Dhobi Ghat: The wandering questions

As soon as I was comfortably seated in the theatre I texted my friend to tell him that I was about to watch Dhobi Ghat first day first show. His reply was surprise that the Dhobis had not created a controversy over the title and let it release. My brief open-mouthed mental reaction was quickly silenced by the on-screen announcement that the film would not have any intermission. I found that extremely cheery, and shouted a silent hurray! 95 minutes of undisturbed viewing followed. I think if those 95 minutes had been broken into two halves, no one would have come back for the second half. By which I don’t mean to suggest that the movie was terrible enough to leave unfinished. This opinion is purely because I felt the movie was akin to seeing a dream – you can’t expect to wake up for a drink of water and go back to seeing it again can you?

That was perhaps the greatest aspect of the movie – a visual appeal that keeps you hooked throughout with an almost voyeuristic curiosity. The subtitle ‘Mumbai Diaries’ is a fair pointer in the direction of the stories we are told, as also of the story within the story. We are told of the lives of four singular individuals almost continuously from each other’s perspective. What is singular about the individuals is that they are all migrants, which is perhaps rather too common a state of affairs these days. Where Dhobi Ghat excels is in showcasing the self-proclaimed distinction that is often a signature of migrant histories. Every migrant, in seeing his new home with new eyes, translates the novelty to the object rather than himself, the subject. Thus the city is made novel, even if people have come here a thousand times. Whether seen through Yasmin’s videos, or through Shai’s camera lens, or through Arun’s brushwork, every migrant has the singular self-identity as discoverer, as first traveller. But not every migrant story treads such mystic realms. Some are very much grounded in the difficult-to-digest hardness of life-in-the-commonplace. Some, like that of Munna, are of hunger since birth, and migration if only to satiate that hunger, through whatever is available.

The aspect that delineates sharply the migrant from the resident is the issue of competition for resources. Every migrant sees only other migrants as competition – the resident is the host, and hence, paradoxically, not hostile. Whether in labour, or in love, the migrant only contends with other “foreigners”. Equally too, migrants tend to form their own enclaves. Again, the irony is delicious and the friend-foe equation becomes very much an imbalanced seesaw. This too is subtly demonstrated in the movie, through minor stories that parallel the major ones. The long-domiciled resident often has very little clue of the stereotypes that play in the heads of the newcomers: their craving for familiarity in the unknown, their need for anonymity in the knowable. It is realizing that almost everyone comes to Chowpatty for bhel puri and also not being discovered as a migrant by other migrants in a crowd. The question then is, where does the questing migrant really come to a halt? Or does he/she ever really stop moving? Is one migration only the beginning of a thousand others? In my own life, I hesitate to answer that question, having lived, as I have, as a migrant in cities full of migrants. I find the journey intoxicating, far more nourishing than the “settled” life in one place. In Dhobi Ghat too, the migrants keep moving, although for a different clutch of reasons – and not always happy ones.

So what is the Dhobi Ghat? It is a symbol, one among many whose recognition and identification might easily separate the resident from the migrant.