Seeing and believing

"Haan, main mendak hoon," says Bauji (Sanjay Mishra), the ageing protagonist of Rajat Kapoor's Ankhon Dekhi, "Apne kuay ko samajhne ki koshish kar raha hoon." ("Yes, I'm a frog in the well, but at least I'm trying to understand my well.") Bauji's "kuaan" is a marvellously realised Old Delhi setting with crumbling houses in which joint-family members squabble and talk past each other for much of the day, but have more relaxed rooftop soirees once in a while; hospitality and goodwill are measured in glasses of "rooh-abja". Working in a small travel agency, Bauji is surrounded by clocks that tell the time in far-off countries, but he appears to have rarely ever left this neighbourhood.

Though his world is a small one, there is a lot he still has to comprehend about it, even at his age. His daughter Rita has grown up and is in a romance with a boy who may or may not be a rogue. The basic affection between him and his wife (Seema Pahwa, brilliantly channelling the many facets of a loud-mouthed but soft-hearted woman) is usually overridden by the little trials of everyday life. His younger brother Rishi (played by Rajat Kapoor himself) is becoming distant and wants to move out with his family after decades of living together.

Bauji's personal epiphany - the film's plot-mover - happens when his relatives turn out to be wrong about his daughter's boyfriend. This gets him thinking about the need to look closely at the world and make up one's own mind about what is real - it is as if he has been reborn, or grown a new pair of eyes. Soon he is sharing his insight with other people, trying to convince them that they too must discover their personal sach and rely on their own observations rather than take things at face value. But what might the cost of such a project be? Could it mean letting go of unquantifiable things, such as one's complicated relationships with family and friends? As he will learn, being untethered could mean soaring above the world like a bird (or like a frog that has escaped its well), but it could just as easily mean crashing down to earth.

Or perhaps he will find that everything is an illusion anyway. The studio behind Ankhon Dekhi is Mithya Talkies, and Kapoor's Mithya, one of the best Hindi films of the last decade, was about an actor who is hired to masquerade as someone else and ends up fitting all too well into his new role; notions of selfhood become confused and perhaps irrelevant. Bauji's story isn't as dramatic, but he is often in danger of losing touch with reality in the process of defining it. Trust only what you can see, he tells a group of apostles, even as one is constantly reminded of the impracticality of such advice. (Some of the followers react by blindly accepting what he is saying.) He speaks about the importance of truth - going to the extent of leaving his job because how can he sell the virtues of cities he has never been to himself? - but ends up concealing things from his family and gets involved with an underhanded gambling operation.

There have been a few films with Old Delhi settings in recent years, and like most of them Ankhon Dekhi emphasises authenticity in character, dialogue and production design. It has many nice touches, from Bauji's wife's weary exclamations of "Arre bhaiya!" (even when she is addressing a prospective son-in-law) to the pleasing but unexpected candour of a scene where Rita shows up at her boyfriend's house and makes herself comfortable. There is overlapping dialogue and a ear for conversation, and it is all wonderfully performed by Mishra, Pahwa and a cast of fine supporting actors.

But plot-oriented though this film appears to be, it is - again like Mithya - deceptive at a formal level, with detours into strangeness that may reflect the main character's inner state, and his inability to pin down what is real. Kapoor dedicates Ankhon Dekhi to his "masters", Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, and that should tell you something about his often-abstract filmmaking sensibility. It is a sensibility with traces of nihilism - a cold, detached view of the absurdities of our condition - but it also gently observes and acknowledges the little things that can make life bearable.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer