Misogynistic chatter of a million Boiz Locker Rooms

Writer-director Shaan Vyas’ short film Natkhat, which was screened in the We Are One film festival on YouTube, tells the story of how in our homes and around our dining tables, on our playgrounds and in classrooms, on the way home and on the streets outside our busy markets, misogyny is being passed on from one young boy, one teenager, one man to the others, like a contagion whose curve won’t ever be allowed to flatten.

The film’s story is simple, but it has a split personality. There’s one part of it that is the hard, often unbearable reality, and then there’s the other which is pivoted on heartfelt hope. It’s not false hope. But it is hope.

The film’s setting is also split — in the two worlds that 7-year-old Sonu (Miss Sanika Patel), the adored son of Maa (played by Vidya Balan), inhabits.

There’s his school, the boys he hangs around with in his colony, his Tauji, dad and chacha with whom he has dinner that his mother, wearing her ghunghat long, serves. And then there are the afternoons spent alone with Maa, when he returns home and craves some jalebi, and evenings when she tells him a bedtime story, when he asks his Maa how she got a new bruise.

One day, while the men are having dinner, Maa overhears a conversation about how to deal with a pesky woman MLA. The adults are discussing what to do when Sonu pipes up: “Uthwa do. Jab koi ladki tang kare na, usko uthwa-do.”

He had heard of it happen the other day, and just that afternoon he had seen it as well.

Boys will be boys, Tauji says, but adds that Sonu’s TV watching should be regulated.

“Ramayan, Mahabharat dekho,” he says, directing Sonu to two truly Indian epics — one in which Mariyada Purushottam abandons his pregnant wife in a forest for the sake of his reputation, and the other in which five great men stake claim to a woman as theirs but none rises to her defence when she is disrobed in front of them and other men of high virtue.

Written by Annukampa Harsh and Shaan Vyas, Natkhat, a 33-minute short film, has a clear-eyed understanding of how patriarchy perpetuates and nurtures misogyny, how men are trained to unsee women except for their basic needs — food and sex. And when they do see a woman exerting herself, her right as a human being, how they must deal with it.

But this reality is too depressing and common, and so the film becomes wistful, seeking solace in the belief that children can change, that the misogyny leaching into them can be wrung out.

There is a teary-eyed romance to this part of the story that’s built around a bedtime story about a king, his daughter and birds that like to take flight.

It’s sweet, soothing fiction. Male privilege that’s handed down from one generation to another is not given up so easily.

When Natkhat is real, it’s powerful, poignant and has a scary scene involving children that will never, ever leave me.

Miss Sarita Patel, who plays Sonu with a throbbing inner cosmos, is confident and very good. Vidya Balan, whose character of Maa is essentially us, carries the heavy burden of mothers, sisters, daughters with her intrinsic warmth and a certain feminine resilience that is passed from one generation of women to another.