It was the beginning of the 2015 monsoon. I was still a student at the Indian Film and Television Institute. I received a frantic call from my 96-year-old grandmother, Nani. She fell down and could not get up. With the help of her neighbors, she climbed into bed, but ended up spending days in bed. Nani, usually fierce and independent, found herself extremely miserable. My mother called a nursing agency to help her recover. So Nurse P came into our lives.
At that time, everyone at the film school was on a four-month strike, so I used to visit Mumbai often to check on Nani. From outside her apartment, courtesy of a television screen, streamed footage of nationalist forces advocating hypermasculinity and vicious attacks on minorities, intellectuals, free speech, and civil liberties. While the country was in frenzied chaos, Nani was plagued by hallucinations of her own. She frequently had hallucinations of her dead husband, but I don’t think she liked him very much. It has been 40 years since he died, and since then she has been single, since it was strictly forbidden to fall in love again. She appeared in a dream and cursed him for not being loved for so many years.
Maybe it was the hot, sticky weather, maybe it was Nani’s tantrum, or maybe it was just our days seeming to go on forever, but Nurse P, Nani, and I… We often spent afternoons talking about our past. Although Nani and Nurse P came from completely different backgrounds, they shared a common loneliness and were trying to overcome it with quiet dignity, without the weight of self-pity. Ms. P, a nurse, shares her story of the challenges she faced when she moved to Mumbai, found little work, and ultimately became independent to support herself and her family. Yet, every time she called home, they reminded her that she was incomplete in some way, in that she was not yet married.
It was from that afternoon conversation that I began writing a short script for my final student film. However, the task seemed too difficult and the project was soon abandoned, but I decided to tackle it again for a longer period of time instead of a short 20 minute period.
When I was a child, I studied at a school far away from the city. There was no TV except on Saturdays. To entertain ourselves, we told each other stories about movies in our hostel rooms with the lights off. I listened to those stories and tried to imagine the movies they were describing. Years later, I had a chance to see some of those movies. Unfortunately, the movie itself didn’t quite fit my friend’s description.
I thought about movies and storytelling. Is it possible to make a movie out of a story that’s not very interesting when told, but becomes more interesting when seen? There is always a conflict between showing and telling, between writing a script and making a movie.
“All We Imagine as Light” stars Kani Kusruti (left) and Divya Prahava.
(Petit Chaos)
I remember the first draft of “All We Imagine as Light.” I wrote a 200-page thick document explaining every sound and explaining every flickering light behind the fluttering curtains. It was so boring that even I couldn’t sleep and proofread it. After many rewrites (33 times to be exact), a script began to emerge. In it, I tried to find the truth in the image, which perhaps can be explained in words.
Along the way, I started meeting several women in Mumbai – women of all ages and walks of life. Lots of nurses too. I met and chatted with T, a boisterous nurse, and S, a shy nurse, at a cafe across the street from a fancy hospital. T told me about a creepy old man who exposed himself to S. T grinned cheekily and teased poor S for being too timid. Both women were excellent at their jobs. T was more sociable and dated a doctor. Ms. S was married to a man living in the Middle East. She had just started wearing jeans, and she told me with an embarrassed look on her face that she was afraid he would be offended if she made such a digression.
Mr. T and Mr. S were both close to my age, perhaps a few years younger. I thought about the privilege of writing about their lives as they struggled in the hospital, away from their loved ones.
What started as a two-page short film script grew longer and longer as the years went by. Elements of real life, fantasy, folklore, and everyday tragedy are woven into the script. As a screenwriter, I felt no different from a magpie who weaves a nest not only of twigs and branches, but also of small, shiny objects that people forget or misplace. Somehow, a somewhat complete structure emerged, albeit imperfect and rough around the edges.
