Homebound

What’s in a name? Everything, suggests Homebound, if you live in India. “When you’re in uniform, no one reads the badge,” Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) tells Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) in Hindi. The English subtitle, a little over-eager, provides the subtext, rendering this as: “Your faith and caste no longer matter.” But, of course, they do, and names are the first battlement to be protected and attacked. Inquiring about the results of his police recruitment exam, Chandan offers only his first name when asked, and his surname as the caste-neutral Kumar when pressed. His slight hesitancy is enough to tip off the clerk he’s talking to, who immediately switches from offering sympathy to mocking the boy about reservations.

In Neeraj Ghaywan’s new film Homebound, Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter play Chandan Kumar and Mohammed Shoaib Ali, respectively, two best friends whose identities bolster their interpersonal dynamics as much as they make them precarious in their relationship to the rest of the country. Shoaib comes from a Muslim family in India’s Hindi heartland; his father is a farmer in his last legs, quite literally. His knees are done, and he is unable to tend to his field. Chandan belongs to a working-class Dalit family; his parents are laborers, and his sister, not the chosen one for education, cleans after the children in a local government school. These factors that make up the length and breadth of India’s fault lines don’t come between Chandan and Shoaib or their families. Still, two decades into the first century and almost seventy years after independence, they determine everything from the quality of daily life to their future.

The film opens with two young men, Chandan and Shoaib, making their way into the centre of a heaving crowd, creating space for themselves. The location is a train station, from where they hope to be borne away, yearning for the ‘ijjat’, and ‘paisa’ which will allow them the dignity they have clearly been deprived of all their lives.

In May 2020, the newspaper image of a wiry Saiyub holding an unconscious Amrit in his lap on a scorched highway in Madhya Pradesh came across as an antidote to the raging virus. Fate has its own destiny. It was not just a melancholic picture of abiding friendship, Saiyub took Amrit home when a section of the media was projecting Muslims as super spreaders. Journalist Basharat Peer tracked the story of two friends to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh for The New York Times.

Hope is the star-crossed protagonist of “Homebound”, a film that retraces the margins of Indian living as the layout of a ‘Snakes and Ladders’ board game. The pattern is unforgiving. Every time there is progress, it is inevitably punctured by a cruel twist of fate; every small leap is laced with the threat of a steep fall. An office peon impresses the bosses and gets promoted to salesman against the odds, but the feel-goodness is short-lived. A young factory worker sends money back home to fund a concrete roof, but his underdog-ness is transient. A bitter spat is followed by a life-affirming reunion, but the joy is brief. This constant snuffing out of hope reflects the skewed social structure of a country where everything — including emotions — are hierarchical. There is no respite; indignity has a pecking order.

There’s a long stretch, or one that feels long, in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, where the leading men, Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), aren’t talking to each other. They’ve fought; one hit the other over a competitive exam result where millions appeared for a thousand odd vacancies. Shoaib is Muslim, Chandan is Dalit, both from the working class with zero privileges. And once the men reunite, it is as if sunshine returns to the film. That is the power of screen friendships, I guess. Thanks to my newfound obsession with Sholay, I could not help drawing an unlikely parallel: this duo is the Jai–Veeru of our times.

In a north Indian state, best friends Chandan Kumar (Vishal Jethwa) and Mohammed Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) see the police uniform as their only escape and a shield against the caste and religion-based bigotry they face frequently. To them, the uniform symbolizes respect, access, and a rightful place at the table. Though painfully aware of the ingrained societal hierarchy, it’s their youthful zest for life, hope for a better tomorrow, and unbreakable bond that keep them going. Their persistence and optimism are tested time and again, but things reach a breaking point when a nationwide lockdown due to Covid-19 separates them from their families and the place they call home.