Awkwardness and Allusions
Excited by metaphors — one about a bird leaving a cage keeps coming up — the film animates its central conflict by invoking Toba Tek Singh, Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story about India and Pakistan exchanging asylum inmates, ending with the titular character laying down between India and Pakistan’s barded border, in a no-man’s-land. That no-man’s-land is Sirat’s limbo, her existence. This metaphor comes out of nowhere, and sealed with Sirat singing, later, “Hum Dekhenge”, the film ends on a note that hints at India-Pakistan unity, collapsing the end of that animosity to the end of Sirat’s dysphoric fragility. But this feels odd, like someone trying to forcefully sublimate politics into one’s identity. Metaphors do not provide resolutions. As Roger Scruton writes, “Metaphors make connections which are not there in the fabric of reality, but created by our own associative powers.” In some sense, every time the film leans, panting, on its metaphors, it feels like it is abdicating the “fabric of reality”, more comfortable with being suggestive, because hope seems to lie only in the realm of rhetoric, not reality. In one of the most bare-faced, pulping moments of the film, Sirat attests to this fact of her existence — “Kaash pe atki hai”, that it is stuck on “I Wish”.
Even as the film allows us to be with Sirat’s triumphs — getting a TG Certificate and identity card, getting a job — it is haunted by her pain. She notes, “For years, my identity was in my body and my heart. Now it’s in my hand.” But, of course, she has to hide this card, too, from her mother. Instead, she celebrates with her family of choice at India Gate, her sakhis, two handsome, twinky boys.
For years, decades, we have been arguing the merits of representation, passing passionate rhetoric for rational argument. Some gave up, and chose the path of authorship instead. More than seeing ourselves on screen, what we desire is to write ourselves onto the screen; to write, direct, produce, act; to see our material lives elevated by cinema. I Am Sirat comes from the stables of authorship, a defiant story that tries to repurpose pain as hope, whose gossamer progressive sheen is both tantalizing and incomplete, whose bowing down to the tenets of filmic resolution is both moving and suspicious. Such is, perhaps, the tragedy of telling your story, when your story is yet unfolding in full force. After all, one of the central problems documentary filmmakers face is to answer the question — when to stop filming?