Sounds of silence

Fire is neither about passion nor naked sensuality. It is about the naked pain and suffering that passion often hides. It is about those silences that lie buried in the depths of a woman’s heart never to be heard. In fact, even when silences turn into screams they remain unheard.

It is about emptiness. The utter loneliness which only a woman knows or can know -- the loneliness that envelops her entire being, her heart. In Fire, I could hear the silent cry of anguished Indian women. One would think that agnipariskha is a one-time ritual, a one-time test of a woman’s purity. Far from it. It is a lifelong ordeal, a continual trial, not of her purity but of her endurance and ability to suffer silently. And this ordeal by fire is something that not only Hindu women undergo, but every Indian women is made to undergo regardless of religion or background.

The images of three hapless, helpless women will forever remain etched in memory searing the soul and singeing the heart. Only one of them is paralysed. But,the other two are no better. If Biji is physically paralysed, Shabana and Nandita are psychologically crippled. The claustrophobia of a no-exit marriage -- a familiar scenario in countless marriages -- crushes them under its weight. The burden of convention weighs them down ,household chores cripple their sense of freedom as it does to numerous women. It is the weight of choicelesness, weight of sterility or a fear of fertility -- the urge to connect, to belong to, feel wanted-- all this came back.

Women are always waiting, hoping and yearning to receive someone’s love. They are a receptacle, yes. An object, yes. A subject, never. How could it be the story of tradition-bound Punjabi family alone, I wondered. It is the story of women struggling to come to term with themselves, of unfulfilled longings, of betrayed trust -- a muffled cry of the heart waiting to be heard.

How many of us can articulate this emptiness, leave alone confront it or transmute it. Fire reminded me of the words of a friend, who after a traumatic marriage of over two decades, had confided," Hum saath saath hain, par paas nahin" ( We are together, but not close). Intimacy is a women’s language. It is also her tragedy. This is what she always gives but never receives. Condemned to live on the margins of those whom she nurtures, or for whom she nurtures,she lives for a look, a touch, or a caress that rarely comes her way.

What a woman seeks is not something that words can express.The experiences of a woman are in the realm of silence, beyond language, which only images can show.

— A.N.