Amulya Tuladhar

In Custody, 1994, or Muhafiza, is a film I chose to watch for a variety of reasons; Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Neena Gupta, and Om Puri always a guarantor of good quality movies, added to this the story by Anita Desai, really bowled me over and I enjoyed this movie thoroughly. Anita Desai is an India-American professor of English who teaches English in one of the Ivy League University, I think, MIT or Cornell, together other extraordinary English novelists with Indian diasporic themes like Gita Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri but now other great Indian writers of English I enjoy are Amitabh Ghosh who writes on epic historical and ethnographic details like the Ibis Trilogy, etc. I like her writing style and the content which are more relatable than European and English themed contents but after a time they get jaded but I was absolutely piqued at how Anita Desai could possibly write about an entirely parochial theme of an old Urdu master waning away, I wondered if it is the same Anita? Second, other great actors often have their other screen roles transposing upon this story; Shashi Kapoor, for example, the very name of debonair, jumping, lean handsome engineer in Satyam Shivam Sundaram is now horribly obese, both in the film and outside, having given up on his looks and health as his English wife passed away. The other is Om Puri, of the archetypical scream of structurally viced adivasi of Aakrosh always seem to be film situations where he is a low down witness of historic horrific crimes as in Tamas, but here he is just lousy Hindi lecturer whose great fantasy is to do something great for Urdy Shayari, his love, and his forte. And then Shabana Azmi the forever wronged feminist in typical Indian situations, here the second wife of the Urdu poet with pretensions for her own poetic genius. The ending climax of Urdu shayeri recited in the exact toned and translated accurately in English subtitles is the killer that had me weeping. Watch it if you like a good story. Synopsis : An editor asks Deven, a teacher who loves Urdu poetry, to interview poet Nur Shahjehanabadi, an aging whale of a man. Deven goes to Bhopal from Mi...