Lines on the ground and the lives their impact

The first time I watched director Samarth Mahajan’s Borderland s, I was barely 20 minutes into it when I had to press pause. At a shelter home for girls in Kolkata, Noor from Bangladesh, in a colourful T-shirt pulled over a blue, ankle-length cotton skirt, was sitting on a chair with her back to the camera. Her hair was gathered above her neck in a careless bun held by a blue clutcher.

With her left leg shaking continuously, Noor said she used to cut herself because she was angry.

We see marks on her left forearm. Short, sharp cuts that had healed but stayed. They held memories of the days when she was beaten by the man who had bought her, when she realised that his promise to set her free in six months was just another lie. When she thought of her Maasi who had sold her.

Noor said that she would rub chilli into her cuts and then secure it with a bandage. It would burn a lot.

And then she would open the wound and let water run over it. Relief.

Director Samarth Mahajan says borders and the narrative around them is “unidimensional and hyper-masculine.” It’s all about the Army, terrorists, the enemy, the other.

He and his team wanted to find other dimensions — other stories about how borders impact common people, their lives.

Borderlands introduces us to six people — five women and one man — whose lives are shaped by India’s borders with Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

In Birgunj, Nepal, we meet Kavita who works with an NGO engaged in anti-trafficking work. She’s often out on the busy road of the open IndiaNepal border monitoring traffic, stopping bikes and autorickshaws carrying young girls. She smiles while asking them where they are going, why, and with whom. She asks for IDs, where they will stay. Relationship with the adults accompanying the girls. When the details are sketchy, she calls up the girl’s parents to confirm details. And when she is not satisfied, she calls the cops.

Self-confident and with an infectious smile, Kavita talks about how her family is always worried about her because of the work she does.

It’s from Kavita that Borderlands moves to Noor, the one who slipped through the cracks. The one who made me pause.

“There is cross-border violence, and violence between countries. But there is also violence that happens on people because of these constructs of borders, nation-states... Nepal is a peaceful border, but there is violence of another kind. Not through guns and tanks... The trafficking thread, with the Bengal story, is about confinement and rehabilitation,” Samarth says.

B orderlands begins its journey on the India-Pakistan border with young Deepa. She, along with her family, is staying in a Jodhpur camp for Hindus from Pakistan and is studying to be a nurse. She is proud of her knowledge, skill and asks the director and his assistant to participate in a little play-act to show them how good she is at diagnosing and counselling patients. She is hilariously bad.

Deepa smiles a lot when she talks about her work, the life she had in Pakistan, what she wore. The present makes her wilt. She says she doesn’t feel like dressing up these days. She misses her home. She’s upset that all her life she studied Sindi, Urdu and now has to learn Hindi.

Cooking in the open, outside her mud and thatch hut, Deepa gazes at the distant horizon, perhaps looking for the home she left, perhaps hoping to settle in.

“We like fixed identities... Pakistani-Hindus is an identity. But how do they actually live? We were looking for an emotional, softer connection... to look beyond the fixed identities,” says Samarth.

Dhauli, in Nagaon, West Bengal, is much older than Deepa.

She came to India as a young bride from Bangladesh to be with her husband. The house she lives in now, with her children and husband, is just a few feet from the fence beyond which her parents and siblings live. She has not held or touched some of her brothers and sisters who were born after she came to India.

Every year, at the IndiaBangladesh border, the two governments organise “Milan Bazaar”. There is no walking across. But people on both sides of the fences, secured by barbed wire, are allowed to congregate and talk, many voices leaping simultaneously across the strip of no man’s land that separates them.

As salutations, enquiries about health, wedding plans are shouted, small plastic packets dangling precariously on one end of a long bamboo stick rise from one side to drop oranges and colourful dresses for little nieces across the border.

This annual mela, complete with fruit sellers, men selling footwear, clothes, bags, toys, is the mingy, smug generosity of harsh nation-states.

S amarth, an engineer from IIT Kharagpur, grew up in Dinanagar, a town in Punjab close to the border with Pakistan. He takes us home, to meet his mother, Rekha, who wanted to but wasn’t allowed to be a school teacher. On most days, she says, she sits alone at home waiting for her kids to pick up her phone, answer her texts. She talks about loneliness, of living with the fear of terrorists, bombing and attacks. Of feeling reassured when her son’s WhatsApp shows that he is “online”.

We accompany Rekha on her first visit to the Wagah border and see the joy she felt when she and other women are invited to dance to nationalistic songs and wave the Tricolour.

Back home, she tells Samarth, what is the need for this very masculine show of strength, of commandos carrying automatic weapons and stomping their boots. “There is no need to do this everyday. Maybe once a week,” she says.

Samarth says the seed for Borderlands was planted when he was shooting his first film, Unreserved. The film, which won the national award for “on location sound” in 2018, is a set of conversations with people travelling unreserved in train’s general compartments across India.

He recalls a particular conversation with a Kashmiri. “He said his brother is in the Army and yet he supports Pakistan. But added that if his village gets electricity, if he gets a job, he may start supporting India,” Samarth recalls. Shifting identities.

That, says Samarth, stayed with him and set him off on the ambitious Borderlands project in October 2018 which required “bahut paisa, research, travel”.

Borderlands is a co-production between All Things Small and Camera And Shorts, apart from being partly crowdfunded by 557 backers and to zero-in on its main characters Samarth and the team read academic papers, met journalists, sarpanches and shot four-five people in each place. The shooting wrapped up in March 2020 and on the editing table six people made the final cut.

“Stronger characters turned out to be women,” says Samarth.

In Imphal we meet Surjakanta who makes films about Manipuri revolutionaries who fought for an independent nation.

Samarth says, “Manipur is what became a symbol of conflict in the subcontinent. But in the mainland, we don’t like to talk of Manipur and Nagaland in the same breath as Kashmir. We forget that there is a history of...”

This segment, however, is the film’s weakest. After introducing us to Sujarkanta’s love for both — cinema and his land — it meanders and goes nowhere.

Hope, says Samarth, was an important thing they were keen to express through the people and stories they picked.

Deepa hopes to become a practicing nurse soon. Kavita hopes that everyday, as she watches over the border, she is saving girls.

Noor found her soulmate at the shelter home and hopes to reunite with the girl she loves, across the border.

Dhauli hopes that one day she’ll be able to go back home.

Hope, yes. And a long wait.

The New York Indian Film Festival runs online till June 20. Passes are available to watch films.