnames, dates and place-names. The camera often zooms into print on screen, from a wedding cards to a 'No Photography Allowed' sign at Nagpur Airport (yes, cheeky!).

The train-related plot on which the film hinges involves a court case in which the wrong man and the heroine's true love (Navin Nischol) is charged for a murder that Amitabh Bachchan -- the jilted lover and real murderer – apparently could not have committed. Why? Because he was on a train at the time. The film's revelatory flashback sequence – with a stylish Bachchan striding through streets and stations and staircases in his coat, dark glasses and muffler (here the detailing goes for a toss, since this is meant to be Bombay in August) – shows just how he did it (spoiler alert). He used the train – but he also used a plane.

Watching Parwana in the midst of India's horrifyingly mishandled Covid-19 second wave, when the breakdown of our sorely limited health, transport and digital infrastructure is on full display, I was struck by the film's deep belief in functioning infrastructure. Parwana's murder plot is planned and executed flawlessly because -- in the film – trains run exactly on time, flights land and take off smoothly, taxis and public telephones can be found exactly when and where they are needed. The reference to television in a light early scene is as much a part of this vision – remember this is 1971, and TV transmission had not even reached Bombay till 1972.

Parwana, like many Hindi train films of the 1970s, is really a fantasy about technology and infrastructure. Tragically, our tendency to believe in the fantasy of our technological achievements remains alive and well in 2021, at the great human cost of reality.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 16 May 2021

Darkness and death in the Indian Jungle

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The pitch-black vision of Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning 2008 novel about class finds new audiences with a streaming film adaptation.

The White Tiger, currently the most watched film on a major streaming platform in India, features a protagonist born at the bottom of the country's social pyramid (not counting gender). Balram Halwai belongs to what Aravind Adiga, in the bestselling 2008 novel on which the film is based, calls “the Darkness”. “India is two countries in one: An India of Light, and an India of Darkness,” says Balram in the book, going on to elaborate a geographical basis for the divide, centred on water. Wherever the river Ganga flows, he says, that area is the Darkness – while every place in India that is near the ocean is well-off, in the Light.

 

Adiga names Balram's village Laxmangarh, and refers to Dhanbad and Gaya as the nearby towns, the places where men from the village go to seek work, or catch trains to cities further away: Calcutta, Delhi. But of course each time Balram speaks of the Darkness, the term conjures up something more than mere location. It encapsulates the desperate poverty that is the norm in a village like Laxmangarh, the entrenched hierarchy that makes sure that the backbreaking labour of men like Balram's father feeds the bellies of men like Ashok's father.

 

Ashok -- whose car Balram drives, and whose life choices he judges every day, even as he also aspires to them. “Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste,” says Balram scathingly of his master, who does very little about his oft-stated desire to change the future of India. The America-returned son of Laxmangarh's most exploitative landlord (nicknamed the Stork), Ashok is far too good for his own good. He has married his Indian-American girlfriend Pinky, who isn't of his caste, and who might even be Christian -- and his egalitarian ways do not sit well with his position atop the hierarchy. He is constantly trying to prevent Balram from opening doors for him, trying to make him sit next to him on a sofa, and generally experimenting with the radical idea of the servant's humanity.

 

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about another film in which, too, a US-returned Indian employer breaks the rules about how to behave with our servants. The exemplary hope of Rohena Gera's finely wrought narrative is that a man might actually fall in love with his domestic help.

 

In Ramin Bahrani's cinematic adaptation of his old friend Adiga's novel, the erotic and emotional charge of the master-servant relationship remains beneath the surface. But watching Balram attach himself to Ashok like a faithful puppy -- thrilled to be able to serve him well and distraught when his overtures are rejected -- one has no doubt that the charge exists. When a distraught Pinky abandons ship, Balram and Ashok are thrown back even more upon each other, creating unprecedented closeness – and thus also unprecedented distaste. In one remarkable scene, Balram goes instantaneously from cradling the drunken Ashok to slapping him, with some glee, when he passes out. It's a short journey, it seems, from worriedly trying to revive his master with nimbu pani to sprawling on his couch and drinking his whiskey.

 

Adiga articulated that strange intimacy well, and Bahrani excels in this section. In Pinky's absence, Balram determines to “be a wife” to his master – which apparently involves not letting him drink, and keeping his spirits up. But then Ashok's elder brother arrives to take charge of him, and brings rejection in his wake. Ashok goes from being grateful for Balram's company to swatting him away. Suddenly the servant's advice is too stupid, his attentions too cloying. A similar fluctuation happens with others, too; whenever an employer needs the servant, he is wooed and flattered, embraced, called a part of the family.

 

The grateful servant preens, at first. But this is intimacy conducted on one person's terms. And so the servant, powerless though he is, slowly discovers the weapons of the weak. In The White Tiger, Balram goes from being what the coarse-tongued caretaker of the building's netherworld of a basement calls his master's 'faithful dog', to a faithless cheat who realises he must take what he can get. The dehati chuha, the country mouse, learns the ways of the city. But even those petty ways – picking up other paying customers, invoicing fake repairs, siphoning off petrol -- are a fraction of what would be needed to actually bring the servant anywhere near the level of the master.

 

And so intimacy is corroded by duplicitousness. “Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love? Or do we love them, behind a facade of loathing?” muses Balram. Adiga/Bahrani's is a much darker vision of cross-class relationships than Rohena Gera's. That's the thing, though – Sir imagines bridging India's vast social gap with love, The White Tiger with crime. For the vast majority of India, both options remain fantasies.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 31 Jan, 2021.

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.

The Lives of Others

Watching Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 murder mystery, in a post-COVID world 

“The movies make us into voyeurs. We sit in the dark, watching other people's lives. It is the bargain the cinema strikes with us, although most films are too well-behaved to mention it,” wrote the hugely popular film critic Roger Ebert in his 1999 review of the film Peeping Tom. Michael Powell's film caused great outrage upon its release in 1960, and Ebert speculated — nearly 40 years later — that it was because it broke that unspoken contract between the audience and the filmmaker. By making its protagonist a serial killer who liked to film his victims in the throes of death, Peeping Tom forced viewers to contend with the violence of our own scopophilia, the pleasure we derive from looking.

Six years before Peeping Tom, another British director had made a film about the pleasure of looking, featuring a news photographer instead of a film studio focus-puller. But Alfred Hitchcock was too clever to make his audiences too uncomfortable. The kernel of Rear Window (1954) lay in a 1942 Cornell Woolrich short story called 'It Had To Be Murder', where the temporarily laid-up narrator's view of the windows across from his own leads him to suspect a murder. “I could have constructed a timetable of [my neighbours'] comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom,” concedes Woolrich's narrator, before quickly denying any intentional voyeurism. “That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea.”

Hitchcock's hero doesn't get let off so easily. Within the film's first few minutes, his no-nonsense nurse Stella berates him as a 'window shopper' who spends his days looking at newly married couples and “bikini bombshells”. Stella has no doubt that spying on other people is a modern-day evil: “We've become a race of Peeping Toms. They used to poke your eyes out for that sort of thing, with a red-hot poker...” . But Hitchcock, along with his superb screenwriter John Michael Hayes', transforms the original story to make his hero a professional viewer of the world — and his film all about looking.

LB Jefferies, better known as Jeff (James Stewart) is a globe-trotting photographer who's fractured his leg on a particularly adventurous shoot. When the film opens, he has been holed up in his New York apartment for five weeks, with nothing better to do than look out of his rear window. While he converts these telling glimpses of his neighbours into stories — and in Hitchcock's unspoken self-referential extension, into cinematic fictions complete with a plot — Jeff himself is never seen. Or at least, he tries his best to ensure that he isn't: wheeling his chair back, keeping his lights off, even hiding at opportune moments. Not really the usual style of a cinematic hero.

There is all sorts of genius in this Hitchcock treatment, starting with the fact that Jeff thinks of himself as being of generally superior intellect to others in his locality. He does have an interest in the outside world, but usually it is reserved for distant places that impinge on his consciousness only in some headline-making way — when his editor calls to propose a trip to Kashmir because the “place is about to go up in flames”, Jeff's excited response is “Didn't I tell you that's the next place to watch?”. His immediate vicinity he thinks of as dull, lulling us into that assumption — and also making us feel a little guilty about the voyeuristic gaze that seeks excitement.

Dullness appears to be a problem both for those outside relationships and those in them. One single female neighbour — Jeff calls her Miss Lonelyheart — often drinks herself to sleep. But her efforts to date are ill-fated, too: we watch one much-awaited young man thrust himself on her as soon as the front door is closed. Another single woman — Stella's 'bikini bombshell', named 'Miss Torso' by our hero — has no shortage of male admirers, but none of them looks worth having. A single male songwriter above Miss Torso seems equally starved for love.

Meanwhile the couples lead lives of sweetly boring domesticity, or else bitter conflict — the sort that can lead to murder. Our hero himself has a girlfriend most men would have killed for, Grace Kelly as a model called Lisa Fremont who appears on the covers of magazines, but he isn't happy either. He thinks she isn't cut out for marriage to someone like him, who spends weeks on the road in rough places. “If she was only ordinary,” Jeff whines to Stella. We're meant to see that Lisa's Park Avenue perfection and high fashionista status is dull as ditchwater to Jeff: once he even asks what her cocktail companion was wearing, only to ruthlessly mock her reply.

Alfred Hitchcock lets Jeff tell many an uncle joke about nagging wives and the sad fate of husbands. But Rear Window can also be seen as undercutting Jeff's rather comfortable narrative: the rough-and-ready adventurer remains tied to his chair till film's end, while the exquisitely-turned-out Lisa does all the mystery-solving legwork, even putting herself at risk. Lisa's physical fearlessness is what finally impresses Jeff — he seems to think he's kindled her sense of adventure. And of course, Jeff's fracture literally bars him from legwork. Even so, his reliance entirely on visual tricks is fascinating: even when the murderer walks into his room, all Jeff can think of as a weapon is a battery-operated flashlight to blind him temporarily. And it's definitely possible to read Rear Window in a way that sees Jeff's immobility as emasculation, and emasculation as marriage — Hitchcock's hero ends the film with both legs in a cast and firmly embedded in traditional coupledom.

Rear Window is a ridiculously apposite watch for a post-COVID world, where travel for travel's sake seems to have gone, well, out the window. For one, Lisa's attitude turns the perfect side-eye upon Jeff's grandstanding travel stories. Other aspects of the film ring even truer in an era in which rising authoritarianism and the ubiquity of social media, combined with pandemic-enforced isolation, is pushing us more and more into the once socially dubious roles of the lurker, the invisible spectator in the dark. On our screens and off them, stalking and surveillance have greater currency than ever before. Stella's “homespun wisdom” — from a 1939 Reader's Digest — seems almost poetic in its appropriateness: “What people ought to do is get outside their own houses and look in for a change.”

Published in Firstpost, 25 Oct 2020

In the dark of the night

My Mirror column:

The absorbing Raat Akeli Hai stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a UP cop learning a little about himself as he unravels a web of murderous intrigue

Radhika Apte in a still from the atmospheric new murder mystery Raat Akeli Hai

The shaadi ka ghar has been a favoured backdrop for the dramatic unfolding of countless Hindi film romances, but it’s likely never been the setting for a murder mystery. Nor has the ubiquitous wedding video been turned into evidence for a police investigation before. Honey Trehan’s slow-burn directorial debut Raat Akeli Hai does both things with delicious conviction, giving us an atmospheric whodunit that feels deeply embedded in the dystopic state of Uttar Pradesh. What makes the film even more satisfying is that Trehan – a long-time casting director who has done films with Vishal Bhardwaj, Meghna Gulzar and Abhishek Chaubey – casts Nawazuddin Siddiqui as his detective hero, and places his unmarriedness centrestage.

Saddled with the near-giggleworthy name of Jatil (literally ‘complex’) Yadav, Siddiqui’s plain-speaking Kanpuriya cop is introduced as a man with some complexes of his own. We first set eyes on him in a photograph that his mother (the effortlessly watchable Ila Arun) is trotting out at a wedding, attempting to convince a female guest that her son is an eligible match. The fair-skinned young woman has her spangly sari draped over a spaghetti strap blouse, but her views on skin colour remain hopelessly unreconstructed. “Rang saaf nahi hai (His complexion isn't clear),” she says, dismissing Jatil at a glance. “Par mann saaf hai (But his heart is),” says Arun, turning away only to be accosted by her embarrassed and angry son.

But while we might sympathise with the fact that Jatil’s dark skin makes him an inferior candidate in a world where Ajay Devgn is the exception that proves the rule, his own views on women reveal a rather muddy mann. “Did you see the clothes she was wearing?” he says to his mother. “I just want a susheel girl.” As the film unfolds, however, Jatil’s socially-learned disgust for the sexually independent woman (“Tumhare jaisi aurat ko apne paas phatakne bhi na dein”) clashes often with his simultaneous attraction to what he acknowledges as courage and honesty.

And no wonder, given the rarity of a “saaf mann” in RAH's grim world. In a scenario with several shades of last year’s Hollywood crime comedy Knives Out, Jatil is called upon to investigate the murder of the patriarch of a well-off family whose members seem not to like each other very much, and who might all have had motives to kill him. Knives Out hid its sharp politics under parodic excess. Here Trehan and cinematographer Pankaj Kumar (Haider, Tumbadd) create a brilliantly atmospheric web of oppressive rooms and half-lit corridors to match a much darker milieu that feels true to present-day North India: corrupt, power-hungry, sexually exploitative and two-faced. When our hero gets there, the terrace and balconies are still lit up for the wedding that has just taken place, of the widowed dead man to his much younger mistress. And the sight of the new wife Radha (Radhika Apte, looking the part but never completely inhabiting it), still in her wedding finery, sitting in her upstairs room with a ghunghat half covering her face, is very much part of the filmi marriage fantasy (from Mother India to Kabhi Kabhie to Tanu Weds Manu) that RAH both evokes and toys with.

What Trehan and his exceptional screenwriter Smita Singh do with elan is to make that image of the marriageable woman the film's recurring subtext. The dogged small-town detective whose Achilles’ Heel is attractive women has been with us at least since Polanski’s Chinatown. Here the mirage-like quality of Siddiqui’s first sight of Radha also reminds one of Manorama Six Feet Under, Navdeep Singh’s 2007 adaptation of Chinatown. But while our cop hero may have a soft spot for the supposed femme fatale, almost everyone else (in the family and beyond) has already decided that she must be the murderess. “Woh ladies rijha rahi hai aapko (She's seducing you),” Siddiqui's colleague says knowingly. When Siddiqui protests that she barely gives him the time of day, the colleague pounces on him with the sort of unsustainable circular logic that otherwise rational men single women out for: “That's exactly it! That's how women seduce you, by not giving you attention.”

The slow accretion of words and images creates a dark picture of this skewed world, in which women are damned if they don't – and certainly damned if they do. From Siddiqui's “duffer” colleague to the dead man's feckless but good looking “hero-type” heir, every man in town is out to make a sanskaari match, while secretly lusting after women whose attraction is precisely that they're not 'wife material'. “Baazaaru se gharelu hone ka safar kitna kathin hai aapko maloom hai?” asks the politician Munna Raja (Aditya Srivastava). And yet the gharelu women, who've won the supposed big prize of marriage and respectability, can end up more patriarchal than the men, resorting to ever-lower measures to guard their practically nonexistent turf.

Faced with this intriguing cocktail of lust and revenge, our UP policeman hero presents himself as “not such a low-level man”. Jatil's striving for moral fibre is real, and yet it is also clear that he must operate within the system as it currently exists. And that system is one where the extra-legal has become the norm, where it is a public secret that only a saffron-hued MLA can risk owning a tannery, and an inconvenient cop is as easily 'encountered' as an out-of-favour gangster. In this post-procedure world, even being a stickler for truth can now mean finding extra-legal ways to uncover it. Whether it's marriage or murder, the show must go on. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 Aug 2020.

Book Review: The Dark Hours

I reviewed the new translation of a 97-year-old Bengali book, for India Today magazine.

A 1923 bhadralok account of Calcutta's seamy side is sociological and voyeuristic by turns.

In 1842, chief magistrate J.H. Patton drew up an elaborate plan to rid Calcutta of crime. Splitting the city geographically into upper, middle and lower divisions, Patton appointed 300 constables to the police in each. Their daytime duties were not unexpected, “preventing breaches of the peace, arresting persons against whom a hue and cry has been raised, ...drunk and disorderly persons and fakeers, and others making an obscene and disgusting exposure of their persons...” But at night, the constables were instructed to “on no account allow any person to pass along the streets or highways with a bundle, box or package after nightfall, without stopping him and examining the contents of his load...”. Night, it seemed, made everyone a suspect. The just-arrived rural migrant was to be treated as a potential burglar, or, at the very least, immoral. The city after dark was by definition illicit, a place of danger and debauchery.

In 1923, a well-known writer of Bangla detective fiction and children’s literature set out to map that city in words. Eighty years after Patton’s attempted clean-up, Calcutta had only grown in size, complexity and criminality. While claiming literary inspiration from Kaliprasanna Sinha’s irreverent 1862 urban classic Hutum Penchar Naksha, Hemendra Kumar Roy also insisted that his eyewitness account of the city’s seamier side would warn “[f]athers of young boys and girls where and what the real dangers are”. But the fact that Roy published Raater Kolkata under a pseudonym suggests he knew how his “adult male audience” would read it.

Recently translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri as Calcutta Nights, Raater Kolkata is fascinating as a document of the 20th century city, but also for the tightrope it walks between salacious gossip and moral censure. The level of detail varies, from pure urban legend (e.g. women “from the western or north western part of the country” being sexually serviced by hired men in empty houses “on the banks of the Ganga, in the Barabazar area”) to descriptions that seem to draw on long observation.

Prostitution, for instance, is subdivided by race, class and location, from the Chowringhee hackney carriages that “take you to a white-skinned beauty”, to Jorabagan streets in winter, where poor sex workers stand “when the pye-dogs have also vanished”. The bhadralok in Roy clearly takes pride in his first-person exploits: entering an opium den in old Chinatown, escaping a police raid on a Mechhobazar goondas’ den, watching two sanyasinis fight it out at the Nimtola burning ghat. But it is in his descriptions of urban commingling, Durga Puja processions, or the theatre, that the anxieties of the upper caste male truly come to the fore. This is a book to be read as a sociological comment as much on the city as on its author.

Published in India Today, 1 Aug 2020.

Home viewing in times of quarantine

My Mirror column:

Everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home

It’s the third week of lockdown in India, and quarantine is having an odd effect on my film viewing. I don't know if it’s me, or the universe conspiring in some strange serendipity, but almost everything I watch these days seems to be speaking to the current moment. One theme that jumps out at me, film upon film, is our relationship to the idea of home. Home is a place where you feel safe – until you don’t. The other day, on a popular streaming platform, I stumbled upon Darren Aronofsky’s much-discussed (and frequently dissed) Mother! (stylised as mother!), a film I had missed when it came out in 2017. In the talky aftermath of the film’s release, Aronofsky went to some lengths to ‘explain’ his spooky, eventually grisly film as a Biblical allegory for the rape and torment of ‘Mother Earth’ by ‘God’, while other characters stand in for Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel.

I have to confess that the Judaeo-Christian analyses baffled me, because I found Mother! entirely intelligible (all right, not entirely!) as a film about domesticity and its dangers. Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence play a couple living in a large and glorious old house. He spends all his time as writers often do, failing to write, while she cooks and cleans and continues the laborious process of restoring the unfinished house. Lawrence is an unbelievable combination of picture-perfect and extremely hands-on: her flowing hair piled into an artfully messy bun as she mixes new shades of wall paint, or conjures up meals that her husband pronounces “perfect” while making polite noises about how she didn’t have to make so many things. The dynamic between them is strained; her obsession with a private paradise is clearly not sparking his creativity. The more she tries to create the perfect space in which the two of them can live happily ever after, the more avidly he tries to invite the outside world in.

The first to arrive is a man who claims to be a great fan of the man’s previous book. Then his wife, his squabbling sons, and then more and more strangers arrive, until the house is overrun. As the ‘guests’ go from admiring and raucous to irresponsible and downright dangerous, the film walks a brilliant tightrope between possible ways in which we might see this. Is the woman overly anxious, closed off and selfish and the man generous, open, free-flowing? Or is he the selfish one, and she the victim? A pandemic that has us all panicking at the idea of strangers in our homes seemed to me to throw Mother! into a whole new light.

Then the night before last, on another streaming platform, I watched a Japanese film called Domains, directed by Natsuka Kusano. The 2019 film is a marvellous formal experiment that likely isn’t for everyone. A mild-mannered policeman reads out the confession of a woman called Aki who has drowned her old friend’s little daughter. From there, we move on to a series of scenes in which three actors – playing the woman, her friend and her friend’s husband – repeatedly rehearse the lines for what might be the film. Except, of course, this is the film.

For some two and a half hours, we almost never leave the bare room in which the actors sit. When we do, what we see is a near-empty city: roads almost free of traffic, a strangely quiet metro.

A more uncanny resonance with our time comes from the characters’ preoccupation with creating a space in which they feel safe. “Nodoka seemed stifled to maintain the comfort of the house. Naoto, on the other hand, treasured his home so much that he seemed to be keeping everyone out except his family,” remembers Aki. The ‘domain' created by the couple and their daughter is, for Aki, a rival to the one she shared with Nodoka in childhood, a magical “kingdom of chairs and sheets” that only the two of them could enter.

The husband, Naoto, on the other hand, feels visibly threatened by Aki’s being so at home with his wife. When he tells Aki to stop coming over because his daughter has caught a fever in her excitement, Aki responds angrily: “So you think I'm some kind of virus, don’t you?”

Naoto regulates everything, from his wife’s smoking to the humidity and temperature of the house. “I do want to feel safe. I need to protect my family,” he says peevishly. And yet, safe is exactly what they are not in the end. Control can backfire, just as much as openness.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 12 Apr 2020

Hairy Situations

My Mirror column:

A new film casts Jennifer Aniston as a New York City hairdresser caught up in a very European murder, making our columnist think about another fictional hairdresser embroiled in another murder

Jennifer Aniston as a hairdresser in the recent film Murder Mystery

Kyle Newacheck’s Murder Mystery (on Netflix) is an affectionate takedown of the genre, mixing comedy with thrills – and caricatures with characters – in a way that feels surprisingly satisfying. An ordinary New York couple called Nick and Audrey Spitz (Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston) land in the midst of a European murder that’s equal parts hamming and high intrigue.

The setting, a high-volume homage to all those Agatha Christie plots with a cast of suspects stuck on a train or in a country house, is a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with the first murder taking place while all the guests are literally present in the same room. There’s a charming viscount with a perfect jawline; there’s his sultry young Japanese ex-girlfriend who’s recently dumped him for his ancient uncle; there's the uncle himself, a millionaire with a mane of white hair that doesn't make up for his shrivelledness. There’s the obligatory colonel, updated from the moustachioed white man with a past in India to a black man who once lost an eye saving the millionaire’s life. There’s the colonel’s bodyguard, Sergei, a hulk made more forbidding by his refusal to make conversation. There’s a preening actress, a racing car driver, and the millionaire’s unhappy unsatisfactory son. Just as soon as we’ve met everyone, the millionaire announces his intention to disinherit everyone present in favour of his new bride – and is promptly murdered. Enter the other necessary stock character: a detective with a French accent and a high opinion of himself, a la Hercule Poirot.

Screenwriter James Vanderbilt (of Zodiac fame) keeps things zippy and droll, making Nick and Audrey prime suspects for a murder we know they haven't committed – and that they now need to solve in order to save themselves. The film is good fun at this level. But alongside the US-Europe jokes – the NYPD cop converting from dollars as he tips a caricaturish butler, or wearing shorts to the banquet on board yacht – I enjoyed the film for the oddly believable married couple at the centre, with their totally believable US-style quarrels over brands of allergy medication and anniversary gifts. Sandler, as a cop who's failed the detective test three times and taken to keeping that fact from his wife, surprised me with a sense of unspoken vulnerability. But Aniston, as his frustrated hairdresser wife waiting for the European honeymoon he promised her 15 years ago, surprised me more.

We first meet Audrey in the salon where she works, bonding with female clients over the unromanticness of men. As the film moves along, Vanderbilt gives Aniston a more sharply defined sense of unfulfilled aspirations. While her husband snores beside her, Audrey is the one who sneaks into business class and befriends a flirtatious viscount. When he invites the couple to his uncle's yacht in lieu of their tour bus, Nick flies off the handle, thinking it's an Indecent Proposal moment. And yet Nick is supposedly the practical one, the 'real cop' to Audrey's naive murder mystery fiend. The more earnestly his wife throws herself into her honeymoon-turned-adventure, the more he undercuts her: “This is what I do for a living, sweetheart – you're a goddam hairdresser!” Nick apologises quickly after, but the barb sticks. “Look who figured it out, the hairdresser!” Audrey taunts him later.

Kirsten Dunst as the hairdresser Peggy Blomquist in the crime series Fargo (2015)

Watching Audrey reminded me of another hairdresser in another sort of narrative: Kirsten Dunst's fabulous 2015 performance as Peggy Blomquist in the second season of the magisterial crime drama Fargo. Peggy, too, is a woman in a marriage and a life that doesn't quite live up to her desires. Her husband's only dream is to own the butcher shop in their small town. Peggy, meanwhile, thinks she has great style, hoards fashion magazines and is increasingly obsessed with a self-discovery workshop recommended by her beauty salon boss. Like Audrey and Nick, Peggy and her husband find themselves caught up in an increasingly surreal murder case. Fargo's iteration of this is of course chilling, not funny. Peggy's response, which is to start to imagine that expensive course as the bridge to an all-new life, is chilling, too. Murder Mystery makes Audrey's aspirationalness much more familiar, as in a hilarious scene when her budget fashionista self is mocked: “Your shoes still have a sticker from Marshalls,” sneers the Japanese heiress holding them at gunpoint. “They have name brands now,” says Nick defensively, even as Audrey scrambles to take the sticker off.

Is there something about hairdressers that makes them such evocative carriers of the unfulfilled American dream? We don't, in either Murder Mystery or Fargo, see very much of Audrey or Peggy at work, but it is as if they carry deep within themselves the desire for the makeover. The transformative hairdos they give other women are a gift they would love to receive themselves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 

In the name of a cause

Second part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Almost unconsciously, Delhi Crime puts its finger on the disconnect between the police and the public. (The second of a two-part column)

The worst written character in Delhi Crime is not one of the rapists. Richie Mehta's fictional depiction of the December 16, 2012 gang-rape gives the six men a rationale. Jai Singh, the driver of the bus as well as of the crime, gets to speak of his own motivations, however misguided. He had become 'unstable' after his wife died, unable to bear the sight of happy couples. 

As for the five younger men (including his own brother), they saw him as their leader, whose uncontrollable temper they knew not to get in the way of. Mehta and his co-scriptwriters resist the temptation to vilify them, instead giving us a remarkably sympathetic sense of their milieu – their poverty, the instability of their working lives, their attachment to their mothers and to family honour, so much so that they would rather be arrested quietly than face a public shaming. 

A long monologue by the series' bespectacled philosopher-cop, Sudhir Kumar (Gopal Dutt Tiwari, superb), offers a decent pop-psychological explanation for their actions: socio-economic deprivation set against a growing consumer culture, deep-rooted patriarchal assumptions about women running amok in a swiftly changing urban environment, in the absence of either sex education or gender equality.

But Delhi Crime affords no such explanation to the protestors. It doesn't help that the character who represents an entire city in tumult is the daughter of the DCP in charge of the case: a protected, spoilt, clueless teenager with the irritatingly alliterative name of Chandni Chaturvedi. Yashaswini Dayama is a good actor (she plays the funky teenage neighbour in both Phobia and Made in Heaven) but she cannot save this character, made up of so many stereotypes as to be downright unsympathetic. 

Chandni hates Delhi. She has grown up in it, but doesn't feel of it. She spends all her time glued to various screens. She is so alienated from her surroundings that her mother Vartika (the show's DCP protagonist) has requested two weeks' time in which to show her “the good side of Delhi” so that she stops clamouring to go off to firang lands for college.

To make Chandni stand in for the thousands of people who came out on to the streets that fateful December, to march and shout and weep and stand in solidarity with Jyoti Singh and with each other, is to not only support an establishmentarian politics that reads public criticism as a rejection of the city/country, but also to be utterly clueless about what the Nirbhaya protests meant. This cluelessness lies, unfortunately, at the very foundation of Delhi Crime. 

The show's dismissive, cynical attitude to protest emerges first in the way that Vartika eyerolls at a knot of students beginning to assemble outside Vasant Vihar Police Station. “Yeh lo, in students ko extracurricular activity mil gayi. They'll sit, soak in the sunshine, in the name of a cause. If they're lucky, they'll get on to TV. Aur is sab mein hamari lag jayegi,” says Shefali Shah's character to her subordinate Bhupender. “Yeh log itni jaldi signboards kaise banwa lete hain?” Bhupender responds on cue. Then the two of them chortle, as if they've made the funniest joke in the world. But really, if this is how disconnected the police are from the public they serve, then the joke is on them.

In another giveaway moment, an unnamed young policewoman working to deal with the gathering crowds at India Gate says to her colleague Neeti (Rasika Dugal), “Ek case ke liye itna sab? Ho kya gaya hai yaar?” The scene ties the quiet gravity of Neeti's response to an accident of circumstance: Neeti just happens to be in personal contact with the survivor. If she hadn't had that chance, the series suggests, she might well have been as baffled as the other young policewoman, untouched by the fervour that had taken hold of thousands of people her age, and her gender.

In turning the Nirbhaya case into a police procedural, the  makers of Delhi Crime have somehow missed the incredible power of that moment in our national life. The heightened public response that the show seems only to comprehend as a measure of the heinousness of the rape, the baffling crowd that must be dispersed as it gets 'dangerously' close to the PMO on a day when there are preparations to receive the Russian president at Hyderabad House, was not about “just one case”. True, there was something extraordinary about the violence, but there have been equally terrible rapes before and since (a point the show makes, again in bafflement).

But there was much more about the case that made it the symbolic epicentre of a vast spontaneous uprising, the spark that set a tinderbox city on fire: the young lower middle class physiotherapy student from a Hindi-speaking family who'd gone out to watch an English film, in one of the city's recently built malls, with a boy who may or may not have been her boyfriend. 

Each of those who protested that bleak, cold December drew from the not-yet-dead Jyoti Singh courage to wage our collective ongoing battles. We congregated in the streets to demand the equal rights to life and love and freedom that our cities will not award us without a fight. If we soaked in any sunshine, it was of our own making.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 April 2019.

(Read the first part of this column here.)

A blinkered vision

First part of my two-part Mirror column on Delhi Crime:

Delhi Crime's retelling of the 'Nirbhaya' investigation is gripping. But it sees things so completely through police eyes that it can sometimes feel deliberately blind.

For me, the most revealing moment in Delhi Crime arrived a day or so into the Netflix series’ recreation of how the Delhi Police apprehended the six men later charged in the December 16, 2012 rape case. In director Richie Mehta’s screen version, a man called Banke Lal arrives at the Vasant Vihar police station to tell the cops that at about 8.30 pm on December 16, a little before the rape took place, he had boarded a similar white bus from Munirka Bus Stand, been attacked and robbed of his phone and wallet by the six men on board, and thrown out of the bus near the IIT overpass.

“Had I landed on my head, I’d be dead,” says Banke Lal.

“Why didn’t you report it that night?” asks Vartika Chaturvedi, the senior cop in charge of the case, played by Shefali Shah.

“Who would I have complained to? I was asking everyone for help, no one listened,” Banke Lal replies. “I managed to borrow a phone from a passing auto driver and called my brother, who told me to come home. I figured, what would the cops do? It was only when I saw the news that I realised that this had to be the same gang.”

The sequence ends with Chaturvedi thanking Banke Lal for coming to them and asking for another case to be filed against the same suspects. She then goes out of the room, leans against a wall as her right-hand man Bhupender (Rajesh Tailang) wonders if there might be other victims to be found.

“If he had made a complaint that same night, maybe we could have prevented this,” responds Chaturvedi.

“We don't know that,” says Bhupender. “Ismein hamari kya galti hai?”

“Try saying that to Deepika,” says Chaturvedi, half swallowing her words.

As I watched the sequence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that we live in a country in which a citizen who has just been robbed, beaten up and thrown off a bus can respond to his predicament with “What could the police have done in this?” It seemed to me to offer an involuntary glimpse of something the show appears to take entirely for granted: that we as a citizenry have so little faith in our police force that we don’t go to them for help, even when we’re victims of an act of targeted violence and robbery, bang in the middle of the country’s capital.

Then, as I sat down to write this column, reliving my own memories of December 2012, as all Indian women who watch it will do, I remembered that there had indeed been such an incident. A man had been robbed on the night of the gang rape, by the very same men, aboard the very same bus.

It didn't take much looking up online to find reports. What I found in them was distressing. The Times of India reported on December 23, 2012, that three constables from the Hauz Khas police station had been suspended for their failure of duty when approached on December 16 by one Ramadhar Singh, who had been picked up “from RK Puram Sector 4 by the six gang rape accused, and robbed and dumped near IIT”.

The report continued: “The three cops were on patrol duty around 8.15pm when they were approached by Ramadhar. He had told them that he was robbed and that he had lost his mobile and, hence, cannot call 100. The cops, however, told them they were from the Hauz Khas police station and he needs to go to Vasant Vihar to register a case. They neither sent out a wireless message to track the bus nor had they informed Vasant Vihar cops about the incident,” said a source.”

I describe this incident in such detail not to make the point that the heinous gangrape that would end up making Delhi the notorious site of frenzied international attention was preventable. That may be true, or it may not. The “what if” that it becomes on the show is easily voiced — and almost as easily dismissed. Richie Mehta’s version is so insistent on showing Delhi Police in good light that he simply erases the inconvenient truth that the victim of the robbery did in fact try to report it and was turned away by cops. It then absolves the police of even the glimmer of responsibility by making his female cop protagonist have a moment of guilt, that can, however, be painted as emotional, even irrational — since in Mehta’s version the onus is on the citizen who didn’t come to the police earlier.

In many ways, this is transparently the position the show takes: it makes the police the put-upon heroes, under-appreciated figures whose valiant efforts to fight crime while being enormously understaffed and under-budgeted are not appreciated by a thankless citizenry. All we ever see are good cops being treated badly. The DCP who hasn’t gone home for three nights is taunted by a judge as being someone who spends her time at parties and has probably never been to a crime scene. Children in a posh South Delhi school regurgitate their parents’ assumptions about the cops being corrupt. In a less monied class, too, Bhupender tells Vartika that he hides his job from any prospective in-laws he’s meeting because “no one wants either a dosti or dushmani with the police”.

Vartika chastises Bhupender for not seeing that a family that doesn’t respect his job will not “protect his daughter”. But the larger issue, the fact of why a city of 20 million people has a relationship with its police force that is one of “Best if we never have to deal with them” rather than “They will help us get justice”, is never really discussed. When we get unwitting glimpses of the reasons why — such as when some constables on duty taunt and torture the not-yet-convicted suspected rapists, driving three of them to attempt suicide — it is not treated as an abuse of power, but simply as something strategically unfortunate that happens.

But surely if the police in Delhi and in the rest of India are assumed by the man on the street — and even more so, by the woman on the street — to be not just professionally incompetent, but a power-seeking, corrupt and potentially malign class of people that is best avoided, there must be some reason why. Surely the answer cannot be the one Mehta provides by ventriloquising the ex-police commissioner Neeraj Kumar, who is a consultant on Delhi Crime: that it’s every other constituency who’s wrong — the politicians, the media, the judiciary, ordinary people, students — and the police who are right.

(To be continued next week)

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror.