Under The Shade of Gulmohar
Home: A Place to Start From, A Place to Return
*SPOILERS AHEAD for the film Gulmohar*
Long ago, I remember driving through the curvy uphill of Pushkar with my mama (uncle). He works in construction, building houses for people. Pragmatic as per the standards of early youth, I asked him: “why do people spend so much time and money in building houses?” I had grown seeing people dedicate their entire lives to building a house of their own. It’s almost as if to have a house of one’s own is what they live for. Films and songs, too, have often glorified this. But I never understood the appeal of it. Why can’t you just rent a place? Or get a flat?
My mama, the architect behind hundreds of places which people call their home, glanced at me with eyes that carried a sage’s calming wisdom. Before he began working in house construction, he had his own long-standing tryst with homes. Mama never had a single place to call his home. He lost his childhood home where the entire extended family lived, in a dispute. They moved from one rented house to another, till the time mama could finally stand on his own two feet and build a home of his own. Over the years, I have lived in three different houses. Yet, it is my mama’s/naani’s house that I call home.
Image Source: Hotstar
Gulmohar (2023) is perhaps one of the most delicate portrayal of home and belongingness. It captures the complexities of attachment and relationships that continuously make and break in the larger system of what can be called a home.
The idea of home, more like questions about belonging to a place called home, have stayed with me for as long as I can remember. I was born in a place of which I have very faint memories of. I grew up as a toddler in another, which bares witness to the purity of my childhood. The closest I felt to having a home. My teenage years were spent in another place, which is where I have been living since. And yet, it is naani’s/mama’s house that I still consider my home. The great naani baadi as we call it. For long it has been glorified as a refuge, an abode for those who left their homes. A place of return. For daughters and for their children. To me it also marks the return to the primordial feminine, the anima in us.
I saw the film through the eyes of Arun and I have to admit it was Bajpayee’s acting which truly made me feel for the character. To the extent where I could see parts of my own life struggles in him. A pure moment of catharsis straight from Aristotle’s Poetics. From the very beginning, Arun gives us a glimpse of the anxiety of losing one’s home. The news of his mother selling their family home and his son deciding to live separately is a burden far too heavy for him. After all, he only wants his family to stay together, to live together in Gulmohar villa.
Home is never a physical space. That is a house. A chaar-diwari (four walls) as we say. Home is ghar. House is makaan. Gulmohar precisely helped me visualise such thoughts.
घर बनते नहीं, बसाए जाते हैं
You don’t build a home, you settle in one
And that is all Arun wants. The new penthouse in Gurugram, no matter how luxurious it might be, will still be another house. A place to return from office. But Gulmohar villa, his home, was a place to return to oneself. Return to the center of your safety. Because where else will you go when the outside world leaves you confused with no place. We see this idea of return take the limelight as the film progresses. Aditya and Amrita are two other characters who struggle in the outside world. While Aditya is trying to create a place of his own, separate from his family, Amrita is navigating the paths of her sexuality.
The challenge to find a place, to stand still, and be yourself in the outside world is rather a difficult one. For Aditya it is not just living alone and making a home of his own, it is also a matter of creating an identity of his own, on his own. Similarly for Amrita, embracing her identity in terms of her sexuality becomes as important as coming to terms with it.
For most part of the film, they’re running. Running around, running away. Doesn’t that feel familiar? Don’t we often find ourselves running quite often in this outside world? The constant pull-and-push, the effort to hold tight, finding your ground. The constant state of making your way through the ever changing complexities of daily life. So tiring. And yet we run. But where do go when we can’t run anymore? Where do we go when we can’t escape from life anymore?
Home. Ghar. A place where not just you, but all your anxieties settle down.
And that is what Gulmohar villa did for these characters.
“Home is not where you were born. Home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”
— Naguib Mahfouz
Home is not a place where one is born, and for Arun’s character, it is quite literal. We discover that Arun was adopted into the Batra family, and yet he found his place here. The question about his birth parents trouble him for the longest. Of another life he could have had. Of another home, of another family. Moreover I see that grief, and that pain, as he tries to reconcile with the fact that he was left. That he was discarded. One can only imagine the agony Arun felt when he realised that his father did not leave behind his home for him. Hearing the word adopted in his father’s will conjured all his deeper anxieties of being an outsider in this family.
The outside world with all its absurdities makes it easy for us to feel like an outsider, a stranger. We spend our entire lives making persistent efforts to make our place in this world. College, office, work, communities, people, places, we try to make our place, time and time again. Because after all, deep down, our greatest anxiety is not knowing our place in this big wide world. The moment when Arun reads his father’s will that referred to him as their adopted child, snatched away that place from him. Home is the place made for us. If this isn’t his home, where does he belong?
What is a home then? What did it mean for Arun? For Aditya? For Amrita? For my mama? For me? A place to call one’s own. Is that all?
Home is a reminder that there is still a place for you in this world. The world outside is too big and it’s not difficult to lose yourself trying to make it through. But no matter where you are or where you go, you will always have a place to return to. Return to yourself.
For the majority of my life I have struggled to find a place I could call home. My naani’s house comes closest to it, which also happens to be in my hometown. I hardly get to visit it. Maybe once every two year or so. But the minute I pass through the main door of that house, I know I am home. It's the place I left from. It’s the place I return to. There is a sudden ease in my body. I find myself more expressive. It’s the place I spent countless summers with my whole family. Where the only thing I cared for was being myself.
In the most cramped up, filth ridden, chaotic lanes of my city, where it’s difficult to even find space on the footpath to walk, one can find gulmohar flowers adorning the roads. The blossoming of gulmohar signifies the coming of new year, new beginnings. Gulmohar provides us shade, something that is much needed after the first rains of April. Personally, it’s the name gulmohar, that shines through for me. Gulmohar, gul mohar, the stamp of a flower. Flowers that bloom, regardless of everything.
Every time I pass by a gulmohar, I stop instinctually as someone passing by a temple. I look and see this huge tree with flaming red flowers. I want to stop here. I want to pause here. I want to stay here for a while. We often say that life is a journey where we are constantly moving, striving, falling, failing, flying, dropping. But under the shade of gulmohar, I want to stop. Remember, home is a place where all our attempts to escape cease. The naming of this home as Gulmohar villa couldn’t be more apt. The end of Gulmohar villa marked the beginning of a new chapter in each character’s life. A renewal.
Home is where the search for one’s place in this world ends. Home is where you can be you and only you. A place where people will love you just for that. A place to call one’s own. A place to be.
जिएँ तो अपने बग़ीचे में गुलमोहर के तले,
मरें तो ग़ैर की गलियों में गुलमोहर के लिए।
To live in your garden underneath the gulmohar
And to die in the stranger’s lanes for that gulmohar
— दुष्यंत कुमार/Dushyant Kumar
When Life Gives You Melon
Choose Water Over Choly 🍉
Aakash xx