I harbor too much anger, too much pain. It threatens to swallow me up any day now. I can see that this is not the India of my childhood. I feel helpless. There is too much hatred. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed. This is, perhaps, who we were as a people. Just waiting for an opportunity to vent this hatred.
But then I think of both my grandfathers — one a freedom fighter, the other an active participant in the building of Nehruvian India. I think of my maternal grandmother, who still bears the pain of Partition in her heart, the invisible scars that have still not healed. She was not yet a teenager in 1947 when her family had to abandon their home and life and start over as refugees in India. Later, she was unable to finish medical school and perhaps had to bury the dreams she nurtured for herself. But she was a woman who never gave up. She always had hope. She worked when few women were allowed to, she traveled alone when few women dared, she made a life for herself and her family. She was the wind beneath my grandfather’s wings. At almost 90, she is still the driving force in our lives. She had the audacity to educate my mother at an elite boarding school and send her off to IIM Ahmedabad to study management when the family could scarcely afford it. “You must be fully educated before you marry,” was her credo.
I think of my mother, who grew up as India was coming into its own. She didn’t have to carry the burden of Partition, but it was always a presence. I don’t know whether, when my parents were young, life in India seemed full of hope and possibilities. But when I was still in school, the economy opened up and there was hope and excitement and a buzz about what the future holds. The sound of the destruction that happened in the name of faith was loud and jarring, but it was lost in the cacophony of excitement about what we could buy and watch and who we could dare to be. I never imagined that that sound would become the sound of our collective future.
My mother’s life threw up a series of challenges. She had to fight many battles. She has a quiet resilience that has seen us through the darkest of nights. She has worked all her life and shown us how to live with courage and grace. And she, like my grandmother, has nurtured hope. My mother was brave enough to let me do my thing — move to Bombay and become a filmmaker — no questions asked, no fears projected. I was able to follow my dream because I know she always has my back. My mother never wondered why I couldn’t follow a more tried and tested path. She just said, feel free to do your thing.
Just like me, there are so many women out there, following their dreams because their grandmothers helped their mothers run, and their mothers, in turn, helped them fly. So maybe there is a little bit of hope, filtering in and being passed on through the generations.
Sometimes I think of my grandfather languishing in jail for fighting our colonisers and I wonder what he would say about India today. Then I think that too much
has been sacrificed for our freedom, that Mahatma Gandhi’s life is in every Indian’s genes, and that maybe we will turn to kindness and love and tolerance and this too shall pass. And maybe we will become better people. But, perhaps, we will never be the same again. We have been changed forever.
If there is one thing I wish for, for myself and my fellow citizens, it is hope. Hope for true equality. Hope for a real, felt freedom. A world and a time when everyone, regardless of religion, caste, class, gender, sexual preference, region will have equal rights and equal opportunities.
Sometimes I’m scared because I feel that the hope inside me is dying. And all I can see is the abyss. But we are storytellers. Artists. Chroniclers of our time. And if we lose hope, what hope is there for society?
It is for us to decide whether we want to be court painters or we want to paint our pictures through the eyes of the common people — those on the margins, living in the shadows and often forgotten, and those relegated to the background, those who are crushed and crying silent tears.
It is for us to tell the tale, as we see it. It is for us to provide mirrors, offer dreams, challenge the status quo with our stories and do what little we can to nurture humanity. It is for us to remind people that there is another way of seeing, another way of being. To remind the world that defiance is an option and that conforming is not the only way. It is for us to remind people that kindness, grace and compassion are possibilities, even in the darkest of times.
And when we try to tell our stories, a little piece of hope comes alive in our hearts. For a little while, we feel that the tentacles of patriarchy, be it in the form of censorship, vicious trolls, systemic obstacles, don’t matter. There is just the storyteller and her story. And that little flicker of hope.
The writer is a screenwriter and film director