Postcards: From Marathi Cinema To A Vigil For Palestine
This month in Postcards: a strangers’ choir, Jyoti Dogra’s transcendent theatre, losing and finding Ghalib, and more
Dear reader, we write to you about the people, places, and ideas that brought team BehanBox joy this month. One postcard, every month.
Weaving Gajras And Intimacies
My friend’s hair ran between my fingers and caught on my nails as I looped the gajra around her bun. We laughed while she took pictures of us in the mirror, our fingers grazing. Next to us, a picture of Babasaheb smiled at us.
Over the past few years, I have taken great pleasure in bringing flowers for my friends. I love the way their faces light up as they bury their noses in the soft petals, inhaling deeply and letting out all tension with a long sigh.
I also find myself watching them in awe as they admire themselves in the mirror, adorning their heads and arms with bracelets of flowers. There is something very powerful about a womxn making their hair with authority, choosing the way the world perceives them, and choosing to be unapologetically unpalatable.
Most of all, living in often unfamiliar and unforgiving cities, we claim and create our own sense of belonging. On days when I feel alienated by the fast traffic and big flyovers, I have often made my way to the small flower shop near my house to buy two strings of garjas; one for me, one for a friend. As someone who is always late, I have even caught myself leaving 10 minutes early to do this!
In a society that surveils bodies, love, and existence, the queer intimacy of gathering flowers and placing them in a lover’s hair is loud, familiar, and comfortable. I have even begun to like the sight of my hands weaving flowers into my own hair.
Anjali
Finding My Ghalib, Two Decades On
There must be a German word for the inexplicable joy of finding something you once thought was lost. In the summer of 2005, Mirza Ghalib by Gulzar was released — a book I read countless times, until I could rattle off its verses effortlessly. Based on the iconic 1988 television series written and directed by Gulzar, the book is part poetry, part history, part biography — a masterclass in historical retelling.
Back then, everyone I loved received a copy as a gift. Those dearest to me were given signed editions, autographed by the great man himself.
Somewhere between moving homes and continents, I lost my own copy. The book soon went out of print. Eventually, I made peace with its absence. Then, two decades later, while rummaging through the guest room at my parents’ house, I felt a flicker of recognition. There it was — that once-familiar green jacket. An old man in a fez cap half-smiled back at me.
I had found my Mirza Ghalib.
I opened the book gently, reverently, as if handling a fragile artifact. The pages had turned sepia with time. My eyes scanned the English text; my mind processed it in Urdu. And in my imagination, scenes from the teleserial played vividly — layered with the voices and visages of Ghalib, Gulzar, and Naseeruddin Shah.
When these three come together, the result is nothing short of genius. Who but Gulzar could describe the narrow lanes of Ballimaran as “pechīda dalīloñ kī sī galiyāñ”—”as complicated as a litigant’s argument”? And who but Naseeruddin Shah could portray Ghalib’s irreverent wit and aching melancholy with such nuance?
As for Ghalib himself:
“Hain aur bhi duniya mein sukhanwar bahut achchhe
Kehte hain ki ‘Ghalib’ ka hai andaaz-e-bayaan aur.”
[There are many fine poets in the world; but Ghalib’s style of expression is truly unique.]
Bhanupriya Rao
Reaching For the Peak
Decades of playing around with words don’t make it any easier for me to describe Jyoti Dogra’s theatre. It is rarely one thing or another. Just when you settle in for a good belly laugh, her work turns achingly dark. And when you feel that all humanity is doomed, a bright spark lights up the stage. Sometimes it is metaphysical and other times, a straight dive into the tedium of the everyday.
There was Notes On Chai, a wonderful take on the very mundane and everyday, framed very unusually with Tibetan throat singing; Black Hole, an incredibly subtle take on the infinite threads that join our lives and deaths to the stars, and Maas, of course, an utterly brilliant take on body shaming.
So far, her works have been monologues, but Jyoti is now touring her first ensemble work, ‘Mezok’. Again, it is hard to pin down what it is easily. Mezok is a glorious snow peaked mountain, the place we all want to get to, a metaphor for our dreams and desires. But the climb up is never easy, for there is the question of survival, of migration, separation and alienation and the endless tussles with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that decides our identity.
At the centre of the play is a table which is an office window, a mountain, a sun-dappled roof in the hills, and perhaps the urban condo where a migrant worker struggles to find humanity. Jyoti does not trouble with a linear storyline or pat explanations of what is going on but anyone who has dreamt of reaching their own Mezok, and that is all of us, will love this very moving play.
Malini Nair
Strangers Making Harmony
I’m a famously bad singer, always off-key, always breathy, I’ve conceded the mic at karaoke bars lest the public would turn on me. So consider it revenge, delusion, or madness to wake up on a Sunday to go sing with a group of strangers.
I had learned of this Strangers’ Choir courtesy algorithm. A friend’s friend shared a story of a third friend attending this strange gathering of people vocalising together, swaying their shoulders, their eyes closed. They looked at peace, a bit awkward, but at peace. I rushed to book tickets when I heard the choir is coming back to Delhi.
To make harmony, the organiser Medha Sahi says at one point, is to make one note shine on top of the other. Her hands — first the stretch of her palms, then a quick flurry of her fingers, then curled into a tight fist — played with our vocal chords, a melody soon became a language. I am a stranger to the alchemy of low-mid-high notes, voices, tones, rounds, staggered openings, crescendos, but for three hours it didn’t matter. Voices clash and clang, but it doesn’t feel like conflict. When in doubt, sing louder, Medha said, louder and louder.
There were 120 minutes of feeling conscious, warm, and playful. I met someone who picked up drums recently, theirs is a singing family, she proudly said. Another woman was shifting but made it a point to attend the choir. Also overheard: conversations about maintaining curly hair routines; about singing, whether one is a newcomer or a veteran to this group. And spotted people with the whimsiest tattoos; people with their children and friends; people by themselves. People who wanted to bask in the nourishing feeling of creating something together.
And for three hours on that autumn morning, I too was one of those people who had agreed to come together to sing ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, even if badly. More than once I faltered but when one voice falls, others catch you, and you appreciate that kindness.
Saumya Kalia
Candles, Moral Arc And Rainbows
In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. On a Tuesday afternoon, that became our beacon of hope. It was October 7, two years since Israel had escalated its violence against Palestinians, and my friends and I were getting ready to attend a candlelight vigil.
We had spent the afternoon painting watermelon-shaped candle holders and making a poster with King’s quote written across. A rainbow arched across the sky as we made our way to the protest site. It felt like a sign, a quiet assurance that justice, no matter how distant, is still on its way.
Within five minutes of reaching the venue, we were detained. Police officers, men and women, outnumbering us by far pushed us into three buses and whisked us to a remote police station on the side of the highway, 12km away. It was absurd, this massive show of state power against a handful of people holding candles. You could feel their unease – not with us, but with what we represented.
At the station, we sang songs of solidarity and kept lighting our candles. Each time, the police would rush to snatch them away. We’d light them again. It became a small, glowing act of defiance. In those flickers of flame, constantly extinguished and revived, I understood what courage really looks like – not loud or dramatic, but stubbornly steady.
That night, I felt more hopeful than I had in months. Because if a candle can make the powerful tremble, then surely, the arc is bending and all we have to do for it to keep bending is to show up.
Shreya Raman
Coming Home To Marathi
It’s been a good time for Marathi storytelling as this year comes to an end. A warm, grounding time. For me, it started with watching Sabar Bonda in theatres, a small, tender film about queerness and grief. But more than anything, it gave me something I didn’t know I’d been looking for: queerness in Marathi. A language I grew up hearing and speaking but somehow never gave myself permission to feel in.
Then there was Dashavtar. A magical and important film that weaves through the Konkan coast, showing what the impact of mining and “development” projects really looks like. All of this is centred around Dashavtar performances, a folk art performed by marginalised communities in Konkan.
Shivaji Maharaj in Bhimnagar Mohalla is also back on stage, and feels more relevant than ever. Written by Shahir Sambhaji Bhagat, the play questions how history is taught in schools, how reservation is understood, and how Shivaji lives on, not in textbooks or statues, but in protest marches, in people’s memories, in dissent. Watching all this, surrounded by people who speak the same language and share the same values, felt healing.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about language and how I distanced myself from Marathi – I thought it couldn’t hold the parts of me that didn’t fit the mold. But maybe I never really gave it a chance. I recently bought two books in Marathi. My partner once said: “Learning Marathi is like learning to walk.” I think I’ve finally placed my one foot on the ground.
Urvi Sawant
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