What Hindi Cinema Taught Me About Grief

I did not cry at my grandfather's funeral. I stood at the back of the hall and watched others cry and felt something that I could not name — not numbness, exactly, but an emptiness of procedure. The right things were being done and I was participating in them and the grief was in me somewhere but it had not arrived at the surface yet.

Six months later I watched Anand. I had seen it before. I knew how it ended. I was alone at two in the morning and I cried for about forty minutes and when I was done I understood something about my grandfather that I hadn't understood at the funeral.

The grammar of feeling

I have been thinking about this for years now — the gap between experience and emotion. The way grief, or joy, or love often arrives not in the moment of the experience itself but later, through something oblique. A film, a song, a particular quality of afternoon light. An image in a book.

Hindi cinema, the old kind — the Gulzar films, the Hrishikesh Mukherjee films, the songs Sahir Ludhianvi wrote — has a particular relationship with sentiment that I don't think I fully appreciated until I was older. It is not embarrassed by feeling. It is not ironic about it. It presents grief as something enormous and appropriate, as something that takes up the space it actually takes up rather than the smaller, more manageable space we are usually allowed for it.

"Zindagi kaisi hai paheli, haye — kabhi yeh hasaaye kabhi yeh rulaaye." (Life is such a mystery — sometimes it makes you laugh, sometimes it makes you cry.)

The permission to feel fully

What moved me at two in the morning was partly the film itself and partly the permission the film gave me. To inhabit the feeling at its full size. To not be efficient about it or proportionate about it. To let it be as large as it actually was.

This is something children do naturally and adults are trained out of. My son, who is two, cries at the volume the feeling demands. He does not modulate. He has not yet learned that emotions are supposed to be performed at a scale that does not inconvenience others.

I think part of what we lose, in the long negotiation of growing up, is access to the unmodulated version of things. We learn to process at a distance. To experience through layers of interpretation and management and self-consciousness.

Art — the good kind, the kind that makes no concessions to its own reception — can sometimes get you back through those layers. It provides the grammar for feelings that couldn't find their own language.

What I understood about my grandfather

What I understood, watching Anand alone at two in the morning, was this: that my grandfather had been dying for a long time, not in the biological sense but in the sense that mattered — in the gradual erosion of what had made him himself. And I had known this and not known what to do with the knowing. And the film gave me a shape to put it into.

I cried for him and for that erosion and for the gap between the person he had been and the person he was at the end and for the fact that I had never said clearly, in a way that reached him, that I was glad he had existed.

I still haven't found a better language for that than the one he gave me: the old Hindi films he watched every Sunday afternoon, humming along to songs he had known since before I was born.