One of my favourite parts about engaging with art is stepping into perspective of another, and “All We Imagine as Light” offers exactly this – an intimate window into the lives of women in contemporary Mumbai.

To me this is a story about female friendship.

It is about two nurses in Mumbai (Prabha) and her younger roommate (Anu) living and working in Mumbai. We find out that the older nurse (Prabha’s) husband left for Germany soon after they married, and now rarely contacts her. The younger nurse Anu meanwhile is in a secret relationship with a Muslim boy.

I won’t spoil what events unfold, but over the course of the movie, we are given a lens into the intimacy of female relationships. In fact, the men in the movie rarely make an appearance.

“Yes, those living on the periphery often vanish, leaving behind little to no trace or noise.”

What kind of support system exists in the ‘city of dreams illusions’ especially for women?

For example, we learn about one of Prabha’s friends who is being evicted from a house that she had lived in for 22 years. Her husband had died and hadn’t told her/given her any papers for proof of address. She decides eventually to move back to her village, and both Prabha and Anu help her relocate.

We see three women, each at different life stages, navigating this indifferent city whilst supporting each other.

I like how this movie is all about the subtext. It is just a story with the tragedies and joys of living. No huge grand narratives, but just the daily lives of two women in evolving India. Whilst reading through the reviews, I saw some people say it was ‘underwhelming’. Nothing happens. It’s slow. I love this. It’s a slice of life movie- there is no grand arc or narratives, it’s just an intimate lens on a group of three women navigating a modern Mumbai. I’m reminded of Haruki Murakami’s book ‘Men without Women’ a series of short stories about men who have lost women in their lives. This is a story of women without men.

‘The whole invitation from poetry is that it is possible to speak what you think is impossible to say. And once you’ve said it you are freed into a larger territory… You can begin to speak what you feel needs to be said to a loved one, or to a colleague or a friend, or to yourself in the mirror’

David Whyte

I’ve been obsessed with David Whyte, an Irish poet who also is a Zen practitioner and avid rock climber, two deep interests of mine. Much like with my love for Pico Iyer, I find kindred souls through reading. You can’t help but be drawn to people who have the same proclivities, interests and ways of seeing.

I’ve been so deeply moved, that I’ve started trying to write poetry myself. The more I write, the more I find that the world is transformed. ‘Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity’.

A recurring theme that I think I wrote about almost a decade ago, was how language shapes your world. It colours the lens through which one sees. Although paradoxically, it is tricky at the same time because language is merely a pointer, not the actual ’thing itself’.

There was a period where I kind of dismissed language. “Language cannot capture ‘this’, the richness of reality”, as I sat daily in meditation, a place where language can be seen for what it is’.

But that was a mistaken view. For language is deeply powerful in its way to point to the ineffable.

I’ve literally had lines of David Whyte’s poetry instantaneously snap me into non-dual states of awareness, into the deepest attentive experiences and into breaking down in joyful tears. ‘The kettle is singing, even as it pours you a drink’.

Music is in the same domain as poetry.

I think this is the purpose of any art. To point at the world, so that you actually look, to open us in ways we can’t always do alone; to new ways of seeing, reframing, feeling, at a non verbal non conceptual experiential level.

Language and words are limited, but what they point to is unlimited and unable to be contained.