In Uday Prakash’s short story collection, The Walls of Delhi (translated into English by Jason Grunebaum), the titular story follows Ramnivas, an impoverished Delhi sweeper, who finds a mountain of cash hidden behind a gymnasium wall.
The windfall not only transforms the man’s life, it also seems to make Ramnivas a better friend, a more attentive husband, a superior lover even. So much so that his long-suffering mistress Sushma, hitherto indifferent to him, suddenly feels “as if she were rolling around on a flowerbed of the prettiest blossoms in the world”. In a satirical segue, Prakash helpfully informs the reader (this is the literary equivalent of Jim Halpert’s fourth-wall-breaking glance at the camera in The Office ) about the palliative effects of hard cash on one’s disposition: “The roots of happiness lie hidden away in money. From there, the tree of pleasure can grow, and flourish, and bear the fruit of joy. Maybe the best qualities of men, too, lie locked inside a bundle of cash (…)”
Before-after
Anurag Kashyap’s latest film Choked: Paisa Bolta Hai (released on Netflix earlier this month) features a similar plot conceit at its heart. Sarita Pillai (Saiyami Kher), a Mumbai bank teller, finds a seemingly bottomless pit of money in her clogged kitchen sink. For
Sarita, the money means a chance to paper over the cracks in her marriage — her unemployed husband Sushant (Roshan Mathew) is an irritable, often petty little man, hopping from one job to another, peddling small-scale insurance schemes with his carrom-playing neighbours. November 2016, however, brings with it demonetisation; a move that threatens to render Sarita’s newfound bounty null and void — or worse, land her in legal trouble.
Choked has a lot going for it, to be honest. The depiction of lower middle-class Marathi life is affectionate and lit up by Kashyap’s signature brand of humour, à la Gangs of Wasseypur — absurd and grouchy, surreal and yet informed by an earthy pragmatism. The performances are commendable for the most part. Kher, a promising young actor who made her debut in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2016 grandiose dud Mirzya , is given most of the heavy-lifting in Choked , and she passes with flying colours.
Two modes
Her malleable eyes just about manage to sell an under-cooked backstory — how Sarita and Sushant were singers in a reality show, how she ‘choked’ in the spotlight, costing them their one shot at show business. In the aftermath, she took up a bank job to support Sushant’s singing dreams, and there too Kher does a fine job of communicating Sarita’s quiet
despondence — an early scene sees Sarita expertly skewering a casually sexist customer without changing her demeanor or raising her voice. Mathew starts the film off on a hammy note before coming into his own gradually. Amruta Subhash is dependable as ever, playing Sharvari Tai, Sarita and Sushant’s kind-hearted but meddlesome neighbour, whose daughter’s wedding plans are poleaxed by the demonetisation.
And yet, the whole thing never really comes together satisfactorily. Choked starts off as a simmering deconstruction of marriage, co-dependence and how financial upheavals influence the trajectory of a relationship. Midway through, however, Kashyap decides that he also wants to make a grand allegorical statement about the evils of demonetisation; the panic, the impact on crores of middle-class Indians who felt betrayed and attacked. In one of the first scenes that depict this, Sarita firmly tells off a teary-eyed customer who begs her with folded hands for more money, “ Bank mein paise milte hain, sympathy nahi milti. Unke haath jodiye jinko vote diya tha .” (This is a bank; you get money here, not sympathy. Go and beg before those you voted for.)
Discordant notes
There’s no harm in ambition, of course — Kashyap has been one of India’s most ambitious filmmakers for close to two decades now, after all — but the movie’s screenplay just cannot keep pace with its protean objectives. Worse, the discordant notes struck by the film’s two ‘modes’ — the personal, marked by the Pillais’ domestic space, and the political, marked by its demonetisation scenes — end up cancelling the good work done by the film’s first 30-odd minutes.
It’s almost as if Kashyap were trying to squeeze in a Netflix series-like pacing within the confines of a 100-minute movie. Had Choked been a series, of course, the scenes directly confronting demonetisation and its aftermath could have been siphoned off into a separate episode — the mid-season ‘standalone’ episode that has become de rigueur in the streaming era, a concept borrowed from comic books that gave writers breathing space to focus on sidekicks and nemeses instead.
Alas, Choked suffers because of its distinct lack of breathing space (pun unintended). The screenplay, which promised so much in the first half, begins to fall apart under the burden of its on-the-nose economic metaphors (politicians, plumbing, clogged drainpipes, corruption — we get it, thanks). All of which is a shame, because after the many disappointments of Bombay Velvet , Kashyap delivered three solid films — Raman Raghav 2.0 , Ugly and Mukkabaaz , not to mention the Netflix series Sacred Games . Unfortunately, with Manmarziyan , the insipid Ghost Stories and now Choked , Bollywood’s pre-eminent stylist has lost considerable ground.
In The Walls of Delhi , Prakash describes the suddenly rich Ramnivas’s overnight happiness using a Bollywood metaphor: “Gone was the poor, broken, sorrowful Jitendra. Now he was the gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile.” How long before an Anurag Kashyap film makes us feel like that again?
The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.
