A Film Much More Than Ordinary

When we hear the word “Bombay” or “Mumbai” as it has now come to be known, the scenes that float up in our visual memory are scenes from Bollywood box office hits featuring larger-than-life stars from Bollywood. All dancing across bridges or jumping out of helicopters without a parachute. Ladies in different stages of undress dancing away tantalizingly to a ‘hot’ item song, or, a young pair of lovers making it out on a luxury launch out in the sea against the sound of the roaring waves and visuals of the surf kissing the launch.

Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, right across the globe for the top award at Cannes earlier this year, made history by being the first Indian film to bag the honours. It does not bear the slightest resemblance to any Bollywood blockbuster or even a Southern modernized mythological movie. Nor is it anywhere like a Ray or a Ghatak or a Benegal film. Or even a Basu Chatterjee or a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film.

There is nothing artsy about the film or the characters or the people in it. So, what does it resemble at all?

First, it offers us a glimpse of a Mumbai we do not know at all.

Second, it introduces us to three less-than-ordinary women living practically on the fringes of the city to earn their daily bread and terrified by the thought of going back to where they came from.

Third, we are offered a glimpse into the mindset of the ever-increasing migrant population from the voice-over of some man who says that he came to the city to eke out a livelihood 23 years ago but still cannot feel it is his ‘home’, while, at the same time, he is terrified of going back.

The daily train that passes through the famous flower market along the tracks at Western Dadar station defines the opening frame heard against the teeming crowds outside to close in on the quiet, unsmiling face of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a delivery nurse in a small hospital as she stands near the door of a compartment watching the city pass her by. She lives in a small apology of a flat and shares with another Kerala migrant young lady named Anu (Divya Prabha).

You can see the local trains passing by through the window of their room. The train, the sounds of its wheels on the tracks, are both the only truth in the lives of these three women. And act as a metaphor of speed and movement which, for these three women of different ages, education, social status and linguistic roots, are the substitute for what they understand as “home”. Especially for Prabha and Anu who hail from some remote pockets in Kerala.

Parvati, in her mid-forties, works at the same hospital where Prabha and Anu are working as nurses, but as a cleaning woman who has come to Mumbai from some village in interior Maharashtra. She is threatened with eviction by builders who will be bringing down the shanties where she lives so, as she has no documents to prove tenancy rights, she must leave. But she is loath to leave because she will have to quit her job.

So moves the narrative between and among these three less-than-ordinary women you would not glance at for more than a few nano- seconds in real life, pulling you to share their joys and sorrows along with them as we run along with the film. Prabha, married with her husband working in Germany who never came back, is dignified, with a personality filled with self-respect who looks after Anu as a little sister. Anu is flighty, loves to dress up, and is having a torrid affair with a local boy, Shiaz, a Muslim. She actively seeks corners and crevices to share a hot session, maybe, in the fence behind a football field which must stop when it begins to rain heavily. Parvati is very friendly with Prabha but rejects Prabha’s suggestion to move in with her son and his wife because, “I hate roj ka jhik jhik.”

There are vignettes of a ‘pretend’ family when Prabha tries to control the flighty nature of Anu like an older sister who is itching to dress up and go on a date with Shiaz, or, trying to help Parvati to move to her seaside village, or, a deeply emotional glimpse of Prabha’s longing for a proper ‘family’ when she hugs close a brand new and gleaming rice cooker, a gift from some anonymous ‘friend’, or, when she tries to know who sent the gift.

There is a beautiful scene when Parvati shares some liquor with the other two and completely drunk, Parvati and Anu break out in a wild dance to a funny song from Caravan while Prabha watches on with a smile.

There are scenes of teeming crowds filling the streets during a Ganapati visarjan procession which explains why there is so much rain in the entire film. Or, Prabha and Anu taking their pregnant cat to the nursing home for the doctor to find out how the kitten is doing in her mother’s womb. The same doctor has the keen eye for Prabha but she rejects him, reminding him that she is married.

The two younger women, Prabha and Anu, are persuaded by Parvati to escort her to her village where she has acquired the job of a cook. From this point on, the film switches over to a different note, exiting from the claustrophobic workplace and room in Mumbai. Prabha and Anu find the seaside a beautiful transition from the small world of Mumbai and while Prabha and Parvati enjoy the surf of the sea and the shore, Anu takes every opportunity to have a fast one with Shiaz who has come along stealthily without the knowledge of the other two women. The lovers make love inside a cave and discover graffiti on the walls carved out by other lovers before them. At one point, the camera captures Anu fast asleep on Shiaz’s lap.

The actors have not used any make-up except the natural touches Anu uses to beautify herself before meeting up with Shiaz, jostling in a crowded bus and smiling away with that slight happiness in her dull life. Her only fear is being dragged back to Kerala where her parents are trying to get her married off to some boy she does not wish to. She has learnt to enjoy the freedom whatever it means for her.

Apart from the absolute naturalness of the performances by all the actors, it is the technical support Kapadia has engineered to bring across such a beautiful film. Ranabir Das’s cinematography is washed over with shades of turquoise and blue, the nurse’s uniforms are blue, the sky is blue, the sea is blue, keeping pace with the mood of the story and the ambience of the film – physical, emotional, social which the story is set against.

But in the end, the film closes on the twinkling lights of the small cafeteria-cum-grocery in that small village, colouring the lives of the three women and also the film per se. The editing is seamless, though it cuts often from the nursing home to the small room the two young women share to the skyline being corrupted by the high-rises in the city with the local trains functioning like punctuation marks in a short story.

Three languages are used in the film – Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi though the title is in English.

The music track runs like the undercurrents of a river right through the film mainly with the help of the soft notes of the piano which fits the mood of the film but runs contrary to its subject – the concept of homelessness among three women who do not have a home. Topshe’s original soundtrack is filled with the sounds of the trains running right through the film, sounds of the waves of the sea, chirping birds, the sound of dry leaves as Prabha, Anu and Shiaz walk over them.

The whole means more than the sum of its parts. This is the final message that comes across through this beautiful film. At one point, we hear some faceless person saying, “We hear that Bombay is a city of dreams. But I feel it is a city of illusions.”

The two gaps this critic discovered in the film is one, the local trains in Mumbai are hardly vacant enough for Prabha to keep standing at the door to watch the city pass her by. In one scene, we find Prabha and Anu in an empty compartment. This is a wild dream on a local train in Mumbai. The second gap is Anu missing completely from the story for a considerable span of time when they visit Parvati’s village.

To sum up, All We Imagine As Light is an extraordinary film filled with less-than-ordinary people, both men and women. Bombay is both – a city of dreams as well as a city of illusions.