It was the beginning of the monsoon in 2015. I was still a student at the Film & Television Institute of India. I received a frantic call from my 96-year-old grandmother, Nani — she had fallen and could not get back up. With some help from neighbors, she scrambled onto her bed — only to be confined to it for days. The normally fiercely independent Nani found herself quite miserable. To aid her recovery, my mother called up a nursing agency, and that is when Nurse P came into our lives.
At the time, all of us at our film school were on a four-month strike, so I made frequent visits to Mumbai to check in on Nani. From outside her apartment, images petered in courtesy of our TV screen — images of nationalistic forces that were advocating hypermasculinity and vicious attacks on minorities, intellectuals, freedom of speech and civil liberties. As the country was in a frenzied delirium, Nani was having hallucinations of her own. She had frequent visions of her dead husband, whom I suspect she didn’t like very much. He had been dead for 40 years, and she had been single ever since, as falling in love again was strictly forbidden. She cursed him for appearing in her dreams and for all the years she could not be loved.
Perhaps it was the hot and sticky weather, or the petulant tantrums of Nani, or maybe just that our days seemed to be stretching on endlessly, but Nurse P, Nani and I started spending many afternoons talking about our pasts. Although Nani and Nurse P were of completely different backgrounds, they shared a common loneliness, which they were trying to negotiate with quiet dignity, devoid of the heaviness of self-pity. Nurse P told us about the troubles she faced moving to Mumbai and nearly not getting a job, to finally being independent and supporting herself as well as her family. And yet, every time she called home, she was reminded by them that she was in some way incomplete for not yet being married.
It was from these afternoon conversations that I began to write a short script for my final student film. But the task seemed too daunting, and soon the project was abandoned, until I decided to take it on again — not for a 20-minute short but for something much longer.
When I was a child, I studied in a school that was away from the city. We didn’t have TV except on Saturdays. To entertain ourselves, we narrated stories of films to one another in our hostel rooms after the lights had been turned off. I listened to those stories and tried to imagine the films they described. Several years later, I had a chance to watch some of those films. Unfortunately, the films themselves never lived up to my friends’ descriptions!
I thought about cinema and storytelling. Could we perhaps film a story that was less interesting when told and more when seen? Showing and telling — the conflict of writing a script and making a film always exists.
“All We Imagine as Light” stars Kani Kusruti, left, and Divya Prahba.
(Petit Chaos)
I recall the first draft of “All We Imagine as Light.” I wrote a hefty 200-page document that described every sound and described the light that flickered behind every fluttering curtain. It was so terribly boring that even I could not proofread it without falling asleep. After many rounds of rewriting (33, to be precise), a script began to appear — in it, I tried to find the truth of an image that could perhaps be described in words.
Along the way, I began to meet several women in Mumbai — women of all ages and occupations. Many nurses too. I met T, the boisterous nurse, and S, the shy nurse, who chatted with me in a cafe opposite a fancy hospital. T told me about a creepy old man who had exposed himself to S. With a cheeky grin, T teased poor S for being too timid. Both women were excellent at their jobs. T was more outgoing and was dating a doctor. S was married to a man who lived in the Middle East. She had only just started wearing jeans, she told me with a shy look, afraid that he would take offense to such a digression.
Both T and S were close to my age, perhaps a few years younger. I thought about the privilege I had of writing about their lives while they toiled in a hospital away from their loved ones.
What started as a two-page short film script grew longer and longer as years passed by. Aspects from lived lives, fantasies, folk stories and mundane tragedies wove themselves into the script. I felt that as a screenwriter I was not different from a magpie weaving a nest — woven together with twigs and branches but also with small and sparkly objects that people had forgotten or left behind. Somehow the structure emerged — imperfect and rough on the edges but complete in its own way.