In long steady shots, it takes note of the gender roles inside the community and the details of the living spaces. The house is cramped, overflowing with things that, for lack of closet space, are arranged on the floor or stuffed under the bed. As a set of boys in the locality chase a rooster, the camera runs along, offering viewers a striking view of the ghetto’s alleys and backyard. In the room where a bunch of little girls pretend to be ‘women’, mimicking their mothers’ cooking and cleaning, it becomes a quiet and unobtrusive onlooker. In the final moments, it dramatically reveals itself to the characters who acknowledge the filmmaker’s presence and their participation in his work, placing the film in an ambiguous space between fiction and documentary.
But clearly, this is a work of fiction. There is a sense of a story, about a working-class Muslim family wading through life’s high tide. Razzak (Imitiyaz Sheikh), who quit his menial job a couple of months ago, is now trying to raise money to buy an autorickshaw. His wife, Raziya (Samina Sheikh), disagrees with the plan. She, who handles the family’s monthly budget, knows they cannot afford to wait around. The film moves in and out of this central plot, shifting between the worlds of adults and children intertwined like branches shooting off each other’s stems.
Poverty is omnipresent and glaring, but not in the least bit humiliating. Chavada’s humanist eye scrapes away the clichés about working-class Muslim figures and substitutes them with images that radiate profound beauty and spirit carefully gleaned from the interiors of their lives. The characters, in their limited spaces, earn their moments of agency, like how Ruba, the couple’s elder child, furtively makes efforts to buy an expensive soft drink she spotted at a grocery store.
Don’t human interactions, in close relationships, become intricate, with emotions flowing freely in and out? Razzak’s parents fight as intensely as they express affection. There is a sequence where his old mother visits her married daughter in her moderately affluent apartment outside the ghetto. Their exchange has a delightful graphical quality, touching several emotional troughs and crests. They talk about children, comment on a new couch, and reminisce about the circumstances that uprooted the family from their native town and the father’s professional failures. The women move around the house, look in on her ailing mother-in-law, and fold dry clothes together. They argue about Razzak’s financial situation – the daughter thinks her brother needs to be more responsible, while the mother staunchly defends her son.