The many dichotomies of ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT
Age and youth, love found and love lost, a city of excess and a city of scarcity—Sarthak Parashar examines the many contrasts balanced by Payal Kapadia in the acclaimed All We Imagine As Light (2024).
Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha)—the two leads of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024)—take their cat (who they think is expecting) to a doctor. Prabha and this doctor seem to have complicated, repressed emotions towards each other. The younger Anu takes the doctor’s hand to have him pet the cat. Prabha sees this gesture as a sign of flirting, a testimony to the rumours of ‘loose character’ she has heard about Anu. She tells her, “If you behave like a slut, nobody will respect you.” In the very next scene, however, Prabha apologizes in her own way, presenting Anu her favourite dish.
In these small gestures, Kapadia sets the tone of the film: a clash and reconciliation of differing philosophies.
The first Indian film to win the Grand Prix, the second most prestigious honour at the Cannes Film Festival, AWIAL was finally released in selected theatres in India in November. Warmly received in its homeland, it has also received two nominations at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards. Presently, it is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
The first half of AWIAL is set in Mumbai, a city which houses the highest number of billionaires in Asia along with the world’s biggest slum. Kapadia’s film is as full of dichotomies as the city itself. AWIAL centres around two Malayalee women, both nurses, who share much more than a dingy rented apartment—they navigate life and womanhood together. Prabha (older, nominally married) and Anu (younger, unmarried), are two very different women bonded by their womanhood. For Prabha, the institution of marriage holds her back; for Anu, the same institution bickers with her life, in the form of photographs of suitable men sent to her by her mother.
When Anu and Prabha receive an anonymous electrical cooking appliance with instructions in German, Prabhu sees it as a suffocating reminder of her marital status. Anu imagines the possibilities of all she can cook. Perhaps no scene captures the gap between them better: of age, of generations, and restraint.
The women deal with men in different ways, too. Prabha has an estranged husband in Germany and a contractual-doctor colleague who gets her poetry and sweets. Anu is in love with a Muslim man (also Malayalee), but fears facing the stigma of interfaith unions. She is seen differently by the other nurses simply because she dares to love; the patriarchy of the Malayalam-speaking world doesn’t spare her even when she is more than a thousand kilometres away from home. Even Prabha, it seems, has spent her time in Mumbai trying to escape the same.
When Anu and Prabha receive an anonymous electrical cooking appliance with instructions in German, Prabhu sees it as a suffocating reminder of her marital status. Anu imagines the possibilities of all she can cook. Perhaps no scene captures the gap between them better: of age, of generations, and restraint.
Hovering above is the cloudy monsoon that darkens the mahanagar of Mumbai. The sea treats every city differently; it is almost as if the sun does not inevitably rise in Mumbai after a stormy night and when it does, it barely makes a difference to most of its citizens. Many films set in Mumbai are often called ‘love letters’ to the city, and often feature sequences of people looking at the sea and finding solace in the ruthlessness of the city. In Ayan Mukherjee’s 2009 coming-of-age drama Wake Up Sid, Aisha’s apartment overlooks the sea, and her column in a lifestyle magazine explores her journey of settling in Mumbai. Eventually, it is not Mumbai she falls in love with, but the titular Sid.
That is the Mumbai of the rich, the well-off. The working class, the migrants, however, must deal with leaking roofs, waterlogging, inflated rents, and documents to prove that they own the houses they have inhabited for decades. Anu only manages to pay her rent with Prabha’s help. Yet, Anu and Prabha, even if they are overworked and underpaid nurses, aren’t exactly the working class that wrestles with the rising skyscrapers from disputed homes. It is people like Parvaty, an older widowed woman who runs the canteen at the hospital where Anu and Prabha work.
Parvaty’s house in Mumbai barely looks like a home. Dimly lit, it is so clustered that there is no way she can find the document she needs the most to prove her home ownership. The only lights one can see are the city-lights around, from the window. When I imagine Parvaty’s house back in Ratnagiri, with a sprawling garden and sunlight all around, I hear sea waves hitting the shores. The sea waves in Mumbai go mute and die out, trying to trespass the crowd.
Intriguingly, the only time the characters soak up the sea breeze is when they are away from the rat-race of Mumbai, in the exceptionally low population density of Konkan.
Love, for both women, is a frustrating, tricky terrain. Anu buys a burqa to masquerade as a Muslim woman and go to her lover’s place, presumably to have sex. The plan does not work out as the city drowns in heavy rain and Anu is stuck in the metro. Space is a rare luxury in Mumbai: Anu and her lover sneak into shady parking lots and playgrounds to make out, and it is not until they are in Ratnagiri that they copulate.
For Prabha, when she is told by Manoj (Anees Nedumangad), the doctor that he will stay back in Mumbai if she so wishes, it takes all her life-force into telling him that she is already married—instead of confessing that she would love for him to stay, that she would love to help him learn Hindi, and get used to the foreign sea breeze of Mumbai, as if the Arabian sea that borders their home state speaks another language.
What sets Prabha apart from Anu is that the latter dares to take a risk for love; the former can barely call the man who loves her by his name. This difference—and how it is bridged—is the crux of the film, and AWIAL presents it in low-exposure and a flat-aspect ratio. The first half of the film appears claustrophobic, before the characters are given space to breathe in the second half.
These dichotomies are reflected very well in the performances as well. Kusruti’s Prabha is poised and settled in her expressions. The film starts with a mesmerizing shot of her swaying around a local train pole, her expressions reading like a lovelorn thumri, a supple eye roll sounding like Begum Akhtar singing ‘Prem ki bheeksha maange bhikharan, laaj humari rakhiyo saajan’ (The beggarwoman asks for love in alms, oh lover, do not let me down). Hers a captivating face, a face that demands to be looked at, with suppressed angst and maturity in her hypnotic eyes. Unlike Anu, she does not shrug off her burqa when the plan does not work out. Instead, she holds the German cooking appliance close to her core, and hugs it, as if it is also her estranged husband. It is unclear if she cries; she has made peace with life. Or perhaps, life has made peace with her.
Divya Prabha’s Anu, meanwhile, is reckless and her angst is visible from the surface. She is like a brazen taan, wrestling to emote her disdain and disappointment towards a society that refuses to let her love in peace, and sunlight.
In Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy, the central character Lata—confused about her many suitors—quotes Clough to her friend, “There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction: One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy, and another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you.” Perhaps there are two different kinds of loving as well, one which haunts and exhausts Prabha, and another that fuels and revitalizes Anu.
Prabha saves a strange man who ends up unconscious on the Konkan shore. She gives him CPR, and people hail her as his saviour—and his wife. She hesitates, but then uses his amnesia to get the closure that her husband never gave her. He touches her, says her name without the ‘sister’-prefix (even when she nurses him back to consciousness) and apologizes for forgetting about it. The scene is ambiguous, and at times, suggests that this man is really her husband. Perhaps the audience is being deceived just like the stranger. Only after Prabha is touched and kissed that she starts to make sense of Anu’s choices.
Perhaps, all the light and hope and misery and dichotomy and understanding in the world are people; people are the reason one is stuck, and also the reason to move on. They are the reason one stays back in a city that does not speak their language, and the reason one moves back to a coast that does.
Perhaps closure is sometimes created, imagined, and told to oneself. In Anurag Kashyap’s 2009 film Dev.D, Chanda tells a sulky, dismissive Dev who is unable to understand the concept of moving on, “Karte hain log move on. Maine kiya hai (People move on. I have).” Perhaps closure is also retold, like a chant to oneself; it’s not an event, but a process.
When Anu confesses to Prabha that there is a guy who she loves, instead of the many suitors her mother has suggested, Prabha says, “You cannot escape your fate.” AWIAL suggests that one could try. And escape it in bits and pieces, in even smaller escapes to damp jungle floors, prehistoric caves, with strangers and Muslim boyfriends and an older woman who has run out of damns to give.
Parvaty lives on her own terms, reflective of actress Chhaya Kadam’s role in Kiran Rao’s Laapata Ladies. She tells Prabha that if her husband ever comes back, she will thrash him. Prabha and her seem to be old mates: They spend a lot of time together, rising in solidarity with workers’ union and eating at a fancy Chinese restaurant that Parvaty was too hesitant to try all the years that she lived in Mumbai. When Parvaty tells Prabha to throw a rock at the building that is taking her home away, she does so.
Parvaty and Prabha are two starkly different women, much like Prabha and Anu. Prabha might not make sense of Parvaty leaving Mumbai and moving back to Ratnagiri, or Anu’s sneaky links but when they need her, she is there and vice versa. They care for one another; understanding one another is an exercise in futility.
In helping Parvaty move back, Anu finds a bottle of alcohol in Parvaty’s belongings in Ratnagiri and they both gulp it down, and then dance unabashedly to “Daiya yah main kahan aa phasee”. Prabha watches them with love and a cathartic smile.
AWIAL concludes with Prabha and Parvaty meeting Anu’s boyfriend, the former asking him to sit and tell her about which part of Kerala he comes from. His religion ceases to exist—at least between the four of them.
The film’s title is inspired from a painting by Nalini Malani, Kapadia’s mother, which has dueling mythical beings and winged figures in intimate-mundane positions against white archival paper, with scattered text that reads “One day the streets all over the world will be empty. From every tomb I’ll learn all we imagine of light”. Perhaps, all the light and hope and misery and dichotomy and understanding in the world are people; people are the reason one is stuck, and also the reason to move on. They are the reason one stays back in a city that does not speak their language, and the reason one moves back to a coast that does.
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Sarthak Parashar is an alleged cinephile (even though he has neither watched Nolan or Scorcese), freelance journalist, unapologetic lover of art, and Lata Mangeshkar fanboy. The lovechild of Chanda from Anurag Kashyap's Dev D and Tara Khanna from Made in Heaven, he finds solace in films, the literature of Jhumpa Lahiri, ghazals sung by women, and gossip from r/BollyBlindsNGossip. Based in Delhi, you can find him on Instagram @curlsandmockery.
