There is very little talk in Navdeep Singh’s NH10 but there is one chilling conversation summing up the heart of the darkness that India loses itself in ever so often.
A cop is talking to Anushka Sharma’s Meera, almost as if, she, an urban woman, is an alien who must be educated about the laws that govern the real India. He asks her if she has read Manusmiriti (the treatise about gender and caste politics) and tells her something to the effect of, “If the cars that must be driven to the right side of the road, start going towards the left, accident toh hoga hi. Aapke Gurgaon ka aakhri mall jahan khatm hota hai..wahin par India ka Constitution bhi khatm ho jata hai.”
This is an India where honour killings are de rigueur and the panchayats and law enforcers look the other way and caste lines are drawn and redrawn with iron rods smeared in blood. Where in the dirty loo of a roadside dhaba, words like ‘randi’ are scribbled to mock all women. Where a man can stand anything except a woman who stares right back at him without fear. This is an India Meera has never encountered before. She belongs to the India where women drive their cars, their lives, have high profile jobs and partners who treat them like equals and where gender is incidental except when a jealous colleague throws a sexist jibe after a successful presentation. But more about that later.
NH10 is broadly inspired by director Neil Jordan’s Jody Foster starrer The Brave One, a film that released in 2007, the same year as Navdeep’s critically acclaimed Manorama Six Feet Under. Navdeep has a strangely gifted gaze and even while interpreting Roman Polanski’s China Town in Manorama Six Feet Under, he created a palpable stench of crime and the ennui of small town India in every frame.
His NH10, just like The Brave One is about a woman, who after being pushed to the edge of her humanity, sets out to avenge a tragedy. Yet, the film stands on its own as an unrelentingly dark spiral into the lawless hinterland on the edge of the burgeoning Gurgaon and Navdeep packs it with the damning details of not just caste and class conflicts but the full-blown gender war that is being waged on our streets, villages and towns today.
As we watch Meera walking by herself to her car at night in a posh Gurgaon neighbourhood and then being stalked and attacked in the confines of her vehicle by some goons, we recall a few dozen episodes like this that have happened in real time to real women. The film opens in a little bubble of joy though with a casual conversation between an urban couple on their way to a party. There is no gender politics between Meera (Anushka Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam) as they bicker good-naturedly about her smoking, the boring people they have to meet. They take their laptops to bed, share online banter, household chores and the aftershocks of an attack post which she begins to carry a gun in her handbag. But it is on NH10, on their way to a road trip that the two encounter the inhabitants of the other India. These are men who Arjun describes as ‘butchers’ after seeing the extent of their brutality towards a young couple in love.
The film also questions, without rubbing it in, just how is it that when we see crime unfold in broad daylight. Do we tend to look the other way? An entire dhaba is witness to the kidnapping of a couple and yet only Arjun in his naivete dares to question a cold-blooded goon Satbir (Darshan Kumaar) and in the bargain gets slapped and humiliated. There is a terrible, graphic scene where Satbir hits his sister and her lover and asks her repeatedly, “Aur banegi Laila?’’ Rubbing it in that a woman is a piece of property to be owned and disposed off and must never choose love over family. And that is why it is hard for him to fathom or digest the almost superhuman bravery of a woman who outwits him at every end.
Who will crawl out of a wrecked car, climb walls, run though wilderness, hit and bite and shoot because she wants to protect the man she loves and then because she needs to finish something that has taken from her, all sense of right and wrong, her gentleness and the woman she once was. The woman who was lost without her husband. Who cried like a baby when she saw a murder from behind his shoulder. In one night, she travels from the cherished wife being driven to a dream holiday to someone who sits and smokes an entire cigarette, with an iron rod in hand, waiting for her prey to rise so that she can hit him again. In the background, in a village forgotten by time, you hear the echoes of a Savitri Satyawan skit. The same story where a devoted wife won her husband back from death. Here, the wife watches death and dishes it out without a blink. Like she says in the end, “Jo karna tha..kiya.”
Anushka makes you feel this transition like it was happening to you. You feel every blow she suffers within and without. Her desperation and that point when she loses all fear and watches a pack of murderers from the top of a rockface and screams, ‘’f..k you!” This moment is possibly the feminist counterpoint to Badlapur because at the heart of this tragedy is not a random crime but misogyny.
Bhoopalam is a ray of sunshine and plays the adoring husband with a fetching grin and negotiates the grim parts convincingly. This is an actor we should be watching more of. The violence is hard to watch at places and does get gratuities towards the end but it is tough to see how else the film could have ended. Navdeep and cinematographer Arvind Kannabiran imbue the grasslands, quarries, village lanes, nightscapes around the highway with a sense of nightmarish foreboding and there is not one moment that turns reassuringly cinematic.
We have finally progressed to cinema in a commercial context that does not release us from the angst of real life. That says, “This is happening. This happened to someone else but could happen to you.”
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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