Romancham

There is such a thing as settling down for a film to begin that Romancham doesn’t allow its audience. It begins long before it actually does but teases you into believing that the film will start any moment now. This is not the film’s problem, this is the problem of us. That ‘we have forgotten how to watch films’ will offer the unnecessary consolation that once upon a time, we knew how to.

Instead, let’s quickly go to Romancham. The word settles comfortingly in Malayalam and all its sister languages because its invitation to you isn’t incumbent on your knowing its meaning but its feeling.

And what a feeling Romancham is. I don’t remember watching a film that does so much with so little. And by so little I mean the way stories were once imagined and had the balls to once be told.

Romancham activates that part of the childhood dream where all we wanted in life was to get away from adults, lock ourselves up in a room with friends and tell each other ghost stories. It’s perhaps why when the event we are trained to wait for in a comedy-horror film never fully arrives, we may not even notice it. Perhaps because it has already arrived or perhaps because it doesn’t have to.

The seven friends in the film haven’t succumbed to having a lot to do with the little time they have, they aren’t pumping their days up with the luxury of being absorbed in phones or much else —either because of poverty or because they have one another in the way we used to have friends.

A familiar boredom and the sharp annoyance of being left out of throwball leads one of the friends to become a fake ouija board expert. The incoming ghost is barely the point of interest here because after that, each of their 7 faces explode into an individual drama in this house full of commodes. And the commodes, man. At no point in the film are we told why there are so many commodes in boxes lying around the house but we believe in them, like we believe in their thoughtfulness when they gift one of the commodes to a friend getting married.

Their daily transactions with each other lend themselves to everything from how organizedly they sleep in a line below a kannada fillum poster — to ensuring that the friend who has an incessant cough problem gets his 2 bottles of cough syrup every month. This intimacy is a childhood dream coming true with all of adult life problems intact: money is an issue, and so is the threat of being left out for not knowing how to play throwball, as also – the following desire to puncture said throw ball.

Romancham’s writing is skeletal in a most visible way. It is touchable, holdable and not hiding behind grandiosity. And I am not saying there is no grandiosity just because it is a story of seven men sharing one shabby bathroom, one sink.

I am saying no grandiosity because even if the film is based on real life incidents; in its narration— the only lurking joy is coming from seeing what happens if seven mostly unemployed Malayali bachelors are thrown in a Bangalore house full of commodes.

The charm of this commode house is that it is still largely Bengaluru despite being haunted by Malayali men and even a Malayali ghost. It’s a house left to fend for itself much like the few houses in Jakkur were before the airport flyover plundered its grassy emptiness.

The Romancham house is sometimes modern in its capacity to allow all kinds of non-brahmin things to happen inside it — storing rice in commodes, doing things to piss off gods in all religions — making one wonder if the owners are not Brahmin or live far away or dead or just don’t care – all four of which are super rare to find in Bengloor, whether in 2007 or 2023.

The house’s other Bangalore ability is to be surrounded by the bigness and loudness of landscape and to remain still small in front of neither fully yellow nor green street lights. Its anglala with a rope-swing, the accumulating commode boxes, and broken two-wheelers all contribute to this.

Zizek said in Pervert’s Guide to Cinema that waiting for a film to begin in a dark theatre, staring at the blank screen is like staring into the toilet bowl, waiting for your worst nightmare to come true – for shit to reappear. ‘We are basically watching shit’, he says. I don’t know if it’s the commode or the general naughtiness of the film- shit or not, it’s a mad, sexy film and I want to watch it again.

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Pathan and then some more

1. India’s topmost scientists are representing the country at a science conference in Dubai where the president of India is going to deliver the keynote address. On the way to the conference, the scientists are talking about taking selfies with the president because one of the scientists wants to impress his wife – a woman he’s been married to for 40 years.
2. Mard ko dard hota hai: first time I am watching 2 action heroes sitting and eating pain killers together.
3. Deepika is bottomsupping whiskey like I want to bottomsup her.
4. One paapa sheep is grazing cutely on top of some afghan mountains while John and SRK are doing marvel type stunts over its head.
5. SRK’s face was in my hands when Deepika touched him – his skin felt papery thin. Soft. I was afraid to squeeze. But his veins were throbbing warm (do faces have veins?)
6. SRK’s Adam’s apple is the best apple in the whole world.
7. Deepika Padukone is a queen.
8. Dimple Kapadia’s name in the film is Nandini. I learnt this 2 mins before she died.
9. Putting small pox, 370, and Kashmir together in one line is funny. In one film, too much funny. Chumchumma throwing random words and all. K. Vish’s robots in his short stories do more justice to the feel of somesomethingandall.
10. I still want to know which film SRK was abandoned in as a young child.

Zigzag

Al, Deepika Padukone in Gehraiyaan repeatedly wondering, dreading, living her mother’s fear of being stuck. It echoes in the smallest of frames – taking trash down and putting it near the gate of her apartment building – standing there and examining her life from afar, from her eyes, possibly even her mother’s – wondering – is this the beginning of what stuck feels like?

Same place, many scenes later – running home, having survived, watching a man she loves change into a monster, then losing him to his own accidental death, discovering that he had wanted to murder her – all in a span of one night. Then standing under the shower, losing the last few traces of this man, weeping, knowing – this is what stuck feels like.

Even more poignantly, a little earlier when she discovers that her fiancé is more gutless than she always suspected him to be – the different ways in which people make it possible to become infidel is visible. He launches a string of attacks on her incompetence (since she is an ordinary yoga instructor and “writing is real work – it’s not like saying breathe in breathe out in front of four south Bombay aunties”) – Al remembers her mother in bed with her, weeping to herself saying “I am so stuck beta”

****

I was valuing General English papers last week, always fun, always making me return to the truth about why I teach. One answer made me cry, the next made me giggle and fall about.

To a question about whether the student had ever purchased something they didn’t need, someone wrote about going for a walk in the early days of the pandemic and passing by a small grocery store, visibly going out of business. The owner – an old man with sad eyes was sitting outside and smiling. The student went in to buy half a litre of milk that he didn’t need. After that, every time, the student passed by the store, he bought something or the other. A small, unspoken friendship built itself between them, and then after the pandemic, the student returned to his life, and the owner to his. Now, he says, when he passes by the store occasionally, the man remembers him and smiles. They wave at each other.

To a question about what gift they would like to give a classmate, the same student wrote about his friend’s useless mouse and how much he wants to throw it out and scream. He would like to gift him a new mouse, he says, because his friend’s old mouse is dabba and doesn’t work. If he won’t accept it, he’ll probably give him a classic Indian gift, i.e, a mug. I don’t know why this was funny. Probably because I was curious to understand how a question prompted a teenaged boy to think about his friend’s dabba computer mouse.

I thought back to all the allegations the most intelligent people from the sciences and commerce make about our questions papers. “No sense, anybody can answer your question papers, what is the point, just trying to be cool and stylish to impress students, chumma making it complicated for no reason” — I replayed each of these in my mind when I was reading this student’s answers. I was smiling, like some of my colleagues do when they correct papers. How many science/commerce teachers can afford to smile or laugh like this while reading an answer paper?

I’d like to know.

*****

One morning, walking around the park listening to David foster Wallace’s short story, Good People – I listened to the line It felt like a muscle he did not have with my eyes open, then closed, then opened quickly again. The boy David Wallace writes about in this story does not have the courage to tell the girl he’s made pregnant that he does not love her. I played with the word muscle in my head for a while. Didion mentions something about moral nerve in Self respect: its source its power. I walked faster.

*****

I was watching Freddy with my nephew one evening. I watched Freddy Ginwala when he was kicked and beaten around by his lover’s boyfriend. Lover and her boyfriend both trick him into killing her abusive husband. When Freddy finds out, he sits in the restaurant now owned by the woman and orders a falooda. It is brought to him and he calmly watches the woman and her boyfriend and drinks his falooda. They begin making out in front of him, hoping it will make him go away. It doesn’t. The waiter takes away the empty glass and Freddy says, “repeat” – woman and boyfriend are now irritated. They stop making out. Freddy cannot stop watching them. The waiter brings the falooda and the boyfriend grabs it, spits in it and bangs it on the table. Freddy drinks it, finishes it and calmly says – again – repeat.

My nephew and I burst out laughing.

My nephew’s pizza comes, he finishes eating it and asks me if the sachet packets need to be thrown away along with the empty box. I tell him to keep the sachets aside. What about the bill, he asks me. I say throw the bill away. Ayyo, why, he asks. What to do with it, I ask back. Okay, he tells me, then changes his mind and keeps the bill with the sachets. Why? Bill is paapa no? he tells me. I say okay must be.

We continue watching Freddy.

*****

Mumbai police called Freddy’s lover’s gym-going boyfriend “protein shake” and I couldn’t stop laughing.

*****

Louisa’s Fall

I watched Persuasion today and was taken with Dakota Johnson’s Anne, like I knew I would be but even more by Louisa (Nia Towle). She surprised me like no other woman in love has. I have seen and heard women not only do stupid things in love but also believe that because they do it out of love, it somehow makes them noble. When I say them, I obviously mean moi.

But watching Louisa in love is as terrible as it is reaffirming. I have not read Persuasion but now want to after watching Louisa leap from a wall to revisit the sensation of being caught by the man she loves. It is disgustingly close to how I experienced love as a young woman.

He is leading her down the steps. When he reaches the landing she jumps, and he catches her and her giggles. Austen says “the sensation was delightful to her” – and to reproduce this she runs backs up again, declares to him that he must catch her again and leaps. It wasn’t sufficient warning and the fool falls down. He wouldn’t have been able to catch her safely from that height, even with sufficient warning.

I called her stupid 5 times even before I was fully done watching the scene. I watched it again and again, then went and watched the same scene from the 2007 and 1995 adaptations of the novel. And in each of these scenes, I was watching the same thing – a foolish woman leaping stupidly in love.

Even without meaning to, this need to leap, this desire to reproduce a sensation just because it seems delightful — even at the cost of knowing the pain it might bring — makes villains out of the ones who aren’t able to catch. It is unfair and more than that, it is unnecessary.

Why must we leap? Why must we expect to be caught? It’s perhaps why we do it. We don’t it because we are sure. We do it because we are unsure and want to be sure. It’s a gamble. A stupid, miserable one. It’s a lot like love. Stupid, stupid, love.

There is an interesting humiliation at play here. His is that she falls and hers is that he lets her. That there is an audience for this doesn’t help either case.

An old love and I would go to Kempegowda airport on his bike for kicks in 2008. This was before it was the resort it is today. Back then, it was just one long stretch of road to ride and play on. Once we were there, we’d sit and look at the sparrows, laugh, talk, watch the planes take off and head back.

One day, we began playing. We played lock & key, hide & seek and then running race. He obviously ran very fast. I couldn’t catch up so I began running the other way. He laughed, turned around and began chasing me. I don’t know how the game had changed but I was delighted to find it in my hands. Even so, I couldn’t continue running because I had started laughing so much. He caught up with me and we both buckled down with guffaws.

I went home feeling happy and childlike but mostly with a full stomach. He let the game go and chased me and this made me feel love. A month or something later we found ourselves in a large group of friends he liked because they were his friends and I hated because they were all chuths. We finished lunch at a dhaaba and were getting into our vehicles when the largeness of the parking area became a playground and again, somehow, we began playing running race. This time too, he was very fast and I began running in the opposite direction. I turned back and felt a mild stab of betrayal to watch him standing tall and proud, announcing in front of his friends “Go wherever you want”

We had an audience and he didn’t want to chase me. We had an audience and it’s why I wanted him to chase me. It’d have solidified our love in front of those chuths. In my late 30s, it kills me to say this but I haven’t gotten over this stupid way of leaping and feeling betrayed.

I never brought this up with him, we never found ourselves in large parking areas to lose ourselves in ever again. But I remember feeling empty in my stomach when he dropped me home that evening.

I feel stupid and foolish and small and petty as I type this but I wish there was a way of ensuring that our stomachs never feel that sudden vacuum. It shouldn’t have to fall on other people to catch us whenever we feel like leaping. It’s here that I recall Didion’s words on being in love and remaining indifferent at the same time. Self-respect makes it possible to achieve both she says.

I am thinking of how much self-respect Louisa had or didn’t moments before she took that leap. Why do we allow ourselves to give in to these random moments of leap? What are we hoping to find there? Something as strong and nurturing as the self-respect we seem to lack?

How do we preserve our sense of self despite love? This morning, I woke up uneasily in a rabbit hole I had been digging for sometime now- pinning down my self-respect to weak amulets. I could feel my Sunday slipping away from my hands even before it had begun. I hated it. I didn’t feel like myself. I felt betrayed, possessed, obsessed, in need of a severe makeover. Then I forced myself to watch a film, picked Persuasion, watched that scene, began writing this and somewhere in between the last two moments, I returned to myself.

I felt myself literally picking myself up at one point and I loved the sensation of feeling calm in my stomach again. I don’t know whom to thank for this. Dead white women writers?

A random dude once texted me on twitter to say that he finds it ironical when Dalit women feel inspired by white women. I told him I’d much rather feel inspired by dead white women than alive and thriving savarna women. His only response was “why not black women????????????”

Baba, on days when it feels like everything is slowly dying inside you and you want nothing more but to be held and feel sane and happy again, shouldn’t we do whatever it takes to persuade ourselves to feel whole again? So what if it’s some dead white woman from England speaking to me in Basavanagudi?

Maybe that was what Didion meant when she said not having self-respect was like returning home to oneself and finding it empty. That if we take the risk of leaping, we must also be prepared to take the risk of falling or worse, suffer the humiliation of not being caught.

Violette Leduc

All of today was given to Violette, the film, and now the writer. My body is very fragile now. So I am going to eat a Mc Spicy chicken burger to put some fist back in it.

Here are some shots I liked from the film.

Up next: Therese and Isabelle.

My Happy Family

After a long time, I watched a film in a language that made me pay attention to the silences between words, scenes, and walls. My Happy Family was on Rheaa’s recco list and I immediately bookmarked it because the synopsis said that it was about a woman who leaves her family to live on her own.

What I didn’t know was that the woman is a teacher, married, has two adult children, parents, one brother, one husband, and husband’s relatives. She leaves them all and decides to live in an apartment far away.

Manana has been wanting to leave and live on her own for sometime now. When we first see her, she is already looking for houses. But the urge to finally do it comes from one of her students who is newly married and even more newly separated from her husband. Apparently when the girl told him that she was leaving him, the husband told her that if you say no, you must say it without hesitating, otherwise there is no point.

The next day, Manana packs her bags, moves out and begins living in her new home. All we need to know about where she lives now is that her apartment is on a floor closest to tree tops and their leaves and rustling. Her family goes berserk and there are various meetings held at home and in coffee shops to persuade her back to her life (“mark my words, you will come back to us in one week”– to which she says “ok”)

After one such noisy family intervention where everyone yells at everyone, she leaves them and returns home where she cuts herself a piece of cake, listens to Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca on full volume, sits on a sofa right in front of the tree and eats.

If it is at all possible that an image from a film, a sentence from a book or a conversation with a student can make you alter your life completely, then I wish it is this scene for me. It is something I want to personally and professionally work towards: the silence to have your cake and eat it in front of a tree. While listening to Mozart.

Every day after work, she stops by a vendor downstairs and buys fruits. She is very deliberate in doing this, making sure she only picks the fruits that she wants to eat, and in the exact quantity.

One day, she tries to play her old guitar and learns that its seventh string is broken. The next day, she is at the market looking for the seventh string. She finds it, goes home, reads student’s assignments, smiles at one, drinks wine, and plays the guitar.

Manana found her seventh string and then she couldn’t stop playing.

She makes it look like it is possible to dust off the many parts of you that you have allowed to rust because life just kept happening and you didn’t notice when you stopped doing the things you loved to do. That even at 50, if you find the josh to go looking for some fucking seventh string, then you have nothing to be afraid of.

At the beginning of the film, we are shown Manana with her family. She is just sitting down at the table with cake and her mother asks her to eat it after dinner. People have called this a feminist film because she leaves her family and lives alone. I like to believe that the film is simpler. It is about a woman who dumps her family to eat cake in peace. If that makes it feminist, then we should all have our cake and eat it too.

The film is available on Netflix.

Ammonite

Neck

Mary (Kate Winslet) is looking at Charlotte (Saoirse Ronan) who is sitting with someone else in the first row. They came there together and it doesn’t make sense for them to be sitting away from each other. A little before she leaves, Mary looks at Charlotte’s neck. It is quiet, the kind you want to touch and disturb. It is also inviting, the kind you can never be sure of. Nothing is as bitter in your mouth as the taste of watching their naked neck teased away from you.

Hands

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Women’s hands when they are at work, and in love are the most easiest, most forgotten pleasures. In the picture is an ammonite that Mary and Charlotte heave onto a plank and carry home.

Toes

What does it mean to steal a glimpse of her toes while the rest of her body has already surrendered itself to you?

Face

We must learn to be grateful for art that can lead us into love, pleasure, and desire so ruthlessly. Ask for nothing less. It must be exactly like this.

Letting go

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When does body become bodies? Is it still not one body when they are bodies throbbing together?

Fin

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