‘I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.
If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn’t
have happened in the world?
I’m everything you lost. You won’t forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You can’t forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.’
Farewell (excerpt), Agha Shahid Ali
Histories, politics, ravages, and pain get carried in memories. So do love, tendernesses, dreams. Memories slip through time and wade through years, trickle down generations – changing its form like water in a jar to find its place in a heart.
I watched Dibakar Banerjee’s ‘Tees’, an unreleased film shelved by Netflix, at a closed-door screening some weeks ago, and returned with a head full of thoughts. It is the story of a family across three generations, the past, present, and the future, in three different places – Ayesha Draboo (Manisha Koirala) in 1989 Srinagar, Zia (Huma Qureshi) in the Bombay of 2019, and Anhad Draboo (Shashank Arora), in 2042 Delhi.
The central character, however, is perhaps none of them, but the State. It is the looming presence of the State that affects all these lives in the three different generations. All these people, standing at three different points in time, witness their pasts being rewritten, and their immediate surroundings in the present slowly becoming unknown to them.
In 1989, Ayesha’s Srinagar is changing. Her best friend, Usha (Divya Dutta) – a Hindu – doesn’t feel like her homeland belongs to her anymore. Ayesha is often in denial, she holds on to the Srinagar that was – her Srinagar – surely it cannot be that bad, surely things shall get better? In the Bombay of 2019, Zia, a successful lawyer, finds it difficult to buy a house for herself. She has the wrong name, she’s been told – a Zia with a Z, and not with a J. And 2042, the world that Anhad Draboo inhabits, is dystopic. People get referred to by their Social Security numbers, they are grouped into ‘risk categories’, there’s constant surveillance on the air they breathe, and of course, algorithm is king. In this world, Anhad writes a novel named ‘Tees’, and it is banned from being published by the Ministry of Literature (Needless to point out, 2042 invariably reminds one of Orwell’s 1984 and the various ministries of its State machinery. Like the Ministry of Truth, which was actually the Ministry of Propaganda. Is literature truth?).
He was a child then, and no one talks about 2030, so how does he know so much – Anhad gets asked. Anhad’s history is his memory. ‘My memory keeps getting in the way of your history,’ Anhad quotes Agha Shahid Ali at the beginning of his book. Dibakar’s film made me want to go back and reread a lot of Agha Shahid Ali’s poems, for the poet had written about his Kashmir like few others. And while I did that, I also went back to Amitav Ghosh’s (famous) blog post that he’d written after Shahid’s death. A few lines struck me with a lot more intensity this time – ‘He had a special passion for the food of his region, one variant of it in particular: ‘Kashmiri food in the Pandit style.’ I asked him once why this was so important to him and he explained that it was because of a recurrent dream, in which all the Pandits had vanished from the valley of Kashmir and their food had become extinct. This was a nightmare that haunted him and he returned to it again and again, in his conversation and his poetry.’
Food is intensely personal. The taste of a curry, the smell of spices record memories of growing up, of families that do not stay together anymore, of mothers, of a kitchen left behind. And at the same time, it is so intensely political – from a goverment’s dictation of what people can eat to harmless otherizations amongst friends at a dinner table. Food constructs the fabric of history.
An important aspect of the film’s storyline revolves around a cookbook. A diary full of recipes travelling through time, that not only manages to document culinary history, but also the timelessness of quirks in human character. Agha Shahid Ali’s nightmares are not too different from Usha’s. What use would recipes and cookbooks be if the people were displaced from their homeland?
A dream that had germinated in 1989 finds some sort of an outlet in 2042 – it is interesting how the film plays around with the idea of families. Perhaps we give too much importance to bloodlines – what we call family is a lot more of a complex web than just that. Family is who we love, a mother is whose history affects us the most. Relationships with mothers are always so delicate, so tender – camaraderie that often just falls short of friendship. A character instinctively reaches out for their mother in the darkest of times, but takes too long to open up about their truth.
Dibakar Banerjee says in interviews and screenings that he made Tees to spite his Khosla ka Ghosla audience. The middle-aged, middle-class audience that had found Kamal Khosla and his woes relatable would probably not feel very comfortable watching Tees. Netflix, in its press release, describes the film as ‘the story of an Indian family interwoven with the personal, ideological and sexual history of India,’ and the discomfort would be felt in all three histories, none of which follow conventional, conforming paths. It was easy to observe how the people around Kamal Khosla were making a mockery of his troubles. Perhaps Tees forcefully points out how powers far beyond our control make a mockery of our lives, and sometimes we don’t even understand.
In a strangely ironic turn of events, the fate of Tees is now similar to the fate of Anhad Draboo’s unpublished novel. Tees traverses through time, but it is the present we must inhabit. I hope for it to someday see the light of the day.
