Sexually assertive women still new for Indian screen: Writer Sikka on BA Pass

Growing up, any boy who teased my sisters in school knew he had a bloody nose coming. My mother would scold me, but was secretly proud. Deflecting an aunty’s advances was a lesson I hadn’t learnt though. Mohan Sikka’s short story Railway Aunty was part of the anthology Delhi Noir edited by Hirsh Sawhney. Now it has a new avatar – as the film BA Pass directed by Ajay Bahl. Set in Delhi’s Paharganj, it’s the story of a young man, Mukesh, languishing in a BA pass course and the web of deceit, sex and power he is sucked into when Sarika, the wife of a railway official seduces him. The film is getting a lot of buzz for being bold and unflinching. “Can BA Pass bring in some sense to other Bollywood erotic thrillers?” asks Rohit Vats on IBNLive . Writer Mohan Sikka gives his take on BA Pass to Firstpost. What’s your verdict on the film? What had you been most nervous about? Thumbs up! It’s an impactful film that does the job. It’s hard to leave the theatre without feeling a little stunned. I do feel the film captures the essence of the written story although there are differences in plot and emphasis, naturally. It’s impossible as the creator of the original story not to second guess and say: Oh I would have made this choice and not this one. I had to come to terms with the fact that the film and story are related but separate works of art. Ajay Bahl bought the screen rights from me and wanted a free hand to realize his vision. That was a hard choice but I think the right one. My ideas probably would have killed the film! I was nervous about whether the corruption and betrayal themes would be soft-pedalled, and whether Ajay would need the feel to throw in some light at the end of the tunnel. As you will see when you watch the film, he doubled down on the despair. Bravo! [caption id=“attachment_1019745” align=“alignnone” width=“380”] Shilpa Shukla plays the role of Sarika in the film BA Pass. Image courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Is noir noir everywhere? Or do you think an Indian context changes it at all? Noir noir everywhere! I love that! It definitely changes. The way Delhi does darkness is different than how noir would work in LA or Havana. This is one of the things I had to wrestle with when Hirsh Sawhney asked me to write “The Railway Aunty”. I realized that for noir to work in a lower-middle-class locality in Delhi I would have to rely on local detail, characters grounded in situation, class and family conflict, and the sexual repression and casual cruelty that are the social currency of Punjabi Delhi. Western noir tropes like detectives in dark trenchcoats just wouldn’t fly! Having Paharganj as the location really helped – it’s so perfect in its mix of old and new, railway colonies and labyrinthine lanes, neon glitz and chaos. For example, the character of the femme fatale. Does she carry special punch in an Indian context? She does! She’s a dated type in Western noir, but I think she still has a special power in the Indian context. I think seeing a sexually assertive woman, who enjoys sex and uses it to escape the paralysing limits of her social class, is still new for the Indian screen. Under Sarika’s boredom and hardness is a fierce resistance against an order that she can’t overthrow, but which she defies through what she makes sexually possible for herself and other trapped housewives. I had to dream up Sarika keeping in mind the long history of vamps in Indian cinema. The vamp, as represented by the legendary Helen, represented Western mores and therefore a descent into corruption and depravity. She put the souls of good men at risk, but in the end was always redeemed or transformed by the power of tradition and domestic values. I remember Purab aur Paschim. The vamp was often played by women who were actually foreign-born. The femme fatale, on the other hand, is more of a local brew. She is a central driver of the action in noir, resisting and manipulating men in order to break free from her shackles and get the money, power and independence she craves. She has no maternal or wifely instincts, and she see the morals and values of her class for what they are, a way to control women. She fights corruption with cruelty and remains true to her destructive nature even if she has to die, because she knows there is no softness and redemption in the society modern man has created. [caption id=“attachment_1019773” align=“alignnone” width=“380”] Sikka says a lot of Western noir is not applicable to India. Image Courtesy: Mohan Sikka’s homepage[/caption] A film obviously has to deal with censor issues. But were you surprised Sarika kept having sex with her multicoloured bras on? (In your story she explicitly removes the bra when seducing the young man). No comment, except that one has to understand the context in which a film is made and what is possible for actors on the stage in which they perform. Still, kudos to the censor board for passing the film without a single cut! Anything strike you while watching the film about how we tend to depict sex in a film? Clearly frontal nudity still seems to be a taboo in Indian film. I think the film reveals something about the social and sexual transitions that India is going through, and what’s possible to reveal, as it were, and what is not. In Open magazine you recounted reactions of family members and audiences to the film.How squeamish are we about portrayals like this one? I think this film is hard to watch in the best possible way! We see characters on the screen who resemble us behaving very badly, and it’s impossible to look and impossible to turn away. I think the film does a great job of picking up and highlighting a key theme in my story: the darkness, coercion and violence that live behind the closed doors of our ordinary middle-class lives. Not the “corruption” that our righteous citizens demonstrate against in the streets, but the darkness inside our own homes and hearts. One response from my own aunties was: Beta, achchee story hai lekin yeh sab kahan hota hai? Hamne kabhi nahin dekha! (Good story, son but where does all this happen. I’ve never seen it.) Do you think your story ended up as a morality tale in the film? I think that’s one of the risks in the way the story ends, that this is your fate if you leave the straight and narrow path. Hopefully the point of noir is to show that all of us are corrupt in small and large ways, including the ones who point fingers. All of us are hustling in one form or the other, selling part of ourselves to make it. Some of us just get better options, and others find themselves hurtling down a Paharganj lane as the world closes in on them. It’s a bleak view but it has some truth to it, the perspective of noir that violence on violence is the true norm and there is little true love and happiness to be found in the world we’ve built. The dark fates hover closer than we think and we are all at risk of falling. HarperCollins is republishing The Railway Aunty as an e-single in September as part of their 21st anniversary of publishing in India.