Diligent Candy

This essay is adapted from the introduction I presented at Rialto/Griffioen for a screening of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I had the privilege of introducing the film and wanted to offer the audience a few ideas to carry with them into the screening: about women and the city, migration and home, intimacy, care, friendship, and the quiet rules that shape the lives we are allowed to imagine.

I began that evening with Arundhati Roy. In her internationally acclaimed novel The God of Small Things, Roy writes of the “Love Laws”: “The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

Roy was born in Kerala, the same Indian state that is home to two of the central characters in All We Imagine as Light. But the connection I wanted to make was not simply geographical. Roy’s “Love Laws” offer a useful way of entering Payal Kapadia’s film because All We Imagine as Light is deeply interested in rules that are rarely written down and yet profoundly shape people’s lives.

They are rules about intimacy and belonging, religion and gender, marriage and respectability, home and migration. They determine not only whom one may love, but how much space one is permitted to claim for oneself.

What I find remarkable about Kapadia’s film is that she does not present these questions to us as social “issues” that need to be explained. We encounter them through the texture of ordinary life: through work, commuting, housing, friendship, language, loneliness and relationships.

Large structures become visible through very small experiences.

Three women, without easy categories

At the centre of the film are three women: Prabha, Anu and Parvaty.

One of the first things worth noticing is how carefully Kapadia layers their lives. These women are not presented as symbols of “Indian womanhood”. Nor are they arranged neatly into familiar oppositions such as tradition and modernity, sacrifice and liberation, repression and freedom.

They are allowed to be complicated people.

They work. They care. They hesitate. They make compromises. They desire. They remember. They become frustrated. They imagine other possibilities.

Their circumstances are also very different, and those differences matter.

Age matters. Money matters. Marriage matters. Religion matters. Migration matters. Language matters. Housing matters.

The film shows, in a remarkably understated way, what intersectionality can look like when it is actually lived. A woman may have economic independence and almost no privacy. She may possess social respectability and still experience profound loneliness. She may feel secure in one aspect of her life and precarious in another.

Kapadia never allows a single category to explain a person completely.

That matters because the individual always remains larger than the structures acting upon her.

Who gets to have space?

Mumbai is not merely a setting in All We Imagine as Light. It is central to the film.

It is one of the world’s great cities: densely populated, economically powerful, multilingual and in constant motion. People arrive from elsewhere. Trains transport vast numbers of commuters every day. Workers travel long distances between their homes and workplaces. Different languages, regions and communities continually encounter one another.

And yet within that enormous city, individual lives can feel extraordinarily compressed.

Watching the film, I kept thinking about matchboxes: small rooms stacked above and beside one another, each containing an entire human life.

Space in the film is therefore about much more than architecture.

It is about privacy.

It is about security.

It is about permanence.

It is about whether you own a home or rent one, whether you are allowed to remain somewhere, and whether you can close a door and know that the space behind it belongs, even temporarily, to you.

For women in particular, space has a complicated relationship with freedom.

A woman may travel independently across an enormous city and still possess almost nowhere in which she can simply be alone. She may earn her own income and still have very little control over the conditions in which her private life can exist.

This creates one of the film’s most interesting contradictions.

Mumbai appears to offer movement, anonymity and possibility.

But movement is not necessarily the same thing as freedom.

Migration and the unfinished idea of home

That question of space is closely connected to migration.

Mumbai is a city built, in part, through the lives and labour of people who have arrived from somewhere else. They bring languages, memories, food, habits, relationships and ideas of home with them.

The film moves between Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi, and this multilingualism is significant.

Language tells us something about where people come from, but it also becomes a form of intimacy. Hearing your own language in a city far from home can briefly transform a place. Something unfamiliar becomes recognisable. Someone who was a stranger becomes closer.

At the same time, migration can produce the unsettling experience of existing between places.

A city may depend upon your labour without ever fully becoming yours.

You may know its railway lines, streets, shortcuts and daily rhythms intimately and still feel temporary within it.

And the home you left behind does not remain unchanged either. Places evolve in our absence. Relationships shift. Memory edits.

Home therefore becomes much less straightforward.

It can be a language.

A person.

A memory.

A meal.

Or simply the rare experience of being somewhere where you do not have to explain yourself.

The private life is never entirely private

This brings us back to Roy’s “Love Laws”.

Love is often imagined as something private, belonging only to the people involved. But intimate life is never completely insulated from the society around it.

Religion can enter a relationship.

Family can enter it.

Community can enter it.

Class can enter it.

Gender can enter it.

Housing can enter it.

A relationship that feels ordinary to the people living it may be read very differently by those around them.

The film’s treatment of religious difference is particularly careful in this regard. Religion is not reduced to a simple instrument of restriction. It can be connected to identity, family, memory, community and belonging.

But it can also establish boundaries around whom a person is expected to love and what kinds of relationships are considered permissible.

Kapadia allows those tensions to remain complicated.

The same is true of desire.

One of the things I appreciated most about the film is that desire is not presented as extraordinary or sensational. It exists alongside work, fatigue, commuting, friendship, food and practical concerns.

In other words, it is part of ordinary life.

That becomes especially meaningful in a film centred on women.

Women’s desire is so often either ignored or dramatized. Here, it is simply treated as part of being a person.

Care is also labour

Care is another thread running quietly but insistently through the film.

These women inhabit professional environments in which caring for others is central. And care is something we often romanticise, particularly when women perform it.

We describe women as nurturing, caring or selfless. But those words can obscure the material reality that care is labour.

It takes time.

It takes skill.

It takes patience.

It takes physical energy and emotional energy.

Hospitals depend upon it. Families depend upon it. Cities depend upon it.

And yet the people doing this work can easily become invisible.

Kapadia resists that invisibility by giving an interior life back to women whose professional lives are spent responding to the needs of others.

They may be carers, but they are also tired, funny, irritated, uncertain, lonely, sensual and desiring.

They are not defined by their usefulness.

Friendship as recognition

This is also why friendship matters so much in All We Imagine as Light.

The film does not present friendship as a magical solution to structural problems. Friendship cannot abolish inequality, insecure housing, religious pressure, loneliness or economic precarity.

But it can offer recognition.

There is something powerful in having another person who understands the texture of your ordinary day.

Someone with whom you can eat.

Complain.

Laugh.

Share frustration.

Or simply remain silent.

Someone who knows something about your life without requiring you to explain all of it.

In a city capable of making people anonymous, friendship becomes one way of being known.

When the city makes a life small, cinema can make it visible

This is perhaps what I find most moving about Kapadia’s film.

The city often seems to make these women’s lives smaller.

The camera does the opposite.

The city compresses them; the film expands them.

Kapadia gives them time. She gives them attention. She allows them to be contradictory. She allows them to desire. She allows them simply to exist on screen without first requiring them to become exceptional.

Cinema has traditionally taught us that particular kinds of things deserve our attention: great ambition, violence, conflict, heroism, spectacle and extraordinary romance.

Kapadia asks us to attend to something else.

A commute matters.

A conversation between women matters.

Waiting matters.

Care work matters.

A private longing matters.

Trying to understand where one belongs matters.

There is something quietly radical in taking ordinary female lives this seriously.

What we imagine

And then there is the title: All We Imagine as Light.

The film is filled with literal light: hospital lights, street lights, train windows, apartment blocks, reflections and rain.

But the word in the title that stays with me most is not light.

It is imagine.

Imagination allows a person to conceive of a life that is slightly different from the one presently available.

Perhaps it is a life with more privacy.

A different relationship.

Greater security.

Another home.

Or simply a greater freedom to inhabit one’s own life.

When I introduced the film at Rialto/Griffioen, I asked the audience to watch the ordinary things carefully.

To notice the spaces people occupy, and the spaces they do not have.

To notice the languages they carry with them.

To notice how migration complicates the meaning of home.

To notice the way religion, gender, class and housing enter intimate life without the film needing to announce their presence.

To notice care.

To notice friendship.

And above all, to notice the extraordinary attention Kapadia gives to experiences that cinema can so easily dismiss as insignificant.

I felt especially proud to introduce All We Imagine as Light because it is so resolutely centred on women while never requiring those women to represent anything larger than themselves.

They are allowed to remain ordinary, complicated, desiring and unfinished.

Perhaps that is one of the simplest and most powerful things cinema can do:

to look at a life closely enough that it can no longer be dismissed as small.