Uljhan bhi hoon teri, uljhan ka hal bhi hoon main (I am your problem. But I am also your problem's solution.)
-Zero (2018)
magine an expedition. We are a team of explorers, journeying deep Im Linto the inner monologue of a heartbroken woman, the subterranean conversation she conducts with herself. The landscape of romantic bereavement is hardly alien to any of us, full of familiar sights and sounds. On the surface, our subject is cool, perhaps even flippant. But we hear her private thoughts, we see her grapple with the aftermath of loss. She is nursing a broken heart and an injured spirit. We decide against dismissing her heartache as banal. Our expedition starts surveying the pictures she draws; we become students of the stories she tells herself.
As we step into her mindscape, we begin to understand how she sees the world. She likes her job. Her professional life elicits a fierce loyalty. She feels a warm attachment towards clients and colleagues who've helped her survive and succeed. We sense deep gratitude for champions and mentors who have guided her through office life, its hierarchies and casual politics. She is proud of her achievements as a working professional of some import and value to her workplace. That pride of being visible and valued in a system designed to sideline her, to render her voiceless-offers a reservoir of worth and meaning.
She has just had an important week at work-a project she had helmed was released successfully into the world. We might expect her to be thrilled by this triumph. Instead, as we rummage about in her thoughts, we find that she is queasy, berating herself for her inadequacy. She is preoccupied with the sudden and surprising death of a long-distance romance. The joy of making a productive contribution to the world seems completely obliterated by the sting of romantic rejection. She had gradually revealed herself to this man, and felt he did the same. They were building an intimacy, paying attention to the humdrum matters in each other's lives. There was such a charge between them, it electrified dinner tables. Sadly, pragmatism plundered all prospects of emotional exploration and discovery. Distance, respective life goals, many sensible motifs were invoked. Six hours before she boarded a flight from New York to London, en route to New Delhi, he had subjected her to the tired platitude of 'it's not you, it's me'.
Sprawled on a hotel bed, she reminds herself that this connection was never expected to evolve into marriage or a lasting commitment. The logistics of the affair were impossible to begin with an Indian woman with a rewarding career in New Delhi dating a white Western man in the midst of an equally rewarding career in New York. Despite the odds stacked against them, she had never expected that the end would be so brutal, that his attitude would be so utterly cavalier. Weeping would help, but her body won't oblige. She clings to the hotel linen, unable to physically manifest her pain through tears. We listen closely: she isn't grieving the demise of her quasi-relationship as much as how it ended without exacting any visible emotional toll on her ex.
We hear her ego whine and wail. He was so nonchalant and inarticulate. The sex and continuous conversation must have meant very little to him, I must have misread the depth of our relationship. Was the sex bad? I don't remember it ever being bad for him. He never took me very seriously. If he really cared an iota about me or what I think of him, he wouldn't do this a few hours before I boarded a flight. He would have ended it properly. Instead, he looked like he had been sleepwalking through our entire affair.
