A city translated through the languages of love
Modern Love (Mumbai)’s greatest realization lies in the offering of the city’s palette: an architectural marvel in the Sea Link, an underlying bedrock in Thane, a warm enclosure in cutting chai. The city is steeped in the love its characters exude towards themselves and others.
How do you capture a city in a caption? A young man, who’s not on Instagram, asks his partner. Crazy? Busy? Unpredictable?
No, she seems unconvinced in her response Neither.
Perhaps they realize that one can’t summarise a city as vivid as Mumbai with a simplified description on social media. Across the roads, across the multitude of cities within one, an aspiring graphic designer takes a seat, mulling over his possibilities. Fantasies. Fables of love and hope and independence. A couple breaks into a dance sequence a little beside him, having taken a resolution amongst themselves. Complementarily, the song plays in the background. It urges, Shuru se shuru karte hain. Let’s start from the start.
In that case, let’s start from the start.
Modern Love could’ve been called ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’, suggested Daniel Jones—the founding and present editor on The New York Times column on which the series is based. The divergence between the two names is unbridgeable, more so after the eighteen years in which the former, Modern Love has become emblematic of deeply-personal stories, navigating love in the identifiable, but inexplicable modern zeitgeist. Following the sustained captivity, the first screen translation of the columns appeared on Amazon Prime in 2019, drawing critical acclaim and applause from its viewers. It returned with another season in 2021 before an Indian adaptation was announced earlier this year.
The Indian version of the series, however, was to be rooted in its cityscapes, not merely for the purposes of adapting, but for the imperatives of painting tales on the ‘canvas’ of three Indian cities: Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Mumbai, the ‘maximum city’ was numero uno, the first to paint love from the three chosen colours.
‘Mausam hai pyaar’ (The weather is love) begins the opening sequence of each episode of Modern Love (Mumbai), peppered with affectionate photos of a motley group, including the directors and writers of the six episodes. The inclusion of the latter is both a self-conscious and self-reflexive admission, in that the makers are shown to identify with the abstraction of love they seek to outline on the celluloid. The montage, in doing so, bears imprints of real lives before fiction takes the centrestage, hinting at the borrowing of one from the other. For even if these are pre-written columns to be adapted, the showmakers too have lived through the ebbs and flows of the underlying sentiments. Of love and loss.
The city cascades into the show from the outset, first shot, first episode. A wide-eyed view of the Sea Link. Laalzari (Fatima Sana Sheikh), pines for a ride on the elusive road, standing on the shores of the sea. It’s an expose of the land of Mumbai and its tiding partner.
The presence of the city is not always as panoramic as the first shot. At times, it is implicit. At times, it is overt. At times, it’s absent too. From “Raat Raani” to “Cutting Chai”, the half-dozen episodes keep zooming in and out of the city, entering, exiting Mumbai. Enlarging and dwarfing it. People and places are to be equally shown, in a deft attempt at striking a chord between the modern love in the show, and the city that serves as it’s ‘canvas’, the city which roots the romance.
The half-dozen episodes keep zooming in and out of the city, entering, exiting Mumbai. Enlarging and dwarfing it. People and places are to be equally shown, in a deft attempt at striking a chord between the modern love in the show, and the city that serves as it’s ‘canvas’, the city which roots the romance.
The character of Laalzari is stranded with her love for the city, and the beloved who leaves her. Laalzari and Lutfi—her better half—arrive to Mumbai from Kashmir, in the hope of building a life that was deemed impermissible in the valley. The city, in a way, is their refuge before it becomes their abode. Cities tend to become that, in particular for people hailing from smaller towns. The expanse of cities acts as an absorbent to their crises, cushioning them in its crowd, letting them get lost within themselves and away from the eyes of the detesters.
If Mumbai accepted Laalzari and Lutfi as couple, Laalzari’s acceptance of the city comes about in her acceptance of the self, a decade after Lutfi unilaterally ends the marriage. This marks her second innings in the city, a rejuvenation for someone who had till now been seated only behind her partner.
To Laalzari, the Sea Link is a challenge akin to athletes devoid of self-confidence. She needs to cross it, not merely to reach the other end, but to prove to herself that the barriers can be breached. It’s a win necessary for the senses. Notwithstanding how the central presence of the symbol of Sea Link tucks the episode to Mumbai, it underscores in addition the greater promise of cities far and wide. Of their structures and monuments. Larger than oneself, reaching—and in some cases, crossing these structures—is an act of liberation. A manifestation of the desire to access the city.
Fittingly then, Laalzari’s stepping out in the night-time to sell Kahwa signifies yet another freedom, of a woman occupying a public space, populated as it is with male vendors. Altogether, she transforms to an independent being, spreading her arms as she rides her bicycle on the Sea Link at the end: the materialisation of her perennial desire. The city becomes an abiding partner in that moment, the holder to her self-love.
Laalzari’s lure towards the Sea Link in the first episode is perhaps closer to a visitor’s than a resident’s outlook. The Link—known to people both inside and outside the city—is often gaped at by first-time riders, marvelled at by tourists. Laalzari is a migrant to Mumbai, an outsider yet to access the city in full, and her desire to get on the Link is a symbol of her ‘outsider’ romanticization of Mumbai. More imagined, less lived.
Modern Love (Mumbai), however, doesn’t curtail itself to using the city just as an ambitious conception. In the latter half, the city of Mumbai crawls in-between the characters. “I love Thane”, “Cutting Chai”, and “My Beautiful Wrinkles” elucidate Mumbai its parts: in spirit, transcending its physicality and much-marvelled infrastructure. The city, in these three episodes, becomes more ingrained even as it remains apparent, strumming the chords of love.
In his pathbreaking work on the (im)possibilities of love and loving in the modern Indian city, A City Happens in Love (translated by Akhil Katyal), Ravish Kumar underscores how in the process of loving in a city, “We [the couple] define not only ourselves but the city as well.” The city is a pivot to love, a soil where its seeds are sown. Saba (Masaba Gupta) and Parth (Rithvik Bhowmick)—the protagonists of “I Love Thane”—trace their roots in their strolls in this one part of the city. They reminisce and rejoice their time at Thane, the common origin that spawned, in them, two disparate individuals. The city, in Thane, becomes a sketchbook, with pre-set portraits of the surroundings and the backdrops that are illuminated and etched by Saba and Parth. Therein, they also illuminate their affections.
Thane functions as a stencil to their budding love, basing and shaping the present, lending from their past, memorialising it for the future. The city here is at its metaphysical best. Love happens in Thane; or as Kumar would’ve liked to say, Thane happens in love.
At last, arrives “Cutting Chai”. A name so colloquially Mumbai that it reeks of the city’s fragrance even before the episode unfurls. While no proper documentation of the history of the said variety of the tea exists, a now-widespread legend claims that it originated and cemented its place in Mumbai. Latika (Chitrangada Singh) and Daniel (Arshad Warsi) break the ice over cups of cutting chai, stirring tea and their souls alike. Latika’s cup empties. The hearts click. A specificity of the city comes to be the starting point, a recurring presence rather in their to-be-relationship.
This episode is perhaps singular in that sense, invoking a beverage pinned to Mumbai, underscoring the gastronomy of a city as a vital cultural thread that can tie people—and lovers—in knots. Chai stands as a metaphor to all the food unique to a city, latched interminably to its identity, and the lives of those who inhabit it. Mumbai, the city, as in “I Love Thane” is deeply rooted in the lives of the couple, interplaying as they fumble and fight and fondle. Daniel says of the cutting chai—or perhaps of Mumbai, “It just keeps you wanting for more.”
Chai stands as a metaphor to all the food unique to a city, latched interminably to its identity, and the lives of those who inhabit it. Mumbai is deeply rooted in the lives of the couple, interplaying as they fumble and fight and fondle. Daniel says of the cutting chai—or perhaps of Mumbai, “It just keeps you wanting for more.”
Modern Love (Mumbai)’s greatest realisation lies in the offering of the city’s overall palette. An architectural marvel in the Sea Link, an underlying bedrock in Thane, a warm enclosure in cutting chai: the city is both steeped in, and projected outwards, in the love its characters exude towards others, or themselves. To its credit, the history and popular notions on Mumbai find a place in the variegated anthology, too.
“Baai” hinges on the riots that shook the city. “Mumbai Dragon” is premised on an overbearing, struggling musician, vying for a break in the music industry. “My Beautiful Wrinkles” depicts the striving of a sexagenarian to recast her ties with her friends from Bombay Arts College. The admiration of the city in these episodes may not be as palpable as Laalazari’s, but it derives, and drives, in the ways of a city—the love that brews.
The drafting of cities in cinema can range from silent backdrops to salient foregrounds. Modern Love (Mumbai), in its six-stop ride though Mumbai, paints a multi-faceted picture of the dream land, turning the city into a character of its own. A salient foreground in its bridges. In the tertiary characters who speak little but lend themselves to the city–ness. In the more apparent pavements and infrastructure belonging to Mumbai. The character of the city comes to be defined by what it means, and what it beholds, for the beloved.
In her lone directorial venture Dhobi Ghat (2010), Kiran Rao had capture Mumbai as a living being, composed of the people and places that make it Mumbai. Modern Love (Mumbai) takes on a similar endeavour, albeit with the medley of love at its core. In return, it becomes about both loving in a city, and loving a city. And how the two can become synonymous. Interchangeable even. Based in this Maximum City, the show metaphors cities all across in its dimensions. It explains, to some extent, the desire that erupted on the internet in the people of the nation’s capital for those who wished to see a Modern Love set in Delhi, too.
In the Daniel Jones interview referenced earlier, when the founding editor of the column was asked, “Why is the human appetite for love stories so infinitely renewable?”—an allusion perhaps to the longevity of the resonance of Modern Love and the continuously countless love stories in cinema and literature—Jones touted that “Love was a puzzle that could never be mastered.” Much in line thence, two more versions of Modern Love set in Indian cities are to follow.
Still, there won’t exist an answer to the question of capturing the city in a caption. If anything, Modern Love (Mumbai) only suggests that a city as vast and complex as this would need a longer explanation, a sextet of stories on the love it inspires and ingrains—and so much more.
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Raunaq Saraswat is a freelance journalist and writer. He recently completed an undergraduate degree from IIT Delhi, and will be at the Young India Fellowship at the Ashoka University. You can find him on Twitter: @raunaqsa and Instagram: @raunaq_saraswat.
