After Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania, Firaaq by debutant director Nandita Das is the second film set against the Gujarat riots of 2002 that I have enjoyed watching. The film documents fear. Fear is a very strong emotion. Firaaq exploits the same in the minds of the viewer brilliantly. Because it portrays fear with a deft hand. It is a grim reminder of the horrors that were visited upon a community during the bloodbath that followed the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra. It relives the pain and humiliation that the Muslims faced in the aftermath of the pogrom and follows several tracks to trace the lives of people, destroyed by the riots. The one story that sets the theme of the film is that of Muneera, a henna artist and Hanif, an auto-rickshaw puller who return to their broken and burnt home only to find a locket, definitely Hindu, lying among the remains. Very obviously, they start suspecting their Hindu neighbour who is Muneera’s best friend of being responsible for their state. A single scene sets the tone of the film. Both Muneera and Jyoti, her Hindu neighbour, also a henna artist are invited to the mehndi ceremony of a rich, English-speaking Gujarati family a month after the worst riots have occurred. Before they enter the house, Jyoti takes her bindi off and places it on Muneera’s forehead. The scene precludes the fear that rages in Muneera’s heart, at the time when Jyoti’s Scooty is stopped by the police, at the time when they sprint up to Jyoti’s home to escape the one-side, bigoted police force. All this while, Hanif, Muneera’s husband rages in silence and with his associates, wants justice for himself and his fate. He plots revenge against his suspected assailant.
The second powerful track belongs to the genial poet-musician Khan Sahib and his man Friday played deftly by Raghubir Yadav. Khan Saheb refuses to acknowledge that the society in his beloved city has changed forever, that no one comes to his baithaks anymore, neither the Muslims nor the Hindus except the good doctor and his little daughter. He does not understand the hatred that has pervaded the hearts and minds of people. And he does not watch television. Enconsed in his peaceful and tranquil world he is shocked to find that the dargah of Wali Gujarati has disappeared. Reality sinks in when he actually does watch television one fine day and is confronted with the severity of all what has happened. The destroyed tomb of Wali, the 19th century Sufi mystic who brought the Hindustani qawwali to India remains the starkest reminder of the Gujarat carnage.
In another part of the city lives a Gujarati couple, played by a brilliant Paresh Rawal and a silent, brooding Deepti Naval who is haunted by the screams of a Muslim woman who, fleeing a mob begged her to open the door. Prevented by her husband, a man who, along with his friend were involved in the rape of a Muslim woman during the riots, the devastated wife fails to protect her. She is filled with self-loathing at her utter failure to save the life of another human being. Hearing about the fate that many Muslims in her city succumbed to – being burnt alive – she often pours drops of scalding oil on her arms, only to remind herself that the woman she failed to protect would have been killed in this way…burnt alive. This Hindu wife brings a little Muslim boy home…in penance…to remind herself that she had been party to a brutal murder…to redeem her sins and hides him in the kitchen. All that the little Muslim boy wants is to find his family…a family that has been decimated…his father slaughtered.
Sameer and Anu are an upwardly mobile Muslim-Hindu couple. Their lives are torn apart by the riots as Sameer, a Muslim start seeing reality in the face and fears for his life and that of his wife who has taken the bold step of having married a Muslim. They decide to move to Delhi. As the truth dawns, it feels bitter and shatters all especially after a policeman, having asked him his full name advices him to go away to Pakistan. Sameer Arshad Sheikh will remain a Muslim all his life, nothing will change, even if they move away from the city they lived in and loved for most of their young lives.
Firaaq disturbs you in many different ways. One of them is the ode to fear that it sings ever so vehemently.
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