Anaar Daana review: Lived-in account of a child wrestling with the idea of grief helobaba.com

Do you remember the first time you learnt of the concept of death? That loved ones once gone don’t come back ever. It’s a deeply disturbing feeling that’s excruciating at any point in life. But when you’re a child, it’s cruel. It’s like the wave crashing against your sand castle, a thousand times over. Debutante filmmaker Nishi Dugar’s short film Anaar Daana tries to make sense of that pain – not of death, but of learning about it the very first time.

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Sweet sourness

Premiering in competition at the ongoing Berlin Film Festival, Anaar Daana translates to the sweet and tangy candy made of pomegranate seeds. It’s often consumed as a digestive, but here, it poses the metaphorical question: How do you digest death? The very idea of it. For Guddal, a jar of anaar daana placed on a high ledge in her grandmother’s room starts off as a forbidden fruit. By the end of the film, it’s the khatta-meetha aftertaste of a new discovery about life.

Nishi places the story in an old Jaipur haweli that’s unlike what an outsider associates the city’s structures with. It’s neither palatial nor haunting. As the entire story progresses in daytime, the blue-and-white walls, the ornate wooden doors, and the carved stonework make for an ideal playground, where Guddal and her little brother can own their space like it’s a comfy white cloud in a powder blue sky. For Guddal, nothing is more detrimental than being scolded by her aaya didi (caretaker).

It’s only when a phone call comes and her elder sister locks herself in a room that she begins to see her playground get infiltrated. Soon, men in white crop up and discuss telephone directories and death certificates. Women in colourful but muted colours congregate in silence, interrupted by fleeting bickering. Guddal can sense something is wrong, but can’t point a finger on it – until she eavesdrops someone saying her loved one is now shaant (silent).

Coming to terms

In a heartbreaking scene, Guddal shakes her younger brother and demands the answer to what being “shaant” means. Because really, who introduces the concept of death to a child? Who apprises them of its irrevocability? Who teaches them how to grieve? For Indian kids, at least, it’s a work-in-progress, which possibly makes it tougher to come to terms with death, even as an adult. I still remember the first time my father casually explained to me what natural death means. I always assumed death happens only by accident or illness. I remember pleading to him to cancel my eventual death, just as fervently I pleaded him to get me the new toy in town.

But that’s exactly what life ends up feeling like: we plead and strive for toys that would help us distract from our eventuality. Nishi underlines that it’s not just kids, but also adults who engage in formalities, rituals, and inheritance to skirt over the enormity of death, instead of patiently dealing with it.

With carefully strung-together shots of chappals strewn over in a corner of the aangan (courtyard), peeping angles of ‘well-wishers’ murmuring, and close-ups of a gajra and an agarbatti, cinematographer Ashwin Ameri and editor Pavan Theurkar show how a child’s gaze on life is like a jigsaw puzzle with a perennial missing piece. Dawn Vincent’s music is the sound of reason: the one tool that lends a method to childlike madness, or what’s synonymously called, innocence.

Veda Agrawal, who plays Guddal, is remarkably well-cast. You can see her coming of age through her eyes. Her despondently curious expression will stay with you long after the credits roll, and so will the dilution of innocence on her face when she lies to her younger brother at the end of the film. In conventional wisdom, she’s grown up a little. But if you look at it through the lens of who she was at the start of the film, she’s only died a little. And maybe that means the same.

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