Almost eleven years back in the summer of Mumbai, me and a couple of friends meandered through a few shabby lanes in search for a ‘home’. We were all new to ‘Bombay’, graduates from ‘Calcutta’ looking for something in our lives. I did manage to scrape through to Pune, months later, which in those days used to remain a bit laid-back as compared to Bombay and more to my liking. But Bombay didn’t spare me. My girlfriend then was in Bombay and so I visited the city alternate weeks – from Vile Parle to Dadar, from CST to Santa Cruz, to my friends in Borivli and my cousin at Anushaktinagar. Why so much of a personal gibberish? Cause the film which re-winded my memories is indeed personal – for me, and for many migrants like me who wanted to cope with her – Mumbai to all and Bombay to few including me.
This personal element is what made Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghaat so irresistible to me. Seducer and the seduced all form a part here – sucked in the labyrinth of life. Take Shai, the New Yorker who came to stay in Bombay for a time to shoot photographs. Isn’t New York similar in essence – a dream merchant to immigrants from all over the globe? Yes she is. Shai remains the seducer – the typical exploiter who stretches the soft bearings of a naïve Munna to her advantage. She coaxes him and turns him to her guide in places otherwise she would find difficult to move around – a city which can be so unknown to her own people. And times so uncannily dreadful. Yet, when Munna hands over Arun’s new address to Shai why is there a tear in her crimson eyes? Isn’t she been seduced as well? That’s the charm of the city where personal equations mingle into a collective matrix of lights and shades, longings of humane hue merged into the waves of a bustling Arabian Sea. That is how Tushar Kanti Ray’s camera holds on the lanes and by lanes with surreptitious pander opening up to the grandeur wide-angles of the sea that nurtures the seven islands and this metro. In one of the interviews long before the film was released, Kiran mentioned that she herself an immigrant to the city always felt that each of those rented flats had a story to tell – a story that it carries as persons move in, stay and then move out. This is the microcosm of the metropolis as well – people come and go and yet each leaves one’s mark, miniscule, but that indeed changes the city every time.
It therefore comes as no wonder that Arun’s creative juices flowed by the voyeuristic gaze into a quartet of mini-dv cassettes that he inherited due to tenant-ship. In some deft minimal shots we find Shai looking into Arun’s windows from the opposite construction site when Arun look into those videos where Yashmin is seen to record the daily chores of a neighbour. This circularity of gaze makes the city so vulnerable as well. A vulnerability of a modern day city life, not only Bombay, where you are always been monitored and tracked down. This verity of reality can be disastrous as Yashmin finds out. One of the characters who always speak to Arun and to us through her video diaries meant for her brother, we see how a joyous and sparkling young girl succumbs to the perils of a diabolic milieu. Yashmin is so poignantly beautiful, so vibrant in her love, her nostalgic remembering of her ancestral house in MP that you connect to her immediately. She takes on the city on the full and perishes.
If Yashmin resembles a victim, who does the neighbouring aunt represent? A leitmotif of the city herself? Dumb, speechless, neutral? She well may be. One to whom all these migratory characters come with questions and return unanswered. In Bombay it is you who have to find an answer, to survive or fade away, you have to decide – the city won’t wait, the city can’t wait. Gustavo Santaolalla’s music is soul stirring – like the drumming of incessant rains all round you. Soon you will find water everywhere, trickling down and drowning you. Tushar Kanti Roy’s camera is liberal and following a script that is loose. Defining shots hence are at times juxtaposed edgily leaving a sense of incomplete absolute. In a film which gropes about being all over the place in a smart and chic city this isn’t a big aberration to me. Rather, it came as a different take, a new diced view alternate to the prevalent middle-of-the-road Bollywood contemporary cinema. As compared to the mostly hapless Bengali cinema where nostalgia is soaked only in having a mindset which is a generation old, I have cherished, followed and supported the new breed of Hindi films which have peeked into a clear and sassy image of a metropolis. Be it Delhi in Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye or Khsola ka Ghosla or Bheja Fry, Mithya, Ek Chalis ka last Local and the host of other films on the blasts and the underworlds of Bombay viz A Wednesday, Black Friday, Mumbai Meri Jaan. All these films set up a trend where the apparent realities of the city get on with the unnatural and unseen takes of it – matter-of-fact. Kiran Rao’s script just gave a break to this trend here where the new and the old mingle in old houses, old classical music renditions and more importantly in soft focuses and saturated colours on the screen palette. For those with a weak heart like this essayist, this surely works. It works more because in so many situations you have the same smile on your face as the characters have, your own reminisces and at times you do have a drop of tear – for Yashmin, for Shai, for your Bombay and more so for yourself.
As I have happily settled to Kolkata for long, Dhobi Ghaat gave me that chance to sit back and harp the innumerable little happiness the city gave to me, washed away by the tides of life but resurfaced again. And like Arun, I raise a toast to my muse – Bombay, meri jaan.