All We Imagine As Light: A Moving Ode To Mumbai & Sisterhood

THREE WOMEN, monsoon and a severe city. If Payal Kapadia’s iridescent All We Imagine as Light was a novel, there would be dried flowers stuck between its pages. Since it is a film, the intangible feeling is imbued with visual tactility. It is present in the way Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a middle-aged woman, holds a totem of cold technology within the warmth of her embrace. It is embossed on the face of Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a woman in the middle of a crisis, as she listens to a fiery political speech about reclaiming what is hers. And it drips from the text messages a young Anu (Divya Prabha) sends to her lover: “I am sending you kisses through the clouds so that when it rains my kisses touch your lips.” Kapadia’s film is suffused with such ache that if you extend your hand you can touch it.

Yet the texture varies. If Prabha yearns for the lightness of physical touch, Anu is only waking up to its rousing effect. If the former pines for company then the latter’s eyes dart for privacy. The contradictory nature of their desires are telling of the distinct personalities. Prabha, the older between the two, is married but the relationship is as good as absent. She had little say in the matter and none in the way things unfolded since. Her husband works in Germany and hasn't called in a year. Anu, on the other hand, cannot imagine leading a life decided by someone else. Her parents send pictures of men from matrimony sites which she dismisses with an incredulous laugh of certainty. They are not who she wants and she knows that.

Parvaty’s desire is more of a longing. She wants to continue living in the house she has lived in for over two decades. But the builder’s ultimatum to break it down for a skyrise weakens her resolve. She also has no papers to prove her ownership. Her dread of displacement is also the deeper bond that connects these women. They live in Mumbai but do not really belong there. If the looming threat of being uprooted convinces Parvaty, kitchen staff at a city hospital, to move back to her village then her colleagues Prabha and Anu, nurses at the same institution and roommates, are vulnerable to the same uncertainty. They too have left their homes in Kerala and trained their tongues to speak foreign words for a place that makes everyone feel like tenants on some days.

Kapadia’s debut fiction is a masterful film, one of those life-altering gems that is transcendental and a moving memoir of mundane; transformative and a crushing reiteration of community sustenance. All We Imagine as Light is a poetic portrait of sisterhood that manages to capture the transience of intimacy within its folds. It is that rare film whose every frame affirms the gift of the medium of its choosing as the glorious soundscape grazes against the burnished visuals and the gap between them allows for dialogues and interpretations to flow, and for us to breathe.

Even Mumbai breathes. In the filmmaker’s assured hands, the city assumes the centrality of a protagonist, informing the characters' inner lives and leaking into scenes with singular precision. It is the little things, like Prabha mindfully carrying a handkerchief as armour to combat the humidity, like a pedestal fan thoughtfully placed in the cramped room she and Anu share, like the umbrella they carry as an extension of their hands when the monsoon arrives. The images are striking. There is a dream-like moment when Prabha’s saris are hung to dry indoors — it is so evocative that you can smell the dampness on them.

Using Mumbai's silhouette as backdrop in films is quite common but Kapadia achieves something singular with it. She lets the city frame the narrative and filmmaking in a way rarely been done before. All We Imagine as Light is dotted with verite shots of people talking about Mumbai. We see the festivities of Ganpati accompanied by sombre words, “Some people call it the city of dreams. It is the city of illusions – you have to believe in the illusion or else you will go mad.” The film opens with images of vegetable vendors on the roadside, the handheld shots interspersed with a revealing thought: “I have lived here for more than 23 years but I am afraid to call it my home. There is always the fear of leaving it.” In the same breath we hear another voice, a woman saying when she arrived in the city she was pregnant and although she didn’t tell anyone, she was fed well by the lady whose kids she took care of.

Kapadia assembles them with thoughtful compassion, outlining a complicated relationship that one tends to forge — and often only with — a metropolis. The treatment is reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta trilogy in the 1970s (Pratidwandi, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya) as much like him, she draws out the portrait of the city by underlining what it does to its inhabitants — what it gives only to take back and takes only to return.

Prabha, Anu and Parvaty are migrants. Mumbai is where they work and live. Parvaty imbibes a sense of freedom and self-worth from the space; after years of devoting herself to it, she has earned the right to stay here. For Prabha, the city accentuates her longing but also makes her feel marked. She visibly takes a step back when a group of nurses spot her at the station talking to a doctor. He has feelings for her and while she knows about it and would have possibly considered it in a moment of quiet, the presence of the crowd turns their gaze against herself. In a not less improbable way, the swarming city also keeps her hopes alive. If so many people arrive in Mumbai every day, can her husband not be one of them?

But to Anu, urbanity feels like a refuge. Her youth makes the difference. Mumbai allows her to fall in love with a Muslim boy, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon) — something the more orthodox Prabha disapproves of — and hold his hand. When they are in the frame, things look less oppressive and the bus rides feel joyful. Kapadia’s gaze is always gentle but with them, it assumes the grace of compassion. She depicts the space through the hopeful eyes of the lovers (a tender scene of them meeting is preceded by a shot of a bulldozer — the fragility of their relationship is instantly established but only to us) and permeates their affection with the attributes of the space. Chaos becomes a love language. Their rendezvous is scored to a mystical jazz composition by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun. The intricately arranged notes conjure the physicality of hands lightly brushing against each other in a crowd. When they text, the messages are plastered across images of a leaking city, the juxtaposition underlining the duality of the concrete jungle: it will keep them hidden but also rob the privacy to be alone.

The subliminality of the filmmaker’s craft syncs with the exalted performances. Kusruti is compelling as a woman forever steadying her footing in a foreign land. She is introduced to an effective shot of her holding the stanchion in a moving train, the kineticism of the moment making it feel like Prabha is sitting on a ferris wheel. Like if she loosens her grip, she will fall. The actor conveys multitudes of emotions through her eyes and silences, humanising a role that in lesser hands would have been unlikeable. Kadam and Prabha are poignant in their turns, each using every pore of their being to portray a difficult relationship with a place that sustains and exacts. If the harshness of the city threatens to render them alone, it also espouses sisterhood to combat that. If the congested space pits Prabha and Anu’s disparate desires against each other, it also strangely harmonises them.

But it is in the last act when Kapadia’s treatise of Mumbai comes together with poetic flourish. The setting moves from the urban chaos to the noiseless beaches of Ratnagiri, another city in Maharashtra. Parvaty has decided to come back to her village and Prabha and Anu have accompanied her to help. This stretch unravels with unreal tranquillity, fulfilling every covert wish of these three women. It is so fantastical that it feels imaginary.

One could read this in multiple ways but the underlying remark is impossible to ignore: Mumbai is so hardened by its hustle to survive that it takes away the inhabitants’ right to dream. And then you look up and notice the colour has changed. Shades of blue, bleeding from the women’s saris and trains, the hospital walls and placards have faded and the redness of the earth is in focus. As if Ratnagiri, unlike Mumbai, can see Prabha, Anu and Parvaty beyond their services and their longing to be has finally turned into a sense of belonging. As if, Kapadia insists, one can be assured of being in a place only by leaving it, and see light only by imagining it.