In Henrik Ibsen’s, The Doll’s House, Nora, an otherwise devoted wife, walks out on her husband in the end. The iconic play by the nineteenth-century Norwegian writer had, at that time, exposed the insidious forms that subjugation takes and focused the spotlight squarely on those niggling, hidden, hard-to-identify and underexposed emotions, which we only witness when it erupts and when there is an explosion. When there is a refusal, signified by a sound slamming of the door, to suffer ignominy silently. The depth of this narrative lay in the author’s depiction of the subtlety. The oppression is not in-your-face. The husband is caring, doting, loving. He is among them who are not the out-and-out wife- battering brutes with exposed fangs who are easier to spot. He is among them, whose misogyny lurks under the surface, so surreptitiously that even they are oblivious of its existence. This is actually, in a way, more dangerous because it leaves the sufferer confused and many a great piece of literature as well as cinema, has tapped into that nuanced space and ferreted out the almost invisible entity and flashed a torchlight on it.
The currently streaming Netflix series “Maid” delineates “domestic violence” as anything that scares the daylight out of an individual, who while going about doing her best, is walking on eggshells all the time. Even when she is the one cooking the breakfast eggs and bringing home the bacon.
Earlier this week, I watched the absolutely amazing, utterly understated Bengali film, “Apish….The Office”, directed by Sudeshna Roy and Abhijit Guha, the movie making duo who, going by their outstanding oeuvre over the years, have mastered the art of telling the subtle stories of everyday lives of everyday people without screaming from the rooftops. They have been peering into the chinks in the armor of ostensibly ordinary lives and getting out the tales. The currently running film is the classic example.
The plot is delightfully identifiable in a Calcutta setting. The aspirations of middleclass households with mundane goals of life – the flat, the raise – echoes off the dingy walls of the nearby squatters too where slum dwellers dream desperately of almost the same things but with a difference. The latter….they aspire to not being evicted. They aspire to cajoling an off-day off a reluctant boss.
But the lives of women, willy-nilly, converge at common ground. The two protagonists – domestic helper (Sudipta Chakraborty) and the “lady of the house” she works for (Sandipta Sen) are both working women who juggle kids, husband, boss and office. And both are at the receiving ends of those invisible, insidious forms of subtle subjugation that they will no longer be impervious to. No, I will not give away the ending because the film is still running in cinemas. Catch a show if you can. I watched it at Priya in Deshpriya Park.
Before I finish, I will address the letters and comments that are in the inbox. Those that pertain to the topic we had been discussing the last couple of weeks in Desktop Doodles. There was the Delightful Deluge. Thank you, all. I hear you.
As far as protest is concerned, I am an innate protestor. I don’t take injustice lying down. Whether peaceful, daring, raring, roaring.
But I think it is better to be silent than go to a protest march and take smiley selfies and post them on social media forgetting the devastating reason for why we are there in the first place. I think it is better to stay silent than reveal your flagrant insensitivity by comparing the degree of depravity under different political regimes sitting on television channels. Silence is only sought from those who make a mockery of the plight of the people who suffered.
If you are not one of the above, silence is not sought from you.
Yet we who have gone hoarse screaming and shouting…. are going blue in the face denying that we need to do more than just protest, demand.
Do administer the pain killer to numb the pain but try and cure the disease from the root or else it will erupt again. And again. And again.
The writer is Editor, Features