When you are driving through your city, cocooned in the air-conditioned comfort of your fancy car, you tend to ‘not see’ poverty on the wrong side of the tracks. In fact, we cover those tracks with white sheets (literally and figuratively) when we want to show only shiny happy people to foreign country heads visiting us, don’t we?
Well, Anamika Haksar will take you through the narrow lanes of Shahjahanabad in old Delhi and introduce you to characters you wouldn’t dream of meeting, and make you dream their dreams…
The protagonist of the film is a man called Patru (more appropriately ‘Fatru’ or someone who is ‘faaltu’ or useless) who lives on the street by his wits. He’s mostly a pickpocket, a shaadi band member, a jilted aashiq and our guide through this city within a city, thanks to his gift of the gab.
Theatre actor Ravindra Sahu is so good as Patru, you are not outraged when he’s picking people's pockets - your empathy wells up because he gives money to baba, an old man who’s bedridden (he asks Patru, ‘Is the money honest?’) and you begin to care for him because he dreams of wearing a tux and playing in the symphony-like orchestra rather than wearing the red uniform to play the trumpet in a wedding band or carry the lights on his head to light up the baraat.
I grinned under my mask when I watched him quickly change out of his uniform and comb his hair and join the dancing bunch only to purloin a camera and jewels at the wedding.
Patru is friends with Lali (another star of the theatre, K. Gopalan) who is called a communist but he’s really someone who was robbed of his life savings with which he was to escape to Dubai. Lali is a daily wage labourer who speaks out against the injustice meted out to those even more downtrodden than he. He imagines a world where there’s justice for all…
There’s Raghubir Yadav, the man who sells deep fried kachoris and sings songs that warn you: ‘tamasha dekhne wale kahin tamasha na ban jaye’ (those who watch the spectacle of life could become the spectacle themselves). His kachoris are so ‘khasta’ (crispy), people who work in the area cannot do without a kachori for breakfast.
Ashok Jain wears a white kurta-churidar and speaks a floral Urdu (will remind you of the talent that storytellers - the dastangos - of yesteryears had) that seems completely out of place in a neighbourhood that is full of squalor. He takes groups on tour, showing them the forgotten glory of old Delhi. He speaks of culture and architecture and shows people where Mirza Ghalib lived.
Patru puts his elbow in and begins to steal Ashok’s walking groups to show them Poverty Porn: cops who beat people, carry them away in buses, dead people on the streets being picked by the municipality carts, and introduces people who are struggling to make a living. This subversive, political commentary is so beautifully woven into the narrative, you watch Patru and Ashok’s rivalry with much amusement and yes, awe.
Ashok Jain the guide is played brilliantly by Lokesh Jain. As we watch the film, we realise that despite his clean white clothes, Ashok also lives in one of the dilapidated havelis in Shahjahanabad. And that too has been sold. Although he dreams of looking down on his neighbourhood from a flying carpet, in reality, he is carried away by labourers on a donkey as if he were debris from broken buildings as he reads about the culture of the city from Maheshwar Dayal’s epic on Shahjahanabad.
You hear the complaint of a woman (who rents mattresses for the night) that the city has become so uncivilised, that the ‘Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb’ (multicultural, multi-religious inclusive society) is lost, how people do not speak with the respectful ‘aap’ but the rude ‘arre’... You hear the voice of a woman who dreams of romancing her husband while wearing fancy clothes, but is awakened by the same husband beating her…
This film has two more important characters: the dreams of the characters and the city itself. Saumyananda Sahi's cinematography and Paresh Kamdar's awesome editing breathe life into the city. The city feels like an old man that is in senile decay but will not die (all those electrical wires feel like nerves and the warrens of lanes feel not just like a maze but like the ghastly innards of a person). The dreams, aah, so many dreams! The filmmaker treats the dreams like a fantasy… animated snakes and cows and goddesses and flowers, pop up like something out of a Monty Python sketch title.
But wait, something that made me sigh was the moment where an exhausted labourer pulling a cart full of cement sacks stuck in a noisy traffic jam leans against the load and closes his eyes. This is where the grass begins to grow on the sacks, offering him a pillow to lean on. What a moment!
Will such a wonderful piece of cinema find commercial success with today's audiences in the theatre? We are so used to watching obvious linear storytelling that we are like Patru’s walking tour members who don’t want to face reality and run away by saying, ‘I’d rather save Polar bears’ and ‘My company CSR will not accept this!’
But we need to watch this wonderful film because we still haven’t answered a question Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed (buried in Shahjahanabad and shown in the film) asked once: should I use this blanket to cover my body or your deeds?
P.S: The title implies: Don’t ask me ridiculous questions, I’m off to do important things like feed jalebis to my horse!
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