On loneliness
I was watching Ijaazat the other night — a film that I had only caught on TV once, and I had decided not to watch it since I didn’t know where it had started (turns out, I did catch the beginning). I’ve been listening to Khaali Haath Shaam Aayi Hai and I was thinking about the idea of women’s loneliness. So many of the films of the 1980s also depicted this idea of a woman’s loneliness: Sridevi in her house in Chaandni, torn between Rishi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna (the correct choice, imo), pacing, Rekha in Ijaazat, waiting on a lonely night. That pacing around, staring at the life you’ve built, it’s something that must have connected with so many women watching these films, whose life and career were their children, their husbands, their families, who would eventually leave them alone, or leave them with acute loneliness, which aren’t one and the same. What did these women do when their kids left for school, their husbands for work? Did they write, dream, finally settle down in front of the television to watch something? I suppose the reason I ask these questions is because so much of the life of my mother is a blank to me, but also because I am incredibly curious about the lives of women — this is largely to do with a project I am working on — and attempting to think about their lives means also thinking about their lives that were private, their loneliness, the feeling of staring listlessly at a room filled with everything that makes up a life.