There is a telling scene in Ritesh Batra’s film Photograph (playing on Amazon). Two scenes in fact that mirror each other. In both, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra marvellously exuding a contained wistfulness) is at a shop to buy a dress. The first scene shows her standing noncommittally before a mirror while her sister and mother argue over which colour suits her best. The decision is made for her and the two leave her frozen before the mirror.
In another, a wilful but loving grandmother (played endearingly by Farrukh Jaffar) , is choosing something for Miloni again but this time, she is not invisible. She is being seen not as a conduit of someone else’s choices but as a person.
And that is the whole point, of the film.
Do the people in our lives see us? And if they do, do they see us for who we are or who they want us to be?
We see Miloni tiptoeing for most part, around conversations and the physical spaces in her home. Her parents talk about her, rarely to her. We learn during the course of one such conversation that she was once interested in theatre but then it was taken away from her to be replaced by her family’s academic ambition for her.
No wonder then that she feels closest to another shadowy being in the home. The house help whose busy feet and repetitive question, “didi kuch aur laaon?,” are our only link with her till one day Miloni asks her to pause and sit down for a conversation. The camera does not budge but the surprised woman slowly sits, easing into the frame and for the first time we see her face. In that moment, she too like Saloni becomes visible because someone sees her beyond the role she is supposed to play.
The help played with melting warmth by the exceptional Geetanjali Kulkarni is one of the many notes in the film that tell us what it means to be acknowledged as a person, worthy of attention and genuine human engagement. Something that Miloni does not even know she misses till she sees a photograph of hers clicked by a random stranger at the Gateway of India.
We never see that picture but we see its impact on those who see it. Especially on Miloni herself who says later in the film that the girl in the picture was not her but someone happier, more fulfilled. What she doesn’t say is that she would have liked to be the girl, Rafi (the photographer played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui) saw in her .
It is that girl, Miloni goes in search of during the course of the film. Her connection with Rafi is studiously formal. The two are stiff around each other, as if packed like dolls in different boxes. But everything around them is liquid, sweet and essential like the ice gola doused in syrup that Rafi’s grandmother forces Miloni to have.
It is established right from the onset that Rafi sees in her something that is invisible to everyone else. And also the little things that her own family does not notice. Like the fact that Miloni never drinks cola. Nobody has ever asked her why but Rafi does. And then tumbles forth an untold story about childhood, grief and Campa Cola. And leads us to a Parsi gentleman who still makes the forgotten cola flavour and issues a killer line that sums up a nation in hurry to hurtle towards something it cannot yet define, “This is a big nation with a small memory.”
The religion of the two protagonists is not even an issue here except when Rafi’s grandmother mentions it in passing. It is whether a girl like Miloni can sit through a film in a run down cinema hall with rats scurrying over her feet just to feel connected to a reality beyond her own. We learn the answer when we see her a few scenes later in Rafi’s rundown, shared room that can only be reached via a trap door. We don’t see what happens in the room but may be it is something momentous in what can now tentatively be called a relationship because both Rafi and Miloni do not sleep a wink later, in their respective isolation.
We are reminded however time and again that this is not a story that can unfold indefinitely without reality checks. Rafi is after all a dreamer who can go in search of one bottle of Campa Cola for the sake of nostalgia. Who dreams of love when he hears a Khayyam tune ending in “Noorie..Noorie.” Who can will even a ghost to appear out of imagination for a midnight smoke and a conversation. Who is to say that he is not dreaming up his daily rendezvous with Miloni? But then maybe he isn’t. Because his longing for her is matched by her longing for what he represents. A chance to live and not just play a role even though their interaction begins with a bit of play acting.
She dreams of leaving the city behind and going to a village far away from the hoarding, where her face is splashed as a CA topper. Away from the starched conventions of an arranged match, the ungracious interest of her tutor in her and most of all, away from her parents who are more interested in her academic career than in her. In a key moment, when someone looks at her hoarding and asks if it is her picture on it, she shakes her head. That girl is not her. Never was.
The world of Photograph just as it was in Batra’s better known The Lunchbox is woven around one stray incident that somehow is the beginning of a conversation between two people who were not meant to bond. It is the all seeing gaze of a street photographer in this and it was the food in a misplaced lunchbox in the other.
In both stories, a nondescript event is the beginning of a long awaited shift in two lives. Batra , though not a romantic in the conventional, filmy sense even though he uses film songs to fill the silences within and without , is one.
Just as most of us are. Looking for meaning and purpose in the large, unfamiliar world sprawling around us. A world, that if we are lucky, will suddenly one day begin to play our song and even open a door we didn’t know existed.

Reema is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of  Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a  translator who recently interpreted  Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an  RJ  and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US . She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.