Can India Have Its Adolescence?

How Loves Moves, an exquisite film set in Delhi, is showing at an art gallery. Where else must we seek out our best and brightest?

- Deepanjana Pal

In a far corner of the art gallery Project 88, there hangs a velvet curtain with the Urdu word Dum (Breath) etched on it in gold thread.

A few steps away lies a white body bag, embroidered with peacocks. In the belly of the gallery a large screen lights up to play artist Pallavi Paul's film, How Love Moves.

It takes the viewer to the Delhi Gate cemetery, where the two narrators share their stories, over the course of 63 minutes.

One is an immigrant who came to India, fell in love, and then saw her husband murdered during the Delhi riots of 2020.

The other is a chatty gravedigger named Shamim Khan, who helped bury 4,000 bodies amid the pandemic and the riots.

Their voices keep alive the memory of the many who have been anonymized and turned into data points by death and trauma. "The dead are not worthless," Khan says, at one point. "They're Allah's creations and must be returned to Him with respect."