The Losers: The First Story

It is early evening in one of the villages in Delhi. Sun is there in full force, but they are sitting in a Buddha Jayanti park like park, an old favorite of repressed lovers, under the ample shades of trees. Rahul is sitting tensed with his head down, full of that nervous energy that indicates coming of a climactic event, and asks hesitantly, so, who is the boy, you love. She smiles, says, the boy is so stupid, does not even know she loves him, walks to a nearby tree and starts carving a name on it. Rahul gets up, sees his name printed as a solid proof, and a new lightness comes into his being.

A commonplace event that happens to countless commonplace couples every day. But it still moves you when brought to the screen with bare honesty by Dibakar Banerjee. It is truly disconcerting to realize the banality of our "most precious" experiences. But then, the experience, for all its' cliched nature, is still unique to us. And capturing it with honesty is perhaps also what lends it the special poignance of the sense of it being shared with others.

There are three stories in Banerjee's Love, Sex Aur Dhokha. Each told with his quirky, earthy sense of humour, connected very tenuously and perhaps having separate lives of their own. In all three stories, he plays off the intense sexual tension between couples, whose love hovers in a rapidly changing, uncertain world between the old and the new.

The first story is that of an artist, whose dream fails him. He is a lower middle class boy, who lives with his single mother, and nourished by bollywood love stories and a scholarship that allows him to pursue his film studies. Considering "Adi Sir" his Guru, he is paying homage to the iconic 90s mainstream love story, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in his own humble way. With Shahid Qureshi, whose father has a big shop in the Atta Market, as his Raj, and Shruti Dahiya, daughter of a big Jat businessman cum robber baron, as his Simran. Shruti is his muse, his Simran, with whom he falls in love irresistabily. The boy is dreamy, shifty looking, lies easily, and knows how to curry favor with the big men of the village. You look at him with suspicion, and may even have some sympathy with the big father, who looks hideous but honest. This is a story of puppy love, where bollywood logic is inverted with uncompromising failure and a denoument that is as horrific as it is unexpected.

While it is a great indictment of the tremendous damage which a movie like DDLJ may have brought to popular culture, it also left me dissatisfied. It seemed to play on the mythical rich vs. poor conflict of bollywood love stories. From anecdotal experience, the real conflict in Indian love stories is social - caste, region, religion - most often caste, in mofussil towns, with class usually playing a subservient role. This unsettling aspect of the closeness of the killers and the killed is what perhaps brings in the pathos, apart from just anger.

In "Maps for Lost Lovers", Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's telling of an honor killing in a small, sleepy British town, the killers are not some invisible henchmen of an impossibly rich businessmen. They are friends and brothers of the killed couple, who were apparently "living in sin" before marriage. You see the parents of the killers returning from jail after visiting their sons. Sons have been beaten up, racially abused and taunted not only about their crimes, but their origins. Their parents are unable to understand why their sons have to go through all this, when they probably did what was right. You also see the sister-in-law of the killed man, who loved him like a brother. She is grief-stricken, but has very ambivalent feelings about what he was doing and perhaps even considers his killing as a just retribution from the lordly powers up there. And this ambivalence is all around, unlike the screaming media headlines. You constantly feel something churning inside you, burning you, making you feel not just angry but deeply uncomfortable about yourself, your family and your society.

This ambivalence and duality of the situation is lost in LSD. We go back to the nostalgic images of the lost couple to reflect on what could have been, with anger towards the perpetrators, but never really to examine aspects of our selves that are part of both the killers and the killed.