Soni (now streaming on Netflix) captures what it feels like to walk in a woman’s body on deserted streets, even when you are not a marked victim but a law enforcer in disguise. It also shows the futility of the police uniform on the body of a woman when she wants to do more than just grease the system with her compliance. When she wants to be angry and actually dares to express that anger by schooling an inebriated driver who throws the , “do you know who I am?” line at her.
It captures the sense of isolation that is coded in a woman’s DNA no matter who she is. Be it a young newly single woman for whom home means just a sparse, impersonal place where she heats take away food, makes tea and waters her plants. Where the camera follows her measured movements like the stalkers she routinely confronts in her line of work.
Or an upright IPS officer who has to sit quietly and listen to family banter about police women who don’t know their place. Who is routinely asked questions about when she will have children. Who disbelievingly watches as a well-connected young punk walks away from her police station while her subordinate who confronted him, is taken off active duty. Who has to deal with the normalisation of moral policing and segregation of sexes in a city that stalks and hunts women with impunity everyday.
The film shows that this isolation belongs to all women, because their power is always conditional. And the awareness of this begins early as when a young school girl is shamed for her periods. Or when another girl, possibly the survivor of an assault is brought to the police station and cannot bring herself to speak a single word about the horror she has just been through.
Debutant Ivan Ayr has made a deeply empathetic and intuitive film about a gender that is constantly reminded of its vulnerability. It seems to have internalised the pain of women who sometimes quietly and sometimes loudly and fearlessly combat the disrespect, little and big cruelties and ignorance ladled their way.
The most poignant moment of the film is when the quietly magnificent Saloni Batra’s soft-spoken Kalpana, a slightly disillusioned IPS officer visits her subordinate Soni’s home (played with remarkable economy by Geetika Vidya Ohlyan) and gives her a copy of Amrita Preetam’s biography Raseedi Ticket (Revenue Stamp). Why the book? Because as she explains without saying it in too many words, women have always had to deal with a milieu that dismisses their stories.
She recalls how a well-known critic of Amrita’s work had said when he heard that she was writing a biography, “that story will just about fit the back of a revenue stamp.”
And what a story that turned out to be.
And is still a reminder that women like Kalpana and Soni and all women no matter who and where they are, can one day, rise above the bands constricting their lungs and spirits. And grow beyond the stamp sized place they are accorded in the world.

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.