Postcards: From Witnessing Charles Bridge in Prague To Watching ‘Ullozhukku’
This month in Postcards: notes about finding community in neighbourhoods, ‘Tees’ and thinking about loved ones, and the courage to hope in a flailing democracy
Dear reader, we write to you about the people, places, and ideas that brought team BehanBox joy this month. One postcard, every month.
Tracking Tendrils, Mapping Trees in Bangalore
In How to Be A Tree, Sumana Roy writes she wanted to become a tree because they did not wear bras. As she points out, “It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to ‘hurry up’.” For the longest time, I navigated my way around the neighbourhood through trees. A carpet of slippery gulmohar flowers meant I was close to home, roots of a Banyan meant school, a left at the Jacaranda tree was a trip to the grocery store and so on. These specific trees – markers of my childhood and keepers of time – have more or less disappeared.
But I never cease plant-watching; after all, there’s much to be learned from trees including the state of bralessness, and being.
Archita Raghu
‘Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters, I’ll Lay Me Down’
‘The most beautiful bridge in the world’, they said. Words fall short for the magnificence of the Charles bridge in Prague. Flanked by watch towers on each end, the cobbled path bridge guarded by massive statues of saints, where writer Franz Kafka would have once walked, the not-so-long bridge dominates the cityscape. And every memory of it. It’s most gorgeous at night, when the light from the gas lamps creates rippled reflections on the Vitava river. It is the perfect podium to gawk at the imposing Prague castle.
It is a postcard I would have sent my friend and fellow bridge lover, Tejas, who left us last year. Bridges brought us both joy. We spent hours talking about them–our childhood memories, the structural design, the grandeur, and their purpose.
The memory of staying awake at 2 am during the train journey, as a child, to feel the train passing through the Hirakud bridge over the Mahanandi river in Odisha. Or that of watching passengers fetch coins and push through to squeeze to the window as the train approached the Cotton bridge near Rajamundhry in Andhra.
A bridge is more than a walkway over a river. It brings possibilities – of connecting people with their own on the other side. It is the aspiration of a leader for her people, like Tenmozhi, the president of a remote tribal village in Tamil Nadu, who spent her blood, sweat and tears to get one in her village. It is the possibility of building new ideas, like the doctor couple Abhay and Rani Bang, who after seeing a broken bridge that could have saved an infant’s life, built up a localised, community driven healthcare system that bridged the healthcare gap. A bridge becomes the backdrop of an intense and aching love story of Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood in ‘The Bridges of the Madison County’ and a metaphor for friendship in Simon and Garfunkel song: ‘Like a bridge over troubled waters, I’ll lay me down’.
It is Tejas’ birthday today. He would have been 38. Last year, we had promised to travel together to see the Cotton Bridge in Rajahmundhry over our beloved Godavari river. Until we meet on the other side, may bridges continue to bring us joy.
Bhanupriya Rao
The Undercurrents of Solidarity, And The Indomitable Urvashi
It took me a full year to sit down and watch the 2024 Malayalam film, Ullozhukku (undercurrent). Just about every film buff I knew had been raving about it but I am, well, I am craven about watching tragedies.
What prodded me into changing my mind was actor Urvashi’s furious response recently to being given the best supporting actress title by the National Film Awards jury. She had shouldered the film with a masterly performance, as much as the much younger Parvathy Thiruvothu had. Was it because she was the older actor? Was the award a pension? she had raged.
To say that I was blown away by the film would be an understatement. Urvashi is Leelamma, the matriarch of a rich Christian family in the waterlocked Kuttanad region. She is scheming and heartless enough to marry off her son to a young woman Anju (Parvathy), hiding the fact of his terminal illness. He dies and as the flood waters rise all around, the family is unable to bury him.
Leelamma has one ray of hope in the midst of this unrelenting gloom – her daughter-in-law is pregnant. But the child isn’t her son’s, she discovers. Anju, caught in a miserable marriage, has been visiting her former lover even as her husband lay dying. Leelamma is furious, resentful and broken in turns. No one is flawless in the film. But you can see the terrible damage that patriarchy, class, and social hypocrisy can inflict on human relationships. In the end, however, the two women forge an unlikely solidarity – one of compassion and respect.
And yes, Urvashi is beyond magnificent.
Malini Nair
About Memory, Time, and Ghar
I didn’t expect Tees to pluck strings of gentle grief. When a local group screened this shelved Netflix movie on Independence Day, I was prepared to brood and agonise over the familiar weight of majoritarianism, democracy’s fraying edges. But something about the texture of stories, narrated like lore, made space for quiet remembrance.
The film drifts across three timelines — the Kashmiri pandit exodus of 1989, growing intolerance against Muslims around 2019, and an Orwellian New Delhi of 2034 where citizens are graded into categories. Dibakar Banerjee wields his wand in the dark to sketch violence inflicted on creativity, free speech, and ecologies, and whimsically play with time and space in this process. His protagonist writes a novel ‘Tees’ years later, documenting the turbulence of four decades, as if his memory was keeping these stories — and these people — alive.
This rhythm reminded me of author Deborah Levy’s Real Estate. She wrote about memories, too, and of melding time into stories. She reached this conclusion: it is the work of memory to collapse time. To remember, then, is to do away with bodies and borders, and to let people live many lives, many times over.
I lost my Nanaji five months ago, but his death never felt — doesn’t feel — real. He was himself a man of whimsy and lore; his life always in swift, restless motion, like the river Ganga he lived next to in Haridwar. As children, we always believed he lived across time. He fled Lahore after partition in the 1950s, endured the Emergency of 1975, marvelling at the neoliberal promise of the early aughts, and then again the nightmarish pandemic of 2020. Their house in Haridwar was always alive with these stories; memories decorated his persona, gave a gleam to his eyes. Banerjee in another interview, saw the family as the anchor to Tees: we inherit from them grief and guilt, but also this colossal gift of memory. I still believe Nanaji lives through time, in memories — mine and yours — and in his absence.
Saumya Kalia
Finding Hope In Anti Fragility
The last two months have barely given me any hope for India’s democracy. The list is endless – the police in BJP-ruled states hounding Bengali-Muslim workers and accusing them of being Bangladeshis; the Election Commission conducting Special Intensive Revisions of electoral rolls that is expected to exclude voters from marginalised communities; the Commission’s rebuttal to strong evidence of voter list manipulation presented by Rahul Gandhi and journalists has been lackadaisical at best.
I was in despair when Rega Jha’s here/now studies newsletter popped into my inbox – on the night of August 11. This was four days after Gandhi’s press conference releasing proof of electoral manipulation and four days before India celebrated its 79th independence day.
The newsletter tried to give me “seven optimistic thoughts about Indian democracy”. In a narrative journey that began at the barrels of ink from Mysuru Paints & Varnish that supply the indelible ink for India’s elections, Rega writes about the indelible nature of India’s democratic will. She writes about the fragility of power and more importantly, the anti-fragility of a country.
Coined by author and economic statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, anti-fragility speaks of the strength that comes from chaos and shock. Speaking of Indira Gandhi’s downfall and TN Seshan’s empowering of the election commission, Rega makes a case for how repeated attacks on our democracy have only strengthened our collective attachment to democratic integrity.
Her words, filled with confidence, gave me the courage to hope.
Shreya Raman
Community and Care in Neighbourhood Societies
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to lose a neighborhood. With redevelopment inching closer, everyone is adding ‘last’ to every community experience – the last Friendship Day, the last Women’s Day, the last birthday celebrated together. But, my area in Thane, is the place my mother found a community that supported her as she lives with a walking disability due to polio. Our neighbours see her as more than that; there’s a culture of caretaking. They accompany her when she goes out, joke with her, and always look out for her. There is a quiet intimacy in living within old, close-knit societies. It’s built on shared meals, borrowing and lending money in times of need, driving each other to the hospital in emergencies, and standing beside one another through the last rites of our aging parents.
If several people visit the same doctor, one will collect medicines for all. Children distribute sweets after passing their 10th exams, no matter the marks. The older the residents, the longer their ties to this place. And the more deeply their well-being feels shaken by the idea of their familiar world slipping away. Many fear they won’t find the same sense of community in the new buildings, people who will stand by in sickness and in health. At the same time, there is hope. A better-built home might mean my mother won’t have to be stuck inside during monsoons, or need someone to guide her across uneven tarred paths.
The society is nearly 35 years old, small, tucked away in the corner of the city, worn by time and softened with moss. But the fading had begun long before, when a few left for other cities in search of better chances or out of need. Maybe these slow goodbyes were gently preparing me for the one that’s arriving now.
Urvi Sawant
What movie, book, art, sight or sound inspired you this month? Mail us your postcards at contact@behanbox.com using the template below (or simply write to us). We’ll share your missives with our readers on social media.
Your monthly brain teaser about gender, care, and politics with no perfect answers.
Recently, at an event in Chennai, members of the queer community held a theatre festival as a tribute for a trans elder Dayamma. As they conducted plays, cabaret dances and mourning rituals, they invited audiences to witness and partake in this grief. We’ve been thinking about these tributes, and the act of remembering itself.
Is grieving the passing of a loved one a personal or a political act? Or both?
Write to us with your thoughts.
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