The scorching winds of change: rediscovering Garm Hava

I’m sitting in my favourite DVD-browsing space – the shady, lizard-ridden attic of the Palika Bazaar shop that sells “original copies” of world-cinema titles at Rs 150 – when the salesman leans across and whispers, “Saab, mere paas ek bahut special film hai. London mein copy banaaya. Poore India mein aapko sirf iss dukaan mein milegi.” (“I have a very special film, copied from a London print – you won’t get it anywhere else in India.”) So saying, he unwraps a DVD of M S Sathyu’s Garm Hava.

It’s a strange little moment, incongruous to the setting; normally, the man would be using this hushed tone to hard-sell a porn film. More bizarrely, just a couple of days earlier I was speaking with an aunt about the puzzling unavailability of Sathyu’s film in the Indian market. (She saw it a couple of times on its initial release in 1973 and has never been able to get it out of her mind – especially the haunting soundtrack with the “Maula Salim Chishti” qawwali. I saw it as a child on TV and was unable to appreciate it then but was keen to see it again.) For a movie that’s considered one of the key works of the “Indian New Wave” of the early 1970s, it seemed to have gone underground, never to resurface.

Naturally, I bought the DVD. The print was poor – faded colour, spots and scratches, a couple of seconds of film missing here and there – but not as bad as I'd feared. (I wouldn’t have minded subtitles because the Urdu spoken in the film gets a little dense at times; but again, given these experiences, maybe not.)

Garm Hava's opening montage of images about the Freedom Movement and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi is followed by a lengthy shot of Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) photographed from a waist-high angle at the Agra railway station, waving at a departing train. His sister is leaving for Pakistan and he’s seeing her off; they’ve spent their whole lives in close proximity, now they are being parted in their old age.

This isn’t the last time we'll see Salim waving goodbye to a member of his family. “A hot wind is blowing,” a rickshaw-driver tells him as they leave the station, “Those who don’t get uprooted will get burnt.”

The garm hava in question is the cruel aftermath of Partition, and Salim and his family are being forced to make wholesale adjustments in their way of life. Because of legal complications, their ancestral house is slipping out of their hands. Salim’s daughter Ameena (Geeta Siddharth, in a much more central role than her two-minute appearance in Sholay's family massacre sequence) is separated from the man she is betrothed to. Everywhere, there are subtle changes in equations between Hindus and Muslims. “Sab azaadi ka phaayda apne tareeke se uthaa rahe hain,” (“Everyone is using Independence for their own gain”) sighs Salim when a rickshaw-wallah asks him for two rupees instead of the customary eight annas. A potential landlord assures him that he is unconcerned with a tenant’s religion, but then asks for a year’s payment in advance, because “aap hi ke mazhab ke koi saat maheene ka kiraaya chhod ke chale gaye” (“Someone from your community left without paying seven months’ rent”). Through it all, Salim remains stoical – God will see us through all this, he believes – but his family members, including his son Sikandar (played by the young Farooque Shaikh), aren’t so sure.

Some of the acting in Garm Hava is uneven – I thought a couple of the supporting performers were miscast, and the old lady who plays Salim’s mother seems constantly to be looking out for the director’s instructions – but there’s no faulting Balraj Sahni’s immensely dignified performance in the lead role. Sahni invests a great deal in little gestures, speaking volumes with a subtle shift of his eyes, or by cocking his head ever so slightly, or tapping his cane nervously on the floor while speaking to a money-lender. (I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far, but this portrait of a patriarch trying to retain his dignity while the world he once strode proudly through collapses around him reminded me of Burt Lancaster’s wonderful performance as the Prince in Visconti’s Il Gattopardo.)

Equally notable is the film’s anthropomorphising of the Mirzas’ old haveli. The house is given a life and a personality of its own, with the camera freely exploring its interiors, familiarising us with every corner, pointedly framing characters in doors and stairways as if to stress the relationship of these people to their setting; almost suggesting that one is incomplete without the other. We are reminded that ancestral houses become a part of the people who have lived in them for decades (and the haveli can equally be seen as a symbol for the nation), and this is most poignantly realised in the scenes involving Salim’s mother. When the Mirzas have to leave, she resists, clinging to the walls, crying out that she’d rather die than go away. Later, she insists on sleeping on the terrace of their new accommodation, because from here she can see the haveli in the distance. A scene where the dying woman is carried back to the house, in a palki, is shot to suggest her memories of her first trip to the haveli – presumably as a young bride, in a palanquin, decades earlier.

Most “Partition films” contain moments of strong violence – the movies can’t bring themselves to look away from the horror stories about neighbours killing each other or ghost trains filled with dead bodies, gliding across the fresh borders. And unflinching depictions of this sort can serve a purpose too (although they also carry the danger of trivialisation). But the violence of Garm Hava is subtler: it’s about the uncoiling of the many threads holding together a family, about being uprooted from the only life you knew. This isn’t a flawless film (there’s something a little too convenient, even manipulative, about the way misfortune stalks the Mirzas **) but it’s an important one – a poised, personal, ground-level perspective of a critical time in India’s history – and it’s encouraging to hear that the original print is undergoing restoration. Not a moment too soon, and I hope similar work is done on the under-seen films of other notable Indian directors of that time, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani among them.

----

** In an essay in his fine book 50 Indian Film Classics, M G Raghavendra points out that the film tries to distance itself from the melodramatic idiom of mainstream Hindi cinema but succeeds only to an extent, and this compromises its overall tone

In stores soon

The year-end short-story special that I co-edited for Tehelka in 2008 has just been published in book form, by Hachette India.

(Click to enlarge)

The book contains 10 of the original 15 stories, as well as two newly commissioned ones (by Brinda Charry and Ahmad Saidullah), and I’m very pleased to see it out after all this time. Do look out for it and spread the word.

Notes from Bhutan: haiku readings, blogging politicians

Had a good time at Mountain Echoes. Didn’t attend all – or even most of – the sessions, but I still spent more time listening to discussions than I’ve done at any lit-fest in the past three years. The festival wasn’t stuffed with heavyweights but it had a respectable collection of names, a decent-sized hall with good acoustics, and enthusiastic (but not overwhelming) attendance from Indian invitees as well as Bhutanese book-lovers. Very efficiently organised by Mita Kapur and the Siyahi team too. In some ways it reminded me of the first edition of the now-carnivalesque Jaipur Literature Festival, which, believe it or not, was once an intimate event where it was possible to attend a discussion without getting in the way of a stampede. (For more on this, see the January 2006 archives.)



A few notes:

- Many of us were knackered on the first evening, when we were required to attend the inauguration and sit through speeches at India House, Thimphu. Being in a headache-y haze, I barely registered anything of the Bhutanese prime minister’s lengthy speech about “Gross National Happiness” (note: happiness can be found in simple things like not listening to lengthy speeches), but the highlights of the evening were the short poetry readings that followed. There was a wonderfully sardonic recitation by the Khasi poet Kynpham Sing of his cynical yet strangely affectionate poem “Shillong in Haiku”, about the degeneration of a place that doesn’t know if it’s a town or a city. Here are samples of the haikus that make up the poem:

Scotland of the East–
roads pockmarked by jumbo pits,
cars do twist dancing.

Cars over potholes–
gut-jerking see-saw, always
full of expletives.

Famed Umkhrah River–
reeking serpent of sewage,
bodies and drowned gods.

Iewduh Flyover:
hanging garden of the world’s
second-hand garments.

Multi-lane by-pass:
amazingly by-passing
construction for years.

Central Library–
the emptiness of shelves is
educational.

Reading it on paper (or on a website) isn’t the same thing as hearing Kynpham’s clipped, serio-comic recital. It was brilliant, and I look forward to the publication of his haiku-poem book, which is currently in manuscript form.

(Note: that’s an old photo of Kynpham from the 2009 edition of the Jaipur lit-fest)

- When you’re in the mountains, the idea of national identity becomes amorphous. “We pahaari people know each other really well, regardless of the countries we belong to,” author Namita Gokhale told me later that evening, “These Himalayan lands are a nation unto themselves – people who live in the plains can’t understand the psyche.” The theme of mountains and mountain people, writers and readers, ran through the festival, notably in a beautiful session where Gulzar and Pavan Varma (prolific author, current Indian ambassador to Bhutan) performed a jugalbandhi of poetry readings that touched on mountains, trees and other aspects of the natural world. The format had Gulzar reading one of his poems in the original Urdu, and then Varma reading out his English translation.


I liked the informality of this session – the two men would occasionally interrupt each other to comment on how a word or phrase sounds in translation compared to the original, and then flip through the book to decide what poem to read next; Gulzar chuckled shyly whenever the applause became very loud, as it often did. I know many people who feel that it should be enough to experience a book in solitude – that there’s no need to attend a noisy reading at a large public event – but this session was a pointer to what a good public reading can be.

- For me, and for many other Indians present, one of the eye-openers was the very eloquent Tshering Tobgay, who is the leader of the Opposition Party in the National of Bhutan...in addition to being a prolific and engaging blogger (here's his website). At a session about online media, Tshering spoke about his responsibility to keep the people of his country informed about the issues they face (even if he risks annoying the authorities in the process) and to do this, as far as possible, while supporting the positive initiatives taken by the government rather than opposing them just for the sake of opposition. For a country that has subtle restrictions on freedom of expression, and where Internet penetration is so low that there are only around 12,000 registered Net users, his work is pioneering as well as inspirational. If only more Indian politicians were as dedicated to communicating directly – and candidly – with the common man.

I also enjoyed Tshering’s observation that it’s important for a politician to write or blog regularly, “because that forces you to pause and introspect and think about things, which is something politicians don’t always feel the need to do”.

- On a lighter note: in Jaipur two years ago, an audience comprising adoring young school-goers lapped up Chetan Bhagat’s every word. In Bhutan, Chetan had a trickier task: he had to charm an audience that included people who hadn’t read his books. Once again, he pulled it off, combining gentle self-deprecation with sharp volleys aimed at those who are against “populist” writing. I was moderating his session, and when I asked how becoming a high-profile public figure had affected his life (he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people recently), his answer was typical Bhagat. “It gets me interesting assignments,” he said, mentioning his stint as a Miss India judge, “Dozens of women walk towards you in swimsuits, you have to look at them very carefully. Hard job, but someone’s got to do it.” But the real applause was reserved for a short reading that featured Bhagat and a local actress named Kinley Pelden. To the delight of the audience, they read a “bed scene” from Bhagat’s latest novel 2 States, and ended with the demure-looking Kinley enunciating the line “So we’re just fuck-buddies?” Could be a first for a Bhutanese actress at a public event.

- Tisca Chopra, who played the mother in Taare Zameen Par, moderated a session featuring two young Bhutanese filmmakers: director/editor Tshering Wangyel and scriptwriter/director Tshering Penjore. During the audience Q&A, Siok Sian Pek-Dorji, the director of the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy (she also participated in the blogging session), told an amusing story about the film-reviewing culture in Bhutan being so underdeveloped that a couple of years ago a newspaper was taken to court for carrying a short review of a local film. “What gives you the right to say this about the movie?” they were asked. Many of the Indians in the audience giggled at this anecdote, but I was tempted to point out that the state of film-reviewing and film writing in India is not substantially better, given the size of our film industries. (Earlier post on mediocre film writing here.)

- Author Kunzang Choden signs one of her books


I met Kunzang a few years ago when she was in India (an old post here) and I was very pleased to get my hands on her self-published book Dawa: The Story of a Stray Dog in Bhutan. More on that soon. Will also put up more notes on the fest when I have the time.

PoV 2: the many wonders of Gumnaam

The second of my "Persistence of Vision" columns for Yahoo! India is up. This one is about Agatha Christie filtered through Manoj Kumar's quivering lower lip, Helen's swimsuit dance and Mehmood's Hitler moustache. Here's the link.

The full post:

Lost on Translation Island

The pilot announces that the engine has a snag and they have to make an emergency landing. The passengers - a small group of lucky-draw winners whose prize was a trip to "videsh", and a young steward named Anand (Manoj Kumar) - disembark and wander about what could be a jungle, an island, a desert or possibly all three at once. Then the plane takes off, leaving them stranded (but thoughtfully unloading their luggage before going).

So the wrathful tourists converge on the steward, who seems a natural candidate for co-conspirator in this turn of events. Manoj Kumar is facing the camera, brooding handsomely, contemplating a long future playing martyred characters in patriotic films. Why not get in some practice? He looks down, covers half his face and says in a broken tone that somehow manages to be understated and overwrought at the same time: "Mera iss mein koi haath nahin. Main kuch nahin jaanta!" ("I had no hand in this. I know nothing!") Laurence Olivier, preparing to play Iago at the Old Vic, would have had a jealous tantrum if he had witnessed this scene.

Thus unfolds the central premise of the eye-popping 1965 film Gumnaam, which was one of the few movies of its vintage that I actively sought out as a child, scouring the city's video-parlours until I had a new cassette of the film in my hand. Only because I had heard that it was based on one of my favourite Agatha Christie mysteries, And Then There Were None (also known by the less politically correct title Ten Little Niggers, or Ten Little Indians). But Gumnaam turned out to be so, so much more. It forever changed my conservative ideas about how a book should be turned into a film.

Christie's novel, one of her best-crafted, is about ten people - each of whom has a guilty secret - brought together on an island by a mysterious, absent host who then proceeds to knock them off one by one. As their number diminishes, the survivors get increasingly paranoid; it's obvious that the murderer is one of them. For a (mostly) straight-faced screen version of this story, you can't do better than the 1945 And Then There Were None, directed by Rene Clair and featuring a cast of very honourable character actors including Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald and Judith Anderson. It deviates from the book's ending, settling for a more upbeat climax, and there are moments of tongue-in-cheek silliness, but the events it describes are recognisably from the world of the classic thriller.

Gumnaam, on the other hand, takes the original template and works in slapstick comedy, a hurriedly developed romance, a confusing back-story about an inheritance, truly bizarre set design, a couple of item numbers, a dream sequence featuring statues of Egyptian mummies with glowing eyes, and even a red herring about a "bhatki hui aatma" (wandering spirit). And boy, does it play with our expectations of Hindi cinema's star personalities. Pran was the leading screen villain of the time, so naturally he is framed in various sinister ways - giving the camera a knowing smile as he closes a door, for example - that make him the most obvious suspect early on. Likewise, the swimsuit-wearing Helen is clearly the "bad girl" (though she's easily the most graceful thing about the film), especially when compared to the demure Nanda; but since this is a mystery, could the "twist" be that the murderer is someone we least expect it to be? The film's original viewers must have struggled with these questions. I know I did.

The thing I loved most about Gumnaam as a child was the soundtrack, especially the rambunctious 'Jaan pehchaan ho', which plays in a brilliant nightclub scene early in the film, and the title track 'Gumnaam hai koi' (the tune of which, I later discovered, was "borrowed" from Henry Mancini's score for Charade). But alas, some of the loveliest songs in old Hindi movies are mismatched with tacky visuals or careless lip-synching, so that the music and the images belong to completely different worlds. Thus the plaintive etherealness of Lata Mangeshkar's voice as she sings "Gumnaam hai koi" goes hand in glove with shots of Manoj Kumar's twitching eyebrows. The song leads the protagonists (and us) directly to a large mansion, and thence to a magnificently silly scene where a shrouded figure lying on a dining table rises slowly like the Frankenstein monster and then drops the sheet ... to reveal Mehmood, wearing a Hitler moustache and a lungi.

(From the Christie novel: "In the open doorway of the house a correct butler was awaiting them, and something about his gravity reassured them ... The butler came forward, bowing slightly. He was a tall, lank man, grey-haired and very respectable.")

Hitler-Mehmood looks around at the party and giggles. Everyone smiles, relieved. Hey, it's only Mehmood. He has to be harmless, right?

And indeed, he is. He's the bawarchi who has been hired to receive these guests (the Rene Clair film turns the butler Rogers into a comic figure too, but it's nothing compared to this), and one of the great joys of Gumnaam is how quickly everyone comes to terms with the morbid situation and settles down into what is effectively a five-star heritage hotel. They have their own rooms with fancy furniture and beach views; Mehmood brings them tea and snacks; since there is no television, and cellphones and the Internet haven't yet been invented, they spend their time smoking and drinking copiously, and forming little cliques. Even after the killings begin, there's a general sense of bonhomie, and some of them treat the whole thing as a game: "Tum kehte ho ke main kaatil hoon. Main kehta hoon ke tum kaatil ho. Isska faisla toh ek aur laash ke baad hi hoga." ("You say I'm the killer. I say you're the killer. We'll know only when another body turns up.") Twenty-first-century reality TV could learn a trick or two from this film.

Gumnaam is filled with little mysteries that Agatha Christie would be hard put to resolve. Why does Manoj Kumar randomly scratch his cheek while singing "Jaane chaman, shola badan" to Nanda in the rain? (Is it a form of naturalistic acting?) Why would anyone sing "Jaane chaman, shola badan" to Nanda in the rain? What's with the brief shot of the statue of Jesus on the cross, with a pigeon fluttering near his shoulder? What was the film's set decorator smoking? Where did the two pink, green and white beach-balls come from when Helen sings 'Iss duniya mein jeena ho'? (Was someone carrying them in their luggage?) That rock band we see in the nightclub scene - is it really called "Ted Lyons & His Cubs"? (Lyon cubs?)

That nightclub scene, incidentally, reappeared when I least expected it, in one of the greatest WTF moments in my movie-watching career. I had just acquired a DVD of Terry Zwigoff's indie film Ghost World. I slipped it into the player and sat gaping as 'Jaan pehchaan ho' began to play alongside the credits, accompanied by the familiar sight of Laxmi Chhaya (aptly credited as "Masked Dancer" on Gumnaam's IMDB page) convulsing across a dance floor. The video is being watched by Ghost World's protagonist, the sullen social misfit Enid, whose love for "old Indian rock videos" suggests a non-conformist, even warped, bent of mind. I think she would have liked the rest of the film.

Subtitle silliness: ten were negritos, knights and indiecitos

There's a new series of classic-film DVDs out in Indian music stores. It's by a company called Enlighten (official website here), the discs are nicely packaged and include a short booklet about the film or the director, and there are many great titles available. (Samples: John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, Howard Hawks’ Red River, Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai.) The price – Rs 399 – is much too high for my liking, and predictably there are no special features, but I picked up a DVD of Rene Clair’s And Then There Was None because I wanted to see the film again for a future Yahoo! column. (It's a solid, well-produced if occasionally static version of Agatha Christie’s novel, featuring a cast of fine character actors: Walter Huston, Barry Fitzgerald, Judith Anderson among them.) The English subtitles were on the screen by default when I started playing the disc; I was about to switch them off when I chanced to read some of them. Truly astounding stuff.

The film’s opening credits are preceded by the handwritten title “Ten little Indians went out to dinner”, a reference to the poem (also known as “Ten Little Niggers”) that is integral to Christie’s plot. Now you could reasonably point out that this opening shot doesn’t require a further English subtitle at the bottom, but a subtitle there is (maybe it’s for people who can’t read the cursive version?). And this is what it says:

“Ten were negritos to dinner.”

A few more samples:

When the butler Rogers says “If you gentlemen will be good enough to follow me, I’ll show you to your rooms,”, the subtitle reads: “If I keep the Knights, I’ll show them the rooms.”

(This substitution of “Knights” for “gentlemen” continues through the film.)

“Tell him we are quitting” becomes “Tell that renounced.”

When the cook calls out “Here!” to the butler, the subtitle says “Takes!”

“I think a weekend will be enough” is changed to “I think an end of week will be enough.”

Non-English words frequently occur. “Don’t stand there gawking! Get them up” translates to “Do not stay there stationary, levantalos.” The word “botero” is used for boatman, and “indiecitos” is used for the little "Indian" statuettes. “I tell my patients fairytales” becomes “Les fairytale story.”

And so it continues. A hearing-impaired person reading these subtitles would think of this film as Chico Marx meets late-period Bunuel. I'm not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect the original English was first translated into another language (Spanish, French or a mix of both) and then clumsily translated from that language back to English. Very strange and, I’d like to think, highly avoidable too. If the subtitles on the rest of the Enlighten DVDs are of this quality (and there are many non-English films in the catalogue too), all that fancy packaging doesn’t amount to much.

[An earlier post about problematic DVD subtitles here. Given recent experiences, I’ll probably have more on this subject soon]

Mountain Echoes...

...or, a new literary festival in Bhutan. Am going for it next week. Should be an enjoyable four days. Here's the full programme.

A plug for Friendicoes

From Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog, a post about a Friendicoes rescue – a reminder that there are scattered pinpricks of light in the unfathomably dark and lonely universe of uncared-for animals.

I’ve only interacted with Friendicoes a few times, but each of those encounters has been very positive. The first set of vaccinations for the litter of pups that Foxie belonged to was done by them. Shortly after we adopted Foxie, we decided that her mother Rani and older sister Nanno (from an earlier litter) had to be spayed, otherwise generations of pups would be starving or getting run over by cars near our house in the years to come. So we called Friendicoes to pick up the two dogs for the operation. Shankar, the watchman who had been looking after them, was very reluctant to let the ambulance take them away – he feared they’d take the easy way out and put them down – but four days later I received a call from the ambulance driver, who was on his way back to Saket with Rani and Nanno in the back-seat. I rushed across, took charge of them; they were composed, in good health, very happy to be back, and their reunion with Shankar was one of the most joyous things I've seen.

Foxie has been in poor health for the last few months and we’ve been consulting the Friendicoes doctor, among others. A few days ago we had to show him some X-rays and get a couple of prescriptions written out, so we visited their office near the Defence Colony flyover market, and a friend who does volunteer work there showed us around the shelter where injured dogs, cats, monkeys and birds are housed. It was obvious that space and resources were limited, but also that these people are doing the best they can.

Friendicoes rescues abandoned animals – animals that were taken in as pets on a whim by people who had no idea what a big responsibility this is (I’d venture to suggest that these are the sorts of people who have rarely had to think too deeply about anything for most of their lives), and who “discovered” within a few days that the little things make too much noise for their liking, or are too messy. The result: boundlessly loving creatures dumped on the roads by the only family they knew. The city shelter has dozens of these uncomprehending victims of human cruelty – animals who are so starved for affection that their bodies quiver in delighted gratitude when you so much as reach out and touch them inside their cages.

Needless to say, they need whatever help they can get from animal-lovers, so anyone who’s interested, please do weigh in. Cash and cheque donations are welcome, of course, but even visiting the shelter once in a while with a supply of biscuits or rice helps enormously. Their website has details.

[An earlier post about cruelty to animals here]

Persistence of Vision: an introduction

Here’s the first edition of my film column for Yahoo India. I was asked to do an introductory piece that touched on my journey as a movie-buff, but the column will get more specific from next time. Will add the full text of the piece to this post tomorrow. Meanwhile, comments welcome.

Update: the full post

A boy's notebook

This being an introductory column, I thought I'd say a little something about my journey as a movie buff - perhaps to provide a sense of the sort of mind that is going to be writing this fortnightly piece.

For me, the link between watching films and writing things about them goes back (at least) to age seven. It began, inevitably, with the most masaledaar Hindi movies, and a little notebook in which I would scrawl the titles and star casts of every film I saw, along with a conveniently pliable rating (love a film so much that you want to allot it 16-and-a-half stars? Can be managed).

At this point, like anyone who engages with films at a very elementary level, I saw them mainly as "pictures of people talking" (or singing, or dhishum-dhishum-ing). The actors and the fight scenes were the important things, one didn't think about the craft (or the art) involved.

It's notoriously difficult to pin down the first time one's cerebral circuits were lit up by a previously unfamiliar concept, but I recall the exact moment when the idea leapt into my head that a camera movement might be a deliberately engineered thing. It was while watching the very tense scene in, what else, Sholay, when the villagers turn hostile towards their mercenary protectors Veeru and Jai (because their arrival has made Gabbar Singh even more angry). This culminates in a fiery exchange between the Thakur and one of the more assertive village spokesmen. "Thakur jab tak jeeta hai, sar uthe ke jeeta hai," ("As long as the Thakur lives, he holds his head high") growls Sanjeev Kumar through clenched teeth, speaking of himself in the third-person, and the spokesman snaps back, "Arre, kab tak jeeyoge tum, aur kab tak jeeyenge hum, agar yeh dono iss gaon mein rahe?" ("How long will we stay alive if these two remain in the village?")

As he says the emphasised words "yeh dono", the camera swivels to place Veeru and Jai at the centre of the frame. "Wow!" I thought, "that meant something. There was probably someone out of view, moving the camera at just the right time. Hmm." Two seconds later, all traces of this epiphany had passed out of my mind and I was admiring the heroically unruffled Dharmendra and Amitabh as they stood shoulder to shoulder.

Incidentally Sholay may also have been my introduction to the non-linear narrative. At first and second viewing I remember being confused by the two major flashbacks - the early scene with the train attack, and the mid-movie massacre of the Thakur's family - and trying to work out (again, in my notebook) the right chronology of the events presented in the film. At what point precisely did Sanjeev Kumar go from being the uniformed cop to the shawl-clad landowner? Mulholland Drive it wasn't, but it was fodder of some sort for the mind of a young boy.

Around the age of 13 something happen that I can't really explain: I simply. Stopped. Watching. Hindi. Films. Perhaps, like the glutton who had overdosed on oily food, I had experienced a form of masala-movie dyspepsia and needed something subtler. Whatever the case, the leap was a sudden and extreme one, and it would be more than a decade before I returned to Hindi cinema. Meanwhile, I became obsessively involved with 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, followed by American and British cinema of a later vintage, and thence to foreign-language movies: the major French, German, Russian and Japanese filmmakers, and beyond.

It wasn't easy being saddled with such quaint tastes if you lived in Delhi in the early 1990s - the dying days of the videocassette era, and many years before "world cinema" DVDs became fashionable. But I visited embassy libraries to rent from their small collection of videos, dedicatedly watched the "100 years of cinema" series on Star Movies even though I had to prepare for my Board exams, kept an eye out for newspaper notifications about a tiny "film festival" in some corner of the city... and lost all my friends along the way.

The notebook (or its successor) was still around though, and so was Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide, which I carried with me everywhere, even on the off-chance that we might drop by a video library, or that the uncle whose house we were visiting might have a selection of films to watch. Aided by the Maltin guide, I started compiling more detailed lists of actors' and directors' filmographies (this was pre-Internet, pre-IMDB; one had to work at these things), and from there I progressed to making little notes about the specifics of movies: a scene that struck me in some way; nuances of acting, directing, cinematography, editing. Eventually, I had unstructured notes for every film I saw.

Reading film-related books helped refine my thinking and writing about movies. I became influenced by writers like VF Perkins and Robin Wood, and the ideal of "pure cinema" - looking at a film not as an adjunct to literature or as a straightforward recording of stories but as a form that has its own distinct grammar and its own way of achieving things: using shot composition or recurring visual motifs to comment on a character or an event, for example. I developed an especially high regard for the directors who did these things really well - Hitchcock, FW Murnau, John Ford, Fritz Lang among others. But as I grew older I also came to appreciate that this wasn't the only way to make a great film.

In my view, the defining quality of a true movie buff is an unconditional open-mindedness about what you're willing to watch and engage with - an open-mindedness about different genres and approaches to movie-making. I get antsy when people draw a rigid line between movies that are "art" and movies that are "just good fun", or between the movies they personally love and the movies that belong to the Canon. (My rule of thumb: any good film is by definition a "fun" film. If I didn't enjoy watching it, it doesn't make it to my personal "all-time great" list, period.)

This column, generally speaking, will be about films, directors, even individual sequences that I love. Inclusiveness is key, so expect a discussion on anything ranging from Ingmar Bergman's musings on faith (knight tries to foil Death in chess game) to Manmohan Desai's musings on faith (Sai Baba statue restores sight to blind old woman) to Russ Meyer's musings on large-breasted women (which also is faith of an important kind). "Persistence of Vision" sounds like a weighty name, but as someone who persistently watches and thinks about movies, I'd prefer to emphasise its non-technical meaning. I hope you'll enjoy these night-outs.

Carnival of Souls: zombies, piano players, 'normal' people

There’s a certain kind of low-budget horror film that can benefit from things which might be seen as flaws in other movies. Technical deficiencies, for example, can lend a film a creakiness that adds to its visceral impact. (This is one reason why the silent cinema produced so many horror classics that can still hold a modern audience in thrall.) No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence has happy results: a jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!  

Which is not to say that the really good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But the line between inspiration and serendipity does sometimes get blurred. I was thinking about this while watching Herk Harvey’s 1962 film Carnival of Souls, which, to my everlasting shame, I hadn’t even heard of until Aishwarya told me about it a few months ago. I found the DVD in Palika Bazaar (the Criterion cover design shown here is stylised - the film is in black and white), saw it the same day, and was drawn into its very particular world – a world where “regular” people and “normal” social behaviour are made to seem distant and strange, and where the object of our sympathy is an aloof, expressionless young woman who might be a member of the Undead, living in a personal Purgatory without even knowing it. (In other words, this could be a home video of my adolescence.)

 The young woman’s name is Mary Henry and she is played by Candace Hilligoss, whom I can’t make up my mind about. Is this a case of superbly serendipitous casting and a reasonably talented actor making the most of the one role she was born to play? Or is Hilligoss a B-movie starlet fudging her way through a part that doesn’t require much effort or skill; where looking spaced out for most of the film works well enough for the character? The answer probably lies somewhere in between, but I don’t care to dwell on it much: what matters is that this off-kilter “performance” is perfect for the role.  

The film opens with Mary and two of her friends getting into a drag-race – that wholesome, all-American social ritual of the period – with a trio of boys. Their car topples into a lake and sinks, fruitless efforts are made to find it ... but then Mary climbs out of the muddy depths a few hours later (no one really comments on the strangeness of this), dazed and uncommunicative, yet in a hurry to get on with her life. She travels to Salt Lake City to work as an organ-player in a church but finds herself haunted at intervals by the vision of a ghoulish man, and simultaneously drawn towards a spooky abandoned amusement park. Meanwhile, the people around her become increasingly intrusive. An amorous young man is puzzled to discover what a cold fish (out of water?) she is. A ludicrously solemn psychiatrist tries to unravel the mysteries of her mind. A priest urges her to “save her soul” (and looks very nervous when she suggests exploring the amusement park). These people are very annoying, and their presence deepens our sense of identification with Mary.  

Carnival of Souls is a cheaply made film, and this shows in places, but also visible is creativity, enthusiasm, and a genuine sense for the unsettling moment. When Mary experiences out-of-body episodes where no one can see or hear her, there is a visual gimmick that put me in mind of Alice through the looking glass: a ripple runs across the screen, like a pebble skimming the surface of the lake. Also note how time is compressed (and its passage made unreal) in the early scenes following the accident. At one point Mary gets into her car, reaches for the radio knob and there is an abrupt match-cut to a scene set a few hours later, where she’s testing a piano. Soon after this, she pulls into a gas station and asks the attendant for directions to the guesthouse she is checking in to. “Oh, that’s right around the corner,” he says; the camera follows his pointing arm and after a barely discernible fade-out, we see Mary entering her room with her landlady. (Was this quick segue carefully planned to unnerve the viewer, or did they just run out of footage in the editing room?)  

But my favourite scene – more accurately, a series of four quick shots that add up to just five or six seconds of film – is the one where Mary and the priest are driving away from the abandoned park. The priest can’t wait to leave but Mary hopes to return some day. Sitting in the passenger seat, she looks back longingly and we get a long-shot view of the building from her perspective. But then, there is a cut to a brief shot from inside the building: the ghoul, very incongruous in this daylight setting, sitting by a window, watching the car depart. He turns his head away, looks down; cut to Mary, who makes a similar gesture and then turns around to face the road again. Their movements and expressions are perfectly matched. It’s like there’s an unspoken compact between them: we’ll meet for that eternal dance soon. 

 P.S. Anyone who knows me knows that Hitchcock's Psycho is a personal obsession; it often becomes a point of reference for my other movie-watching. (Two earlier posts in this vein: Peeping Tom and Suspiria.) But even an “objective” viewer would find it difficult to overlook the influence that Psycho must have had on Carnival of Souls, which was made two years later. The very setting – the Four Corners states, their long stretches of highway and bare landscapes dotted with unexpected old structures – is crucial to both movies, as is the theme of a disturbed young woman running away to start a new life but fatally drawn towards a large, mausoleum-like building full of death and decay. 

 But I also amuse myself with a hypothetical connect. What if Psycho took a sudden, demented right turn after Norman Bates pushes the car with Marion Crane's body into the swamp? Instead of returning to the Bates Motel with Norman, the film stays at the swamp and watches as Marion emerges from it. It then traces her puzzled, half-hearted efforts to return to the life she once knew, and her family’s reaction to her changed state. Meanwhile, zombies start to infest the motel, and Norman and his mom are not best pleased, especially since the creatures refuse to get into the shower and soap off.

Rahul Mehta Q&A

[Excerpts from an email Q&A I did with the writer Rahul Mehta for The Hindu Literary Review. Mehta’s short-story collection Quarantine is about young gay men and their relationships with their families and lovers. It’s a tender, insightful book and represents a coming out of sorts for Mehta, a US-based lecturer whose relatives in India don’t yet know that he is homosexual]

When did you first develop an interest in writing, and specifically creative writing?

I’ve always been a writer. Even when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I was telling people that I was going to be a writer. In ninth grade we had to do a research project on a career that we were interested in and we had to shadow an individual who was working in that career. When we had to submit our proposals, I chose “writer” and my teacher wrote back, “That’s not a career. Choose something else.” So I shadowed an advertising executive.

To be fair to my teacher, I don’t think she was necessarily trying to discourage me. I think she was just trying to get me to be practical, to save me from a difficult path. She herself was a writer, so she knew how difficult it is. Much later, in grad school, one of my professors said she always tells her students who want to become writers, “If you can do something else: do it. If you can’t: God help you, and welcome.”

At risk of sounding reductive, was there a connection between your initial realisation that you were gay and your taking up writing? Was there ever a period of confusion and uncertainty, where writing helped you come to terms with your sexuality?

I do think that there is a connection. Being gay forced me early on to question one of the most fundamental aspects of who I am. Naturally that sense of inquiry extended to other areas as well. I think it led me to ask bigger questions about everything around me. I once had this boss who, ticking items off on her fingers, said, “Gay, Indian, raised in West Virginia...of course you ended up a writer!” I think what she meant was that it was only natural for me to turn to writing as a way to try to make sense of these various experiences and these various selves.

Were these stories written partly to “come out”, to announce your sexual identity in a public space? Or was the sexual orientation of the characters incidental to the whole?

I would definitely say the latter. My intent, always, first and foremost, is to tell a compelling story. Sure, I’m drawn to certain types of narratives and characters, but I never set out writing a story with a specific purpose other than to craft a compelling narrative. In fact, I rarely even know what a story is going to be about when I sit down to write it. The seed for a story is usually a first line that I find interesting in some way, that has some tension, perhaps in the sounds of the words or in the relationship between characters. Then I let whatever tension is inherent in that sentence lead me to what should come next. At least with first drafts, I’m very much a sentence-to-sentence writer.

A writer I admire named Gary Lutz once described a similar process. He said when writing a sentence he generally puts down a word and then he tries to figure out what word that first word yearns for. That’s the word he used: “yearns.” I love that.

Over how many years were the stories in Quarantine written? Which is the earliest and which the most recent?

I’m a pretty slow writer. Not only that, I’m pretty demanding of myself, so I end up throwing out much of what I write. For that reason, the nine stories that finally made it into the collection span a pretty long period of time: almost nine years. The earliest story is “The Better Person”; the most recent is “A Better Life.” It’s funny because when I was editing “The Better Person” for the collection I felt very critical toward it. It felt very far away from who I am as a writer now, since it’s been almost nine years since I wrote the first draft. I thought to myself, That’s not the story I would write today; it would be totally different. But at the same time, there are things I love about the story that I think come from my being much younger when I wrote it. It has a certain energy and velocity that I like, a certain unbridled passion.

One thing that struck me is your beautifully empathetic depiction of lonely, elderly people. These stories are about marginalised people in general. Are you particularly interested in themes like isolation and personal dislocation?

Yes, absolutely, I do think those are themes and characters I’m particularly drawn to. Perhaps it comes from my growing up feeling so much like an outsider—brown-skinned in a small West Virginian town that was overwhelmingly white—and witnessing so many of my relatives and Indian family friends who seemed, in some way or another, to be outside as well. I grew up with my father’s parents living in our house. I often wondered what it might have felt like to them to land in this tiny southern American town after five decades of living in Mumbai.

The tone of the stories “The Cure” and “What We Mean” is more wry and playful than the others. Were you trying to be more experimental when you wrote them?

Yes, I do think both those stories have a somewhat different feel than some of the others. They are much more language-driven than plot-driven. They are of-a-piece with a whole slew of shorter works (two to four pages long) that my editor and I eventually decided to cut from the collection because they seemed too different in tone and style than the other stories. Writing these pieces, I was very much influenced by writers like Lutz, whom I mentioned earlier, as well as Lydia Davis, Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, Amy Hempel — writers whose sentences have a sculptural quality and a close attention to sound.

There is a bit of sex in the book, but nothing that’s very explicit. Was that a conscious decision?

Several people have made this comment to me, that there isn’t much sex in the book and that what’s there is tasteful. I’m glad to hear it. What it says to me is that the sex doesn’t jump out or distract or hijack the narratives which, as we’ve discussed, aren’t really about sexuality at all. I think my mom would disagree with you, though. Just yesterday she was complaining to me, “Why so much sex?” But maybe, being my mother, she reads it differently than the typical reader. At any rate, I didn’t make a conscious decision one way or another about how much sex to include in the book. But I do think it’s really tough to write about sex.

What is your overall impression of attitudes towards homosexuality in India? The Supreme Court judgement legalising homosexuality last year was a welcome step, but it also caused paranoia in conservative circles. Then there was the recent case of a professor who committed suicide after being fired by his university.

I was deeply saddened to hear about the death of Dr Siras, and I was shocked by the vicious harassment he endured from the students. Does this event, and the paranoia and uproar you referred to, reflect widespread attitudes toward LGBT people in India? I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I’ve traveled all over India with my partner, Robert, and we’ve rarely felt comfortable being truly open about our relationship. At the same time, Robert and I feel the same discomfort in non-urban areas of the U.S. as well. If we are traveling in America, we will never check into a motel in a small town and ask for a single, king-sized bed. We always take the room with two double beds without making a fuss about it.

Have many of your relatives in India read the book? How have they reacted?

I’ve been a total coward when it comes to talking to my relatives in India about the book or about my sexual orientation. I still haven’t told them about either. If they’ve seen the book or seen any of the press, they haven’t mentioned it to me. Honestly, I don’t know how they will react. I guess I’ll find out when I come to India next month. But I have faith in them. I know that they love me, and in the end I do think that that trumps everything. Whatever political and social hang-ups people may have, if they love you, they find a way to understand. I’ve seen this again and again with people in my life. And of course, this extends far beyond sexual orientation. Family members who truly love one another accept each other for who they are, whatever that might be.

Do you read much Indian writing in English? Is there anyone whose work you’re especially impressed by?

Arundhati Roy is basically a minor deity in my eyes. The God of Small Things is one of my all-time favourite novels, and her nonfiction writings and her social and political activism are tremendous inspirations to me. Her work is swelling with generosity and kindness. There are so many works by Indian writers from which I’ve taken inspiration—Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children come to mind. More recently I’ve loved Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege, and the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I teach in one of my classes). As for poetry, I love Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri as well as anything by Agha Shahid Ali.

[Will post a review of Quarantine soon. Also read this fine piece by Mehta about his coming out to his parents]