Visual details pack Kaikini’s stories, each story like a pomegranate. A rose droops in a buttonhole, like a commuter sleeping on a Mumbai local. Someone settles into a salon chair and says “Mithun cut.” Chandu is greeted by his sister with a slap.  Each observation seems like a clue, propelling us towards a truth we feel we know deep inside. 

This detail functions very differently from detailing in certain post-globalisation work ‘about’ Bombay, which wish to be definitive. Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City could be considered a landmark of this turn along with ‘realistic’ fiction films, or character-driven documentaries favoured by international funding, festivals and prizes. These works seek to translate Bombay/India for a global audience on their terms- bar dances and shooters parallel torch singers and mafiosi, so that Bombay is like New York. The grittier the detail of violence and suffering, the more the claim to authenticity and political urgency, and maybe to Cannes and the Oscars, which ratify even for Indians, what to consider significant.

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Kaikini’s observational detail seeks not to define his characters, or make them represent a social identity, but to help us inhabit a slice of time together, knowing them deeply but only for a moment. Whatever their hardships or loneliness, this intimacy never robs them of their chosen form of dignity, whether they express it through humour, style or poignancy. They are translated to us on their terms. It is a poetic realism, that seeks to liberate meaning, not capture it; a gaze of love and romance for the world, that helps us confront our own loneliness, and nevertheless find the world and ourselves beautiful and worth loving.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com