By Pranav Joshi

If, one fine day, O. Henry was asked what early 20th Century New York meant to him, his answer would vary with the stories and characters he would write about the following evening. Among many other tales, the city could be a working-class immigrant’s volatile dreamscape, a borough about which he inexplicably has frequent nightmares. The language he shares with its inhabitants eerily remind him of a home and a woman he has left behind for a better chance at life. Every day that man would unknowingly cross paths with youthful laughter and amorous whispers, masking their obscured yearnings with the zany discovery of hushed rendezvous. The sounds emanate from a young couple longing to carve out a few minutes they could wholeheartedly own and simply cast away, for a while, everything which weighs them down. They are seen every evening at the waterfront or on a small bench opposite a café around the corner, unfailingly rekindling mutual warmth through a silent embrace or a passionate gaze. Their whimsical silhouettes, jittery in the dusk, melt the pensive heart of the anonymous observer. And that man too, would secretly accept it as one among many affairs the city hides under its daily clamour.

Mumbai in 2017 is no different, apart from hordes of people jostling for space on sidewalks during rush hour while near-endless rows of cars irately honk in stasis. Hardik Mehta’s short film The Affair brings a respite from the chaos by turning its gaze to the romantic trysts which blossom along the city’s coast. These places, often crudely termed as “Love nests”, are havens of a more intimate kind, betraying subtle plea for anonymity and social freedom. Mehta humanizes their importance as places ordinary Mumbaikars flock to because they often have little choice. A tired officegoer, essayed by Amit Sial, finally makes it to a date at Marine Drive after a long, hectic day. His lover, played by Khushboo Upadhyay patiently watches the sunset, even as she sees her longing reflected in the plight of countless others around her, sharing a similar journey. Khushboo Upadhyay lends credible face to the interminable wait, where each moment feels stretched until the loved one appears, almost like he materialized out of thin air.

Shot largely in mid and full close ups by lensman Piyush Puty, Mehta profoundly captures the impassioned glow on the faces of the lovers, even as they hardly exchange dialogue. Their wordless gestures, full of tight embraces and tender kisses, betray a strange sense of relief – a feeling of finally snapping their tether to a reality which will not take their union too kindly. Are they long lost lovers, at last overcoming fate to spend precious time together? Or is the man having an affair in retaliation to his constrained existence in a city stretched to its limits?

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The narrative traces the daily grind of Sial’s character after his tryst ends abruptly – owing to constant interventions by work related calls and a jilted lover’s impatience. The left collar of his crisp shirt still carries red lipstick stains as he makes his way home – a brazen residue of a fantasy which might elude him once again. His small flat, almost an indistinguishable cubicle among countless others, is shared by an extended family. Burdened with the fuss of relatives and a taxing work ethic, he scarcely finds time for his children, let alone himself. Mehta shows ample skill in eschewing exposition on part of his protagonist’s life. The sights and sounds of a starkly overcrowded house convey more than excessive dialogue, while the quotidian aspects of metropolitan existence never overshadow the lead characters’ individualism.

Relishing the moral ambiguity his premise creates, the director hangs on to the infidelity motif only to challenge our own notions – tacit, like the compromises lovers make as they reluctantly navigate through the maze of their personal lives. Mocking our presumptions, the film soon pulls a leaf straight out of O. Henry’s accomplished anti-climactic repertoire. Expectations from the narrative are craftily manipulated and then thwarted as gleefully, revealing in the process, a bittersweet truth – one around which entire lives are built in the hope of accommodating hazy moments whose incandescence is barely enough to counter daily struggles.

Battles with rigid convention, hefty responsibilities or just a chronic lack of space are broadly claimed to be the reasons compelling young men and women to appropriate smoothened boulders near seas or forlorn benches in parks as the foundations of their blossoming love stories. The Affair takes us beyond all the strait-laced debates on personal freedom and privacy, to a surreal realm encapsulated in our own mundane proceedings, where the only deterrent to intense affection is a lack of empathy.