How often is it that our immediate location in which we live and work leaves a lot to the other’s imagination and a whole lot to be desired on our own frugal parts? I’ve come to realize through advanced maturity that we are essentially frugal in spirit as much as we wouldn’t admit it and in a predominantly middle class ethical standard of life, there are patterns within our spaces that we take seriously only in hindsight. The surprising part is this commissioning of selective amnesia is a horrendous human mistake as our individual mind, all the while hoping for change, calculates and puts into our personal accounts this pattern of skirting the truth. We calculate and account for every step, every limitless predictable asset that spells out the words ‘mundane’ and ‘routine’ down to the most overexhausted word in use: ‘normal’. We end up asking, “how much of ourselves is normal in terms of moral accountability?”
The personal space in our lives then is most commonly referenced for our inward reflections and truths fall out of cracks. Think of a nosy or overbearing neighbour, the interpersonal fall-outs in a now much-maligned and fringe group of joint families, the discomfort of living in a communal or social backwater, complaining about occupying small plots in an utopia of real estate boom, potential threat in a less than secure/ isolated suburban sprawl or points where too much space in living quarters is a substitute for desolation and fears of bearing any unexpected incidence all alone, cut off from close community. Hence an element of accommodation as regards spaces is too vast to go beyond just the home. It is a state of mind and a location or landmark lodged deep inside. We pay heed to too little or too much when settled in the seemingly secure folds of the hearth and too many unflappable realities are part of the Pandora’s box that is the home. Its about civilization, human nature; the personalized patch of ownership and practicality we invested in these spaces. Bedazzlement is thus a loaded term here and in cinema the living space has often become a symbol of crucial inversion. After all, the ideal of our personal space is an extensive myth and truth is stranger than fiction even when it escapes our eyes. On these fronts, cinematic representatives helped me in grasping more nuances of the concept in close concurrence with my own ideas. Our spaces are tracts of secrets and figures of much enigma.
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Dear Maya(2017) has the titular protagonist as a recluse ensconced within a dilapidated mansion in the hills, only to not venture out of it for nearly two decades. This mystifies two spirited young girls who are taken aback by the urban legend attached to her secluded stature and attempt to find out her tale as their destinies intertwine. So a generational difference and exploration of gender to then and now and an unified triptych of individual feminine identity are moot points which I took away from its plot. However, the sequestered confines of the home and the person entrapped within that self-inflicted state of exile caught my attention more. The director of the film had told a popular host that she sought inspiration from a real-life occurrence where a woman who saw the brutalities of the 1982 anti-Sikh riots resorted to confinement for 30 years, the surprising part being that her husband stayed in the home next to her all this while. This rattled my self-consciousness and I wondered about the price that one has to pay for all the vicious cycles of violence we are privy to. Reading about them in itself is a death knell for humanity and witnessing it can only have an unimaginably pronounced effect on the recipient. The eyes witnessing horrors of mankind ultimately are punctuated by the fearful signals emitted by our all-controlling brain cells and this paralyses our sense of self and movement in a life-changing reversal of being. The sense of emotional and mental displacement is permanent. The very act of grieving and shock takes an internalized charge and the home becomes a site of inversion of every normal functioning. The human psyche is pushed to such a brink that it retreats from any contact or communication. The vow of silence then remains the last defiance. Technically, this is called agoraphobia. For me, this representation of a recluse in a ghost-like structure is like a body double of our own fears and the unspoken mime that we engage with is given the spotlight to materialize in depth and coherence. Maya is our body double and kindred; the volatile world we occupy is the receptacle which turns its melancholic look at our crestfallen soul.
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The horror house phenomenon actually distills these private fears with heightened cultural synonyms of ghosts, vampires and murderous hotbeds. The underlying and truthful ring of suspense is that the home cannot evince necessity as secure shelthers and merely a roof on our heads. Prior histories and clandestine trysts with danger might as well be two feet away from us. Hence the feeling of dread upon visiting an ancestral home, palace or a lone piece of virgin land. The grand character is not without its apprehensions. What if it is something different than the imposing facade it presents? As goes the saying, “even walls have ears”
I have grown up listening to such anecdotes in which adults refused to show themselves outside and stayed indoors to the detriment of their creaking, cobweb covered walls and shabby living conditions. In one instance I have seen an elderly lady above 90 attest to that. I could (and still can) somehow feel their sheer desperation at renouncing normalized rules of civility and the distance and fear they invite when others talk about them.
In today’s world, stepping out of the home is a challenge unto itself. We hear the common refrain that going out is not suitable anymore. Hooliganism and terror in any one way can be encountered. Staying out too late or not being with known company is an instantly risky proposition. It’s better to be at home than in the great(or in modern parlance, grave) outdoors. Here, the interior and the exterior spaces on which mortals can move around are opposed to each other and let’s say that at the cost of nihilism it’s how things stand.
In E.M. Forster’s book A Passage to India, colonial passage of relationships reaches a difficult point when a morally troubled woman Adela Quested visits the Marabar Caves in a nondescript part of the countryside and the booming sound of Om unsettles her. The dark and fearful claustrophobia of this contained location makes her so weak she fails to see the reverberation of Om in its meditative spiritual essence and approximates it with some doomed enunciation of invasive mental toll. Like some otherwordly call from beyond. The writer’s enigmatic touch has never explained whether her experience is real or a figment of the imagination under duress. His layered underpinning is to reveal the lack of understanding for native culture by the colonizer’s ilk. There is a clear gulf between them in temperament and mindset and this comes to a simmer when she accuses her companion, the comely Dr. Aziz of taking advantage of her in the caves. This is a wrong claim but her disturbing unravelling happens in the closed spaces of a small town and colonial stranglehold in early twentieth century. The caves shake her yoke of mysticism and she is unable to handle this sudden silence and ominous backdrop. The pathology of racial segregations is mounted at the top of its psychological debris.
Another instance is in the 2014 film Highway, where a sexually abused girl Veera confides about her exploitation by her uncle to her abductor who in turn becomes her kindred. It’s a highly problematic situation but in recognition of no physical harm in his presence (as her abduction is a result of his rage against the milling one percent echelons), she shares her scarred front to the rustic man who had been abused himself and seen his mother being lent to other men by his Godless father. In time the recreation of Stockholm Syndrome takes on realistic foregrounding as in the travels through northern India in a truck, she finds the freedom she yearned for, something she expresses in the opening minutes and this later confessional roots it. The abductor and captive dynamic finds a personal space in their predicaments. Lines of normal bonds blur as they establish secure connections with each other. This is the space where personal liberty takes precedence over anything else. I realized extreme circumstances can bear such an outcome and in this honest and bare-bones look the home and outside take an individual tinge. Ultimately Veera lashes out at her family for turning a blind eye to her suffering and leaves them for good. She had all the material comforts and clout to enjoy but chose to walk out to honor her self-esteem. This individualistic streak presents a place of fulfillment as our space, home, is ultimately where the heart is . No amount of money and prestige can build it up or raze it down. This, in no way, tries to make you wary of home.
For me, spaces determine definition of the body and soul and one’s place in the larger scheme of things. In the seminal film Arth(Meaning, 1982), an orphan marries a temperamental director, keeps changing houses and asks him for a permanent home. When he surprises her with one, her happiness knows no bounds and she is humbled. But when he divulges later on in a rough patch of their journey that it has been given to him by his rich mistress, the wife moves out. She finds boarding in a women’s hostel, starts working and with the dint of eventual self-sufficiency finds the resolve to define herself. A permanent home may be elusive but her dignity dictates her personal space.
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I, on my part, accord importance to locations which make me happy, whether serene or crowded and disseminate an enlivened pulse. It has a lot to convey to my sensitivity as not every place manages to make me comfortable and I would rather bolt out of them. A garden, public place, park, my school, any location with a life of its own. I would give that distinction to my school La Martiniere and its premises as well as various spots in and around my historical and culturally rich city Lucknow. As a resident, I know how they warm and comfort me, hold me in balanced equilibrium on a scorching day or a chilly evening.
As I live in the heart of the city, all the best spots are in my grasp and I’m the better for it. In Ek Ghar (A Home) a humble couple settles down in a modest flat but it hardly gives it respite from the flux of urban churning. The bustling sounds interrupt its peace and this sober duo finds soon enough that the home is in a disputed plot of land and contributes majorly to the chagrin of other powerless people around. Their honest and transparent outlook is affixed with the realization that devoid of blame as they are, they are squatters on this patch. The idea of home comes with a heavy burden of conscience and the whealing-dealing borne by power brokers. There is a striking parallel here in the character of a married woman in the film who leaves her husband, questions the place of women, especially those with limited means and money, and concludes that there is no real home for women. It comes down to the father’s and then the husband’s share in her pinched identity. When her personal crisis accentuates to a greater degree, she radically takes refuge in a crematorium. The abode of the dead is the space where the one with no affiliations of her own comes to. No judgements belong here and no prying eyes. This is radical and very much a metaphor of our societal dysfunction. Her identity corresponds with her location of choice and strongly makes an impact.
This elusive idea of home is very close to my heart and soul so to speak. As my family had been occupying a rented flat for sixteen years, I know the feeling of displacement and half-hearted adjustments. We were forced to leave our own home years back by some members who still continue to vouch for our misery. I have addressed a large part of this collective personal pain in my poem titled Two Storeys and A Half.
Two and a Half Storeys
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A well made cinematic example of the pleasures and pains of sharing a home is found in A HOME OF OUR OWN. A single mother and her children struggle to make ends meet. Their strength and solidarity makes them rebuild their sanctimonious abode from scratch after a fire guts it down. The community too pitches in to lend them colossal support. The narrator reminisces about those formative years and the lessons in endurance and hope he imbibed. The reconstruction of the home entails the family’s reconstruction and rebirth.
https://youtu.be/m8n8oaVTL-o?feature=shared
A spectacularly macabre exemplification of the bedazzlement found in spaces is in the 1962 classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Here old age as entailing a holy basil like characteristic to two enlightened souls is missing. The narrative brings in an imperious clash of bruised egos which reinvents the iconography of sibling rivalries. This film is a landmark as its leading actors Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were bitter rivals and this true facet added to the strong sense of simultaneity between real and reel while ageism was another determinant. Macabre means anything horrid related to death or injury. Here macabre takes up the death of normalcy in a seemingly perfect mansion. A bitter former child star Baby Jane Hudson heaps indignities and cruelties on her wheelchair-bound sister Blanche, the incomplete cycle of her desires for success and their fate unfold and the interiors of their home is claimed as their inverted sanctuary. Others are impervious to the psychological horrors inflicted on one by the other. But then the horrors are many-fold here, invested in the mind. A car accident which left Blanche paralyzed from waist down becomes the glue which in the climax here reveals aggressive competitive levels to which blood relations can stoop to in order to succeed in the game of one-upmanship. It signifies that there’s no one innocent party here. As Baby Jane attempts to revive her career in middle age with a rendition of “I wrote a letter to Daddy” which she epitomized as a child idol and reiterates a monologue that she regularly performed as a younger girl in front of the mirror, culminating in that brilliant shot of her mirror-image and shriek of realization of advancing stomp of time, I felt for her. In her sincere counter balances to bouts of uncontrollable rage like hitting her sister like a woman possessed, empathy for her conditioning in the past glory of her heydays, her sister’s halo as a prosperous adult star and her own future left adrift as a consequence come from the deepest recesses of our broader understanding.
Nothing warrants apologies for her negative side but when I looked at her offsetting her verbal outbursts( excepting one physical act of hitting Blanche) with some truly private unguarded moments of child-like engagement with her own self, I knew this was an individual still residing in the beatitude of childhood . We all do as the real precarious trajectory of life begins as we become adults. I completely identified with her anger, her restlessness, her importunate tempers and adamant personality. She had been denied a place and we all know the sting of lifelong rejection spells impossible inner torment. She is shown to zealously prepare meals for her sister and look after her and when her guards are down even call out her name at the time of real trouble. As she wears the same dress and horrid, blanched makeup( an inversion of her sister’s name perhaps?) she makes me recollect the one green t shirt I put on many times when I go out for picking errands and the stern expression I go with. Now cold feet from others despite my best intentions have made me cynical and very angry lately and so that interminable circle and surly expression is a corollary I picked up as being similar. Constant denial after all drives us mad and I know the maddening din is reflected in me too. We are harangued and in turn take it on our visages and hard exteriors while the bulk of the invective is reserved for home. Blame games, finger pointing all transpire here and closest affiliates are injured although the biggest wounds are on oneself.
It is quite telling that external spaces add insult to our injury. I will say it again that Jane’s deeds are very complex and unforgivable and I don’t condone them but that monstrosity has been inflicted on her by everyone who sidelined her unceremoniously as her sister became popular and left her in the cold. If she’s cruel then she reflects portions of the cutthroat show business where she has been made to play to the gallery since a child sensation. Her suffering is genuine as much as Blanche and this film is so rich in subtexts that the personal and emotional space take us over and drive us towards the precipice of uncomfortable foundations. The spaces of human behavior are as vast and sprawling as open spaces.
So by the time the line, “so you mean all this time we could have been friends” comes up, the focus on spaces revert back to its human interpretation. These spaces are presented as being a part and parcel of our existence and interpret us for others.
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All the clips are courtesy YouTube.
NOTE: a reiteration of my first essay published on Wattpad collection A LETTERED SOUL in early 2017.
An Awadh Boy's Panorama : tracing words on these filigreed, discerning fingertips. 