The death penalty awarded to Yakub Memon in July 2007 for his involvement in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts has cast a long shadow. Debates rage on, in drawing rooms, cafes, social media and prime time news TV. And it has inspired Mumbai-based Devashish Makhija to make a short film, abs nt (absent).
The film was shot in one day, and released online on April 9, and in a launch ceremony that evening at The Hive, Bandra, which included a discussion on human rights. Participating in the discussion were Makhija, Saameer Mody of Pocket Films, the producer, and actor-columnist Nandita Das who has worked previously with Makhija on the film Oonga and has also been a recipient of vitriolic hate mail for her public stance against capital punishment.
Mody and Pocket Films came on board to provide financial backing, because “this film does not just entertain, but provokes a reaction, plants a seed of thought in the viewer’s mind.”
Makhija’s interest in Memon began when he researched and assisted on Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap’s 2007 film based on Hussain Zaidi’s book Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts ). That assignment left a lasting impression on him, “particularly the self-destructive cause-effect cycle we explored”. No one can be called a villain, he says, “everyone — from the rioters, whether Hindu or Muslim, to the bereaved, angry Muslim individuals who hatched the plan to plant those bombs — was a victim of some tragic circumstance. Someone hurts you, you hurt someone back, and it goes on."
Makhija finds it disturbing that the actual perpetrators of the blasts have not yet been caught or punished. “There was no doubt in anyone’s mind as to Ajmal Kasab’s involvement in the 26/11 killings,” he says, “But in the case of Yakub Memon, the case was not entirely solved. His direct involvement in the 1993 blasts was neither proven nor adequately evidenced.” He is convinced that Memon got the death penalty to “satisfy a collective hunger for retribution. Suddenly, no one seems to be baying for Tiger Memon’s blood the way the entire country was before his brother Yakub was hung,” he says.
“The law agencies don’t seem to be doing as much now to hunt him down. Is this all we needed? An inauthentic collective closure? This doesn’t smell like true justice to me.” Das echoed his thoughts, and said, “We, as a society, have become bloodthirsty.”
Makhija said that he realised that a 6’22” film would not give him adequate space to explore complex topics such as human rights, terrorism, and the death penalty meaningfully. And, instead of a narrow focus on capital punishment, he wanted to situate the film within the larger context of “a collective morality, an idea of what is right and, therefore, what is wrong,” and bring out the human story of the person on death row as a product of “circumstances, motivations, fragilities and desperations.” So he decided that the film would revolve around a universally identifiable relationship, that of a father and his daughter.
The protagonist is a fictional character, Iqbal (played by Vikas Kumar), who has been working in the Hindi film industry as a dialogue coach for actors. Iqbal is about to be hanged, but his crime is never revealed to the audience, which Makhija hopes will make the audience wonder “if the man is a terrorist, if he has been responsible for the deaths of many people, or if he simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and is being punished for the crimes of others, or if he is just too exhausted to prove his innocence.” All the audience is told is that he longs to meet his daughter one last time, because he was not around when she was growing up: he was in prison serving a jail term.
Makhija says he wrote the script with Kumar in mind because “he has the saddest, most empathetic eyes I have seen in an actor.” And the film begins and ends on those eyes to indicate “his deep sorrow, that abyss of pathos to transfer to the viewer even before the viewer starts to realise that this man might have done something wrong in the eyes of the law.”
Kumar says he jumped at the opportunity because the real-life Memon is someone he found extremely fascinating: “I watched Yakub's interview on TV, and I also heard his wife speak about him. He sounded very confident that he would live. But that did not happen.” To get into the character's skin, he chose to travel to the shoot alone so he could “imagine what a man might do in his last moments.” He listened, on the way, to a track of the azaan (the muezzin’s call to worship) on his cellphone.
The ethical crisis that Makhija is concerned about is whether “the nation was even listening to what Yakub was trying to say through his surrender, his deposition, his full disclosure, his willingness to provide witness, evidence and leads to help incriminate his own family.”
abs nt is on YouTube .
Makhija says he wrote the script with Kumar in mind because “he has the saddest, most empathetic eyes"
