Seeking love in lonesome cities

Notes on watching 'All We Imagine As Light' in Karachi

KARACHI:

There is a distinct subset of cinema that invariably bores my parents—the slow, meditative kind where "nothing really happens." Think: the languid sermons of Govind Nihalani's Party or the temporal sprawl of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. Films that seem to resist the very rhythm of life. Arthouse cinema is hardly alone in provoking this reaction. After watching Alfonso Cuarón's rather mainstream Gravity, for instance, my dad asked me: where is the story? Surely, one character and one room could not be it.

To its credit, Payal Kapadia's fiction feature debut, All We Imagine As Light, offers more than that. It has three women, an entire city, and a partial village to unravel a story steeped in longing. And what better city to host the tenuous intimacies of urban life than Karachi? On Saturday, Neutral held an exclusive screening as part of Chalti Tasveerain, its cinema initiative. For the first time in years, it felt as if a story had found its way home.

Since its launch in October, Chalti Tasveerain has curated a diverse catalog, inviting audiences to two films each month. The initiative is helmed by Saif Quraishi - physicist, actor, filmmaker - and Sameer Haseeb Khan, a Karachi-based filmmaker with a background in journalism and advertising. Together, the pair are focused on building Chalti Tasveerain as a space to bring people together over a shared love of great cinema.

Speaking to The Express Tribune about bringing Kapadia's film to Karachi, Saif said, "We reached out to their production team and followed the necessary protocols including the licencing fee. We just cold emailed them and it came about rather easily."

An ordinary cityscape

All We Imagine As Light follows the intersecting lives of Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha), and Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam) - three nurses from small towns now grappling with urban solitude and shifting desires. Prabha's unresolved past resurfaces in the form of an unexpected gift from her estranged husband, forcing her to confront the limbo of her marriage just as a new possibility for love emerges. Anu, restless and impulsive, tests the boundaries of love and social propriety, while Parvaty, a widow facing eviction, is forced to reckon with the city's indifference. Kapadia renders their dilemmas with remarkable tenderness, allowing emotions to build in hushed gestures and stolen glances, creating a world that is at once tangible and dreamlike.

With a languid two-hour runtime, Kapadia's feature remains remarkably faithful to an alternative mode of storytelling - one that begins long before the reel starts rolling and lingers long after the credits fade.

It is often difficult to articulate the experience of watching something that falls into the nebulous realm of slow cinema. What is there to recount about the three unhurried hours of cyclical mundanity in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman? She butters bread. She peels potatoes. She polishes shoes, folds laundry, bathes, dines with her son. There is nothing to spoil in a film that finds its rhythm in the ordinary.

When I return home from the screening, my mother asks me, What was the story about? So I point at us, then at the misty night sky. Boundless, borderless, indistinguishable from Mumbai.

The brown girl cinema

Later in the film, Mumbai's oppressive rhythms change to the open expanse of the coastal village. As Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty step away from the city's relentless demands, they enter a space where time slows, and submerged emotions come to the surface. Prabha, in particular, experiences a moment of almost mystical clarity, a reckoning that is both deeply personal and universal in its resonance. Is this a miracle or a hallucination? Or perhaps, they both mean the same thing, far away from the city.

Kapadia leaves room for ambiguity, infusing the film's closing moments with a luminous epiphany that resists easy interpretation. There is no writing on the wall, just chalkings full of love and promise in a dimly lit cave. And the weight of memory that the brown girl is all too familiar with.

This brown girl, a nebulous figure in its own right, is relatively new to me. It was not until I was an undergraduate student living in Karachi, suddenly exposed to the city's scholarly circles that I began to see myself as one.

She leads a double life. She knows how to hide and live better than anyone else. She moves through the lagging, rusted grids of the postcolonial metropolis, always in a state of fight or flight. Her joys belong to her alone, as do her sins. She is Anu, determined to live differently from Prabha and Parvaty. She is all of them.

Over the years, I have encountered the brown girl time and again: in the confessional poets at impromptu open mics, in anonymous declarations of love scattered across Facebook groups, in the quiet defiance of pleasure pursued in secrecy.

On screen, I last found her in In Flames (2023), embodied by a grief-stricken Mariam, haunted by a cityscape that loomed over her after a romantic rendezvous took a dark turn. Before that, she appeared as Biba, Mumtaz, and Nucchi in Joyland (2022) —Saim Sadiq's critically acclaimed yet ruthlessly censored film.

That same year, Fawzia Mirza's The Queen of My Dreams, a festival-favourite tracing a young Azra's journey through her mother's early years in Karachi, remained absent from screens here, unable to secure a release.

There are countless stories where the brown girl longs to be seen and heard, and it is no coincidence that these are the first to be sacrificed to ideologues and censorship. But for one night, in a room so intimate it could hardly be called a cinema hall, the bureaucracies felt distant. With a quiet sense of wonder, I realised that Mumbai's heavy skies fade into the same deep indigo as Karachi's - and that all brown girls are on the run.