I watched Haider today. Apart from the fact that it was time
I decided to keep just for myself – no worrying about ma, but giving myself
over to pleasure – it was moving for other reasons.
It made me remember Hamlet, perhaps why it had touched me so
much when I read it in school, just the play without the many readings one came
to hear of in college, and how deeply, deeply affecting it is in the backdrop of
Kashmir. You cannot ignore it, you cannot swallow it: how much people in
Kashmir have suffered, how terrible the behaviour of the army would have been,
how there is no end, no justice, how much anger there is and no catharsis. There
is no acceptance of such death, such loss. And how startlingly alive
Shakespeare’s play is to this panorama of living. It was electrifying because
of this: Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation, despite the unevenness of the texture of
the film, the stilted acting in parts, the ebro-khebro accents. When Haider and
Arshi are together the last time, and he is laughing – laughing with all
the delight of being alive, the tactile immediateness of this life and the
loving and then when he cries – the irrefutableness of his knowledge – there is
no turning away, there is no turning over to your other side and forgetting
this happened, or telling yourself this was imagination or mistake. And once
the violence starts in the latter half of the film, then, as in the play, it
just rages through, there’s no stopping – the mental violence as much as the
physical – minds collapsing, mental frameworks giving way to oblivion – deaths,
suicides. And in the end, this Hamlet remains alive – you never get to know what
living there is for him after what he has seen. Which is all the more harsh,
because that is how it would have been and is for those who have lived through
the violence in Kashmir, and also in Palestine. I can’t imagine how people in
these places reconcile the unspeakable turn of events and can still live on
without losing their minds.
The anger was very close to me too. I was very angry
yesterday, at my life – that this is how things have turned out to be, that
yesterday, I was 31, it was Durga Puja, people around me were so very caught up
in the fabric of living, and I was swirling in the memories of the 2012 pujas, when F was there, that puja photo of hers, the feel of her, her smell and her love, and dealing in present time with an ailing, cranky, uncertain
mother. I was scared that this Puja might turn out to be as good as that year's. And I was just so very, very angry that even she was taken from me, that I was without someone to share it all with, that I should be without a partner or a friend to even talk to, to shout
and say how angry I was, that there should be no one I can sleep with, kiss, or
reach out to for the simplest physical intimacy: that my life should have
panned out such that I have consciously made these choices and will live
through them. In Hamlet, it is always about agency, every step of the way. At every
step, he makes a choice to not kill his uncle. He recognizes the deep moral violation
it means – the same violation which his uncle and mother are guilty of and
which inspires such horror in him - which he cannot bring himself to do. It is this agency, and how you know you will always make this choice - and be accepting of its consequences, that felt really close to me.
In its bombastic way, the song where Haider sings and dances
– the counterpart of The Mousetrap play within the play – played out here with
choruses, ancient Greek drama r giant puppets – is so poignant, because through
all the loud song and dance and vibrant colours, he is appealing to his uncle,
a man of far inferior moral fibre, to recognize what he has done and repent for
it. It feels so powerful also because it is peculiarly helpless – Hamlet, a
poet, is attacking the only way he can, through words and not the body, but the
mind – but it is such an inappropriate and inadequate weapon for a man whose
mind is not built to be swayed by such appeals. Yes, he is remorseful, but it
does not change his course of action. He is out to kill Haider till the very
end.
Hamlet, or Haider, is not a man who wields arms until there
is no choice left to him, but when he does, he does so with 'chutzpah'.
Now, I am thirsting to watch the original play.
