Poetic Faith

The realness of the house on screen

- Ashutosh Salil

THERE is a lone tree. A few floating clouds. A serpentine road and then the house is revealed. The house is a spectacle that is both mute and articulate. A kitchen, a courtyard, windows, rooms, and the entrance. The screen is a landscape of desire, of nostalgia, and of loss. It is a portal.

A single ray of sunshine, that breaks through the old window bars and falls on the floor in the frame, is enough to take me where I have not been in years, to make me see that house again, to feel the loss, to be in that house once more.

Cinema has that power. To take us where we haven’t been, the promise of a house. In watching a film, we gaze at a space we can never occupy but can live in or have lived in. In Achal Mishra’s Gamak Ghar, which was released in 2019, the house is the protagonist. The house hasn’t been scanned and it is here that we experience the tenuousness of property relations and through it, the story of migration, of aspiration, and of loss.

The film is set in Mishra’s ancestral village, Madhopur, in Darbhanga and is about the house that his grandfather built in the 1950s. A structure becomes home with presence and this real, lived-in space was where fiction intersected with the real and then, with my own story.

It is real and, in its realness, it contains a thousand other such homes. Like memory, which can’t be created. It is both real and surreal. The house inspires, it acts and it disintegrates. I wonder if the house would be the same if it were made up of footage and insertions. Would I then enter it the way I did?

In one of the scenes in the film, the grandson is looking for his dead grandfather in the belongings that the latter has left behind. There is a diary with minute details of all expenditures, photo albums and drama books, all tied up in a red piece of cloth and stored in a big aluminium