We recall Black Friday, perhaps the most perfect film in Anurag Kashyap’s oeuvre, timeless and relevant still because of what it says and the righteous rage it exhibits against the failures that allow intolerance to thrive.
There is a 12-minute chase scene in the first half of Black Friday between a few police men and a bomb blast suspect. As real as the stench of Mumbai’s underbelly. The overweight cops and their desperate prey keep running and because nothing else is happening, you start listening to the sound track closely and suddenly the sub-text of Mumbai’s spirit comes alive. A spirit that fights misery with the stardust of Hindi films. This spirit runs like a ticker along with the actors who make you forget they are only acting. As the actors run, we hear snatches of Hindi film songs like, “Main hoon jhum jhum jhum jhum jhumroo’’ which are ironically evocative of simpler, happier times. We hear a TV blare out a film dialogue or two, appropriate to the situation, like the one from Amar Akbar Anthony, “Aise toh aadmi life mein ek ich baar bhagta hai…!’’ We chuckle inadvertently when a tired police man says to the suspect, “Arre yaar ruk ja..main kucch nahin karoonga!’’ Even though what we are watching is grim beyond words. We laugh just like the Mumbaikar who survives routine blasts with a resilient optimism. Then suddenly the man is caught and we see the actual horror of what he was trying to escape. His fingers are hammered and he is made to press his broken thumb onto a confession sheet.
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A police officer surveys the sheet when the man is taken away. It has a blob of blood and a bit of human skin on the paper. He flicks it away. His day’s job is done. This interplay of darkness with a darker darkness, pierced by only a few rays of humanity (mostly in the shape of Kay Kay’s Rakesh Maria who loathes the inhuman police torture of suspects and returns a pair of glasses to a woman he had himself manhandled in the lock up) is a compelling thing to watch in Black Friday. The film shows just how impossible the world has become.
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It shows that reasons may differ why brainwashed rioters create living hell on our streets or why the State could not stop the fall of a Babri Masjid or why the Tiger Memons and the Dawoods turn Mumbai into a ticking bomb or why the cops dehumanise themselves and the criminals before them, they are all equally responsible in some way in making this world, unlivable. On one fateful morning in November, 1993, a city goes by its own business and suddenly the pace slows and we see the last few seconds of peace in slow motion before the bombs go off one after the another, destroying anything that comes in their way. Limbs and lives are scattered, bodies charred beyond recognition and we see close ups of footfalls into something which is part slush and part human blood.
This is what hate has done to this country and will continue to do so till we stop looking for someone to blame for what we have become.
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As Kay Kay’s embittered cop tells a bomb blast suspect, “Anyone who kills in the name of God is a fool. God is not with you. He is with the innocent.’’ Once the horror of the blasts plays itself out, the film pieces together the events preceding the blasts because our past is afterall the reason for our present. So we see the destruction of Babri Masjid, uncontained riots in Mumbai, unloading of RDX on the docks of Mumbai with the connivance of corrupt custom officers, the brainwashing of adrift young men. In the end when innocent people die and a city’s courage takes body blows, does it matter who is more to blame? Kashyap quotes Gandhi in the beginning and the end of the film to show us that revenge indeed begets revenge begets revenge and that caught up in a cycle of hate, we will keep spawning more hate, till there is nothing left to destroy except ourselves. The film’s power lies in its unsentimental narrative, in its brutally realistic performances. Be it Kay Kay interrogating a suspect while battling a hunger induced migraine or Aditya Srivastava’s Baadshah Khan shuttling helplessly between cities after having played out his part in the bomb blasts, we see moments of palpable humanity in both. Whether it is the hungry cop stealing a banana from a suspect’s fridge or Baadshah Khan trying not to look too longingly at a girl in a ferry in Calcutta where he has come to hide, we see just how alike both are. Both are human-beings caught in inhuman circumstances.
The only difference is that the cop has to forget his humanity to protect law while the criminal becomes inhuman to defy it.
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The film based on the book of same name by S Hussain Zaidi, shows searing images, reenacted from the actual Mumbai blasts and culled from real media footage to show us the horror of terrorism when it strikes everyday life. But Kashyap wants us to look beyond the surface eruptions to the wheel of cause and effect which endlessly keeps spinning out riots, blasts and communal violence in India. The film’s point is simply this. It does not matter who masterminds blasts or riots that always butcher the innocent.
It does not matter because in this country, almost everyone has a God to fight for. And there will always be a reason good enough to kill or die for. The question is who will stop this cycle? Even though, the film is almost documentary like in its account of the events leading up to the blast, we do see that it is mainly about human intolerance and the loss of innocence.
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For every humane cop who dunks his head in a bucket after every brutal interrogation of a suspect, there is one who uses a hammer to break the fingers of a criminal and assaults the women who land up in prisons to pay for their men’s crimes. Every scene of Black Friday is an indictment of the system which has allowed religious intolerance to grow and fester and explode. This is a timeless piece of work and will remain relevant till religion becomes less important to us than our humanity.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.