“She's sinking. You should come.” My mother sounded jittery. This wasn’t the first time. I hoped it would be the last. She routinely spends a month every year holding vigil at her sick mother’s bed in Gurgaon. For seven years, my grandmother has existed on a foggy plane between life and death in a room at the corner of her son’s house. Or, occasionally, an equally cheerful nook of a hospital ward. For six of those years, she has barely moved.
This is no way to go, I often think — but it’s an even worse way to stay. “Her will is strong,” the doctors say. I wonder why. Often, it almost seems like she is holding on — and suffering, and enduring — for a reason. Perhaps it’s because she thinks her two sons and two daughters are too fragile to handle loss. Or perhaps it’s because she wants to keep them from making more mistakes. Perhaps she wants to apologise for their dysfunctional childhoods. Or perhaps she just doesn’t know how to stop living.
As I watched 90-year old Amarjeet Kapoor (Rishi Kapoor) – Dadu, as he is known in Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (since 1921) — a cold sense of shame crept up my neck. In a way, my grandmother is where Dadu aspires to be. And vice versa. They don’t want to be fine. When agony becomes an ambition, it can only be love — and, at times, lifelong regret — that has manifested itself in the form of last hurrahs.
Unlike her, Dadu has the luxury of time, which, as he discovers, allows his warring descendants to continue living on autopilot. He fantasises about death because it may be the only solution: a desperate last-minute flare to rescue a sinking lifeboat. A cruel twist of fate later confirms that he is not wrong; catharsis, too, is subject to qualitative degrees of sacrifice.
He hopes for his health to dip just enough to give them time together to heal old scars. It’s no coincidence that he mentally comes to life only when life itself is slipping away — on a hospital bed. His grandsons Rahul (Fawad Khan) and Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra) — contemporary reincarnations of parent-favourite Ratan (Mamik) and drifter Sanju (Aamir Khan) from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar — have returned. Dadu is just alive enough to probe at their demons, and dead enough to hold them hostage. They are likely to disperse at the first signs of recovery.
It’s easy to mistake Dadu’s obsession with the perfect family photograph as one of those ancient-patriarch quirks. But he hopes for the camera to capture a false snapshot of time. He hopes for the click to eliminate the sounds of frenzied whispers, slammed doors and hushed arguments. He wants them to reminisce about this picture, and recognise that they were unhappy only because they once knew happiness.
Old souls, at least cinematically, own this consequential poeticism of foreboding. Think Simran’s (Kajol, in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge ) doting grandmother (Achala Sachdev) and her deathbed accelerating the girl’s destiny with Raj (Shah Rukh Khan); think Achala Sachdev again as the heartbroken daadi whose demise forces a feuding father (Amitabh Bachchan) and son (Shah Rukh Khan) to light her pyre together in Kabhie Khushi Kabhi Gham ; think Bhashkor Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan, in Piku ) losing motion one last time so that his daughter (Deepika Padukone) discovers other emotions; and think cantankerous patriarch Century Gowda’s (Singri Gowda, in Raam Reddy’s Kannada-language Thithi ) death setting off a chain of rural hustles that lead his alienated septuagenarian son Gadappa (Channegowda) to rediscover the joy of belonging.
There’s nothing like grief to ignite companionship and unite, and reunite, estranged fates: something that I’ve discovered over two reluctant visits to the Gurgaon bed. Reluctant — because I have outgrown my uncles, both in perpetual states of existential duress, and because I dislike my evil aunt for her greed-driven hostility. But for those few days, huddled together in gloomy corridors, we have wrestled with ghosts of our own photographic memories. Brief, spiritual reconciliations that fizzle out when she returns from the brink.
Like Dadu, my grandmother has quietly witnessed this unrest. She senses more than just a petty property dispute. Unlike him, she doesn’t have the strength to make a desperate Skype call to her now-adult grandson. To tell me that they’re hurting. Unlike Rahul and Arjun, I don’t have tears to shed because she doesn’t have a voice to break.
It has been three years now. Maybe, just maybe, she is waiting for me one final time. And maybe she wants me to stay long enough to cement over those cracks. To provide finishing touches to her imperfect family photograph.
That would be a good way to go, and an even better way to stay.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
