An Autumn of Loneliness

It was a night that he can never forget. The equi-spaced 600W sodium vapor bulbs on the roadside were producing some mysterious chrome shades which were blending perfectly with the thick mists of the chilly mid-December night. When the hypnotic night was choking his thoughts, sudden flashes of frames in green were lashing the languid clemency of his mental shape.

Yes. It is painful to be gay and that to when the vigor of your body fails to run in tandem with the sexual hunger of your mind. It was happening to him and his marrow was rotting very fast.

I am talking about the professor from Aligarh Muslim University. A very naive person who had a poignant taste for old Bollywood classics of Mangeshkar, dark Hindi poems of Kolatkar and a daily schedule of cheap rum.

I watched the movie in a multiplex in Raipur where the most elite audiences couldn’t keep their laughter in hide. I went alone since I wanted it in some way, challenge me. However modern and cool I try to shape myself there always comes an iota of apprehension when it comes to interacting with people having a homophilic sexual orientation. I wanted to wash that away.

For the people who haven’t watched the movie, Professor Siras, the protagonist of the movie, was caught and videotaped forcefully by two people who entered his house while he was in some sort of compromising situation with a rickshaw puller.

The movie is extremely dark in terms of treatment and slow in terms of events happening. I believe Hansal Mehta purposefully did it to pain the audiences. Multiple times, during the movie, you will be on the verge of losing your patience. It resembles this vicissitude of Siras which he wanted his audience to experience. “Enough is enough. Let me end this right now. I can’t take it further.” The number of times he had been thinking this, each time he was also heard telling him “Let me try to be alive once more. I will not lose hope.” At the end of the movie he dies. Although the death was a planned homicide as depicted in the movie, it will be quite a challenge to assure that hope could have won him over again. He was more than gutted from inside and so were the audiences.

The movie depresses you, shows pointing in your eyes how hopelessly ruthless people can be towards them, how the identity of a person who is gay circumnavigates solely on his sexual orientation rather than how creative his mind can be while writing poems, how sensitive and sensible he can be understanding other’s sentiments or how proud he can be being the only Marathi teacher of Aligarh Muslim university.

Till now I had been talking about helplessness, despair, grief but the movie poses much more challenge than this. There were several frames in the movie which showed explicit scenes of a 64 year old professor almost nude, just wearing his underwear trying to slowly climb up on the bare chest body of a rickshaw puller who unlike our notion wasn’t that undesirable. Well, I could have rephrased the last sentence with much more abstraction to induce lesser “meh’s” but Mr. Mehta did the same in the movie. I believe it hit the bull’s eye.

However logical and rational minded you become this explicit realities will ooze some apprehension which you won’t be able to accept so easily but at the same time you will not find any justification to refute the uneasiness, they cause. The dilemma will claim your organic endorsement rather than a fabricated affirmation. I don’t know in which stage of this transformation I am into but it had definitely initiated the process of transition. Thanks for helping me out Mr. Mehta.