II remember watching Mammo as a boy who had freshly gained adolescence, much like its 14-year-old Riyaz. It was the era of cable television and I was visiting my aunt. More importantly, I hadn’t yet the dreaded but inevitable familiarity with the feeling of losing one’s nani—the maternal grandmother—the sort of grandparent that Indian male children often connect on a more intimate level than they even do with their own mother.
It was only recently that I watched the film once again and found out that Mammo (Farida Jalal), the loquacious and lovable sister of Riyaz’s nani Fayyazi (Surekha Sikri), returns to them 20 years later. Back when I first watched the film, a power cut prevented me from ever finding out after the traumatic sequence where Mammo is torn away from her family in India and put on a Frontier Mail bound for Peshawar in Pakistan.
Mammo isn’t the first film that comes to mind when you embark on a tribute to its director, Shyam Benegal. Yet, throughout the span of growing up and living through Mr Benegal continuing to create compelling cinema with films such as Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008) and Well Done Abba (2009)—Mammo imprinted itself more and more, like the shroud of Turin, on my formative psyche. As a 12-year-old with a keen interest in stories, the film held me captive with its absorption of the mundane life. The inconvenience that ensues after a relative you’ve never heard of, shows up at your door and attaches themselves to every aspect of your life.
My recent second viewing of the film not only tugged at my own tender, indelible relationship with my own nani, but her many adoring and generous elderly friends I grew up among. These were women I saw the other version of womanhood in (before I even had the opportunity of coming across the more regular one)—unencumbered by the obligations that come with becoming a man. Which is why I’ve constantly marvelled at how the movie rids both sexes of the burden of the common pedestal—the male is a child and the females are elderly grandmas. For its time, a time much before the castigating expectation of acting right for appearances came about, this was a silent accomplishment.
Young Riyaz, or Rizu, as he is affectionately addressed by Fayyazi and Mammo, is a sensitive, articulate and talented child who reads Kahlil Gibran and is an Alfred Hitchcock fan. He listens to Mozart and allows no slip-ups in the care of his fish. Yet, he has his moments of adolescent frustration. He is deeply conscious of his social status that he sees as inferior. He can be selfish and insensitive. During my first time watching the film, I almost came to hate him for his temperamental, entitled and less-than-ideal conduct with two helpless old women. I never realised that I could be that way often myself.
Thankfully, Benegal endows Mammo nani with the empathy that allows her to see, like no one else can, Rizu’s own human agency for rebellion and protest. With her childlike wonder, she immediately accepts him for what he is, of course alongside her regular attempts to lodge herself and her fixed geriatric ways more deeply into his life where he is a cosmopolitan young man of letters who will wear a sherwani but not a skull cap. Of course, it helps that Mammo is herself a poetry girlie who can quote Faiz at the drop of a hat. Of course, it comes with the caveat that unlike Fayyazi, she is childless. Even in Shyam Benegal’s feminist world, it remains a void in the life of an old woman with no home, like Fayyazi reminds her in a tiff one day.
We tend to go on and on about the virtues of vulnerability, both in life and stories. Mammo bridges the gap between the fragility of its titular character and the teen whose life she infiltrates, but not without the messiness that you can seldom get your way in life without. They act up, resort to devices and eventually allow each other to have their confidences. Mammo does so by poking into the last remaining shards of his crumbling innocence, recalling with both restraint and emotion the horrors of the Partition that she has witnessed firsthand. He does so by promptly planting a kiss on her cheek when, after an argument with Fayyazi and Rizu, she has left home and sought shelter at Haji Ali Dargah. Govind Nihalani’s lens following the wistful laments of Jagjit Singh’s Yeh Faasle across the drenched bleakness of the city renders it among the most evocative sequences in Hindi cinema.
Mammo would have remained deeply traumatic had I never found out that Mahmuda Begam eventually returns to Fayyazi and Rizu. But find out I did, and after the initial deja vu and surrealism of her landing at their doorstep had passed, I found myself smiling a small involuntary smile. For some reason, it might have seemed important for Benegal’s script to have a happy ending after the tragic expulsion of the heroine to a land she has no emotional investment left in. The need for Riyaz and Mammo nani to have a reunion creeps up on the melancholic opening end of the frame narrative. At the end, the trio celebrating the forging of the documentation that says Mammo died during her second visit in India becomes the director’s affirmation in innocence. That of Rizu and that of us.