There is a scene in Shonali Bose’s incredibly direct and brave film Margarita With A Straw where Laila (Kalki Koechlin), the protagonist is passing by a library in her wheelchair and looking through a glass wall at ‘normal’ people on the other side. This glass wall, as the film teaches us is not just something that divides the differently abled from the rest of the world..it divides us all from each other. Your glass wall could be your perception about your limitations, real or imagined, the acute sense of imperfections you may have that make you feel like an outsider. That thought which stops you from leading a full life is a real disability because it is self-imposed. There is a real journey from this moment to the one where Laila blows a kiss to herself in a large mirror as she sips her Margarita with a special, twisty straw. The glass wall that divides her from the world is gone because she has understood after losing the person closest to her that she is enough and that beyond a point, happiness is not something that comes from what others give us but the love we give ourselves. Because as Rumi and Shonali Bose’s own testimonial would prove (she lost her young son just before he turned 17), the wound is the place where light enters you.
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In the end, this is not a film about a young woman with cerebral palsy. Someone who cannot wear her pyjamas by herself or go to the loo alone or shampoo her own hair or talk clearly. It is a film about sexuality, heartbreak , loss, going on, letting go and owning all that we are. With our follies, impulses, needs, the not so pretty episodes that made us see just how much we need to evolve. Like a childhood friend who once tells Laila, “you will not become normal by being friends with normal people,’’ and then looks at her relationship with a woman to wonder if this is the evolved selfhood that Laila was looking at all along, the film makes us question the choices we make driven by insecurities, loneliness, neediness. Laila initiates her childhood friend into casual intimacy because she is sexually curious even as she remains desperately infatuated with the lead singer of her band. It is when he does not return her passion that she realises with a crushing immediacy that for ‘normal’ people, she is not just a woman. She is a woman in a wheelchair.
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When she cries into her mother’s (Revathy) arms and says, “he doesn’t love me,’’ her heartbreak is not just over the loss of a boy who she thought could be hers but because her self-worth has suffered a blow.
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In New York, it is inevitable that she, still smarting from the pain of a bruised heart would fall into a relationship with the one person who cannot see her afflicted body but only sense and feel her beauty. Khanum (Sayani Gupta) is a visually challenged, gay activist who gives Laila the one thing she has never had. A sense of her own desirability and the freedom to explore her sexuality. But here too, there is a constant questioning of the comfort zone the relationship has settled into. And then there is the boy who Laila is attracted to and who has no qualms about going to bed with her.
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There is also the complicated relationship Laila shares with her protective mother who is revolted by the porn sites on her daughter’s laptop but will go any distance to fight for her. It is her eventual sickness and the tragedy that follows that jolts Laila into honestly reassessing her life and the choices she has made. As is obvious by now, none of this has anything to do with disability, but is about the inner universe of a person whose primary need is to find herself, her own niche as she sits on the beach with a girlfriend, holds hands with her on a bus, battles the snow in New York with her mother, tries to make an omelette by herself, plays chess with a man she has befriended on the streets, makes love to a man despite having a girlfriend because he is the first person who can see her imperfect body and still want her, dances with her family on the eve of her departure to a foreign country, massages her mother’s cold feet in a hospital ward, smells the sarees that spell childhood and security.
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Watch Kalki inhabit not just Laila’s body but her soul. Her face is a vision as wreathed in smiles and sudden tears, it negotiates with a world, not entirely ready for her. This is the performance of her life, one that could not have been bettered because it is not just technique but insight and spirit and courage.
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The magnificent Revathy plays the kind of a mother who keeps families glued over conversations, debates and divided dinner tables. The ensemble cast is lovely especially Hussain Dalal and Kuljeet Singh. This is not one of those films that tip toe around gay sexuality and use coded visuals to convey what we have criminalised in India. For this and for choosing a story that is as unique as it is universal, Shonali Bose deserves a salute. And as you watch a blind girl putting on eye shadow before an evening out, you get what the film says without any words. Don’t let anything stand between you and your Margarita with a straw.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.