What is it like to be a man, a woman, a transgender in a country where the law goes right into the bedroom? Natasha Mendonca’s docu-fiction film, Ajeeb Aashiq , which was screened at the recent International Film Festival at Rotterdam, finds out

Suman is a singer, a slam poet, a migrant, an intellectual and a rebel. Khush is an autorickshaw driver, a transgender, a lover, an assistant on a film set, and a ‘hero’ in his own way. Mumbai is a city of labour, love and glamour, of sexuality and censorship, of the people, the state, and the patriarch. These three are the protagonists of Natasha’s film and through them she examines labour, love, sexuality and gender with a rare intensity and sharpness.

Ajeeb Aashiq uses aspects of the pastiche, video art, dialectical montage and the good old documentary and takes on the form of a cinematic essay. Natasha hates binaries, so you will not see the man pitted against the woman. However, she will convincingly ask you to join her in the liminal space that she effortlessly occupies. It is clear that as a filmmaker, she is unafraid of speaking her mind and there is a unique sense of freedom that her cinematic universe creates.

Excerpts from an interview during the Rotterdam film festival:

Why did you choose to make this film?

The word aashiq (in the title) comes from the Sufi tradition of the ‘ aashiqis ’, who were travelling bards who would duel. I liked that idea, the watered-down version of it in the Indian context, and everything in between. So when I began this project, it was primarily about love — the love I have for India and for myself. At the same time, I wanted to address this strange relationship with the self — this constant negotiation that one undergoes with being Indian, about the shame associated with one’s sexuality, body and gender. I wanted to relate all of these to the law of the land. I also wanted to do a piece on labour and class in the glamour industry and this became the basic premise of the film.

How did the two characters of Khush and Suman emerge?

I began to hang out a lot with the transgender community after I wrote the script. There is a part of me that identifies as transgender, not in a way that I want a sex change operation but more in the manner in which Leslie Feinberg writes about transgender warriors — that we all come under the transgender category. It is a spectrum. So, I’m in that spectrum and I’ve always had close links with the gender-ambiguous nature of things. Both Suman and Khush are real and fictional in the film. Without revealing too much, I’ll just tell you that Khush came from really trying circumstances. Until he was 17, when he was a girl, he wasn’t even allowed to step out of his home. That’s also why he harbours so much hate for his former gender. Suman’s character was crafted to be like the city of Mumbai and Khush is the aam admi . I wanted to juxtapose these two characters and their struggles. Suman’s character is more ephemeral and poetic unlike Khush’s which is more rooted in the real, you could say.

In a docu-fiction hybrid film, where do you draw the line between documentary and fiction?

There is this theorist called Sarat Maharaj and he talks about the idea of the ‘picnic’. For me, this film is like a picnic. For instance, the working class characters like Khush — I didn’t want them to slog, I wanted them to have outings. And then we would do a scene. The scene would be from their life — about work and love, which are topics everyone is preoccupied with. I took my script and kept it aside while I was dealing with the characters. But what actually started happening was that real life would often pan out as I had written in my script. It was incredible. In my grant proposal, I wrote that this film will enter people’s lives and they will enter this film in equal measure. It was a fine balancing act. I was more focussed on building relationships with fragile communities.

But then there is the presence of the camera, which can be an intruder, especially while recording the deeply personal…

The camera can be an intrusion when it is not your third arm. Also, if you hang out with people who have cameras all the time, you get bored of it after a point and that’s when the magic starts. I had to be really patient to reach that moment.

By featuring Narendra Modi’s voice, speech and image, it seems like he too is a character in the film…

When I wrote the script, I deliberately chose to keep politics out of it. I’m not talking about Modi specifically. I’m talking about this male authority figure and the idea of repression. I think I would have looked at the state even if it was Rahul Gandhi. For me, it was about the ‘man’. For me, there is no difference between Coke and Pepsi. The brand of politics is patriarchy and I’m anti-patriarchy. Now, whoever the patriarch is, I want to rock the boat. I think this right-wing and left-wing are two wings of the same bird. We need to understand and re-imagine the whole structure.

How do you want your audience to read this film?

When I make a film, I first think about myself. I need to exhaust my complete potential before I can sleep peacefully. If the audience wants to see this as a gay film, then that’s fine. For me, it is like a poem, contextual poetry, repartee, jam and rap. If we are going down, then let’s sing and celebrate as we go down. If you look at the translation of the title, it is Strange Love and that’s deliberate. Film history will throw up Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and that’s a film about fascism. So there are references and then more references. It is a labyrinth.

I’m talking about this male authority figure and the idea of repression.