All We Imagine as Pleasure

Even when God is watching....

Just yesterday I had the opportunity to watch Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light. My friend Geetha was visiting and made the plan spontaneously and before we knew it, we were in the theater with hot coffees in hand, watching Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam, trying to make a life in Mumbai. I won’t be talking much about the movie, except that please go watch it in the theaters, if you like me, find Bollywood mind numbingly mediocre.

At Cannes: Divya Prabha, Payal Kapadia, Chhaya Kadam, Kani Kusruti (Pic Credit: South First)

Without going into much details, because we live in a culture where spoilers are frowned upon like crazy, there is a scene, where one of the actors is having, most probably, her first sexual encounter with her boyfriend. They are making love in the open, but in a secluded spot, possibly on the beach. They are surrounded by trees and the scene is slow and calm, without being titillating. But actually, there was no time for titillation for me, because while watching the scene, I could sense a rising anxiety. I was consumed with the fear that they were going to be discovered. Was someone going to come in and attack or shame them? Would she get pregnant and then feel helpless nowhere to go? In my stress, I had forgotten that the actor is a nurse, who in the beginning of the movie, is shown as guiding someone with contraceptive measures. I felt uneasy and wanted the scene to end, peacefully. The scene ended not just peacefully, but joyfully. The two lovers giggled as the lovemaking came to an end. I was relieved. At the most, Kapadia could have shown a coconut falling on their heads, thank God she didn’t. Just the next scene, had a body floating on the shore. I was again sure; it was the lovers. It wasn’t. Breathe Out.

Poster of All We Imagine As Light (Pic: IMDB)

Sex in the movies mirrors so many norms of chastity and rules of respectability expected in real life. If you transgress, you pay. In the movie, Masaan, for example, when Richa Chaddha and her boyfriend, rent a hotel room to ‘explore their curiosity’ as Chaddha puts it in the police station, they are caught by the police and shamed in a way that devastates their lives. The lovers (they are shown as that) are changed forever by this incident. In Kohhra, the web series on Netflix, which stars Suvinder Vicky and Barun Sobti as cops, sex is almost always discovered and the one’s engaging in it are shamed, punished or are suspects in the crime. It is as if sex is a criminal activity, which if you engage in, you can commit murder. The cops themselves walk in on young people and deride them in multiple scenes. In the movies, only when sex is shown as sinister or a weapon of power, it is uninterrupted, undiscovered, and might I also say, aesthetic?

It is as if the movies at once are warning the audience of the costs of pleasure, just like the sex education, I received in school. Don’t do ‘this’, you’ll get pregnant. Don’t do ‘that’, God is watching you. You know in the Bible, how prostitutes (word used therein) were punished- they were stoned! All we can imagine as pleasure is then just that within the strict confines of what is allowed- within marriages, in a certain way, mostly reproductive and obviously in private. In our book club, one member had mentioned that some of our most progressive conversations on sex and pleasure are limited to consent. Would you like to have sex? Yes, or no? She asks, why not push the conversation further towards pleasure. Why aren’t we taught to say, what we find pleasurable in sex and what we want more of?

I think maybe this is the female gaze in movies- a gaze that allows you to look at life without the punitive lens, no matter what you do. One which believes in your imagination and decision of what is best for you. Where you are not punished because you desired pleasure. You can laugh at the end of your choice- whatever it might be- without the fear of any repercussions. No moosibat on your head, not even a fallen coconut.