At one point during the one-and-a-half-hour-long documentary that is titled after a movie song Bollywood actor Aamir Khan featured in, an anguished American woman says, “If you don’t forgive, here’s what it feels like – you swallow poison and hope that it will kill the person you’re angry at. But aren’t you the one who drank that posion?” That, in a nutshell, is the message Rubaru Roshni wants to convey – not too succinctly – through three different stories placed in stock fashion, one after the other.
Rubaru Roshni (produced by Aamir Khan and directed by Svati Chakravarty Bhatkal) tells three stories through interviews with the people who are intimately connected with each story – one, the assassination of politician Lalit Maken; second, the murder of Sister Rani Maria Vattalil; and third, the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai.
The stories span geographies and demographics that seem to have nothing to do with each other: what does a Sikh man have to do with a nun in Kerala – or a Virginia mom, for instance? Where do Delhi and Punjab, and Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, and Virginia coalesce? How powerfully can a single, one-note theme – forgive an assailant/a murderer/a criminal to heal yourself – work for a long doc?
Pretty powerfully, as it appears.
Chapter I. The Orphan and the Convict
During the first chapter, you’re introduced to Kuki Gill and Avantika Maken – the latter the daughter of a man and a woman who had been assassinated when she was just 6 years old, the former the man convicted of assassinating them. You are told a story you’d read before, but never seen documented through the piecing together of the event from two contrasting points of view. Avantika talks about being “her daddy’s girl”, she tears up as she flips through dog-eared albums and shows, proudly, to yjr camera, a piece of jewellery that still has her mother’s blood on it. “As long as I’m alive, no one’s going to wash this,” she declares, her voice shaking with emotion.
Gill, who was one among a trio that carried out the murder of the Maken couple in 1985 – fuelled by rage over the anti-Sikh riots that they believed Maken to have played a part in – fled to the US after. There, he was detained by Interpol and jailed for years. He was eventually deported to India in 2000.
In 2004, the duo met and there, began the process of a long road to recovery, with Avantika telling the camera that her first question to him had been an anguished “Why?” Gill tells the reporter that he’d told her it wasn’t personal. One of the most heart-rending moments in the documentary is when Gill explains, looking rather amazed all the while, the murder of Mrs Maken. “She was never supposed to be killed. But she saw her husband fall after the bullets and she just sprang on top of him and hugged him with all her might. We tried to separate them, but couldn’t,” he says, almost in awe.
Eventually, Avantika forgives him and elaborates on the light she has managed to embrace, because of said forgiveness.
Chapter II. The Farmer and the Nun
The second chapter is a series of interviews with the family of Sister Rani Maria who was killed in 1995. Maria, who worked to eradicate the daily troubles of the landless poor in a small village in Madhya Pradesh, had initiated a number of moves that threw the moneylenders out of the equation. As a result, they arranged to have her killed – and Sister Maria was stabbed 54 times mercilessly. Even as her killer, Samundar Singh, was sentenced to life imprisonment, her sister Selmi struggled to follow the tenets of her church and forgive him.
Singh was documented in several news reports to have “repented” and “expressed remorse” – and in 2002, Selmi visited her sister’s murderer and tied a ‘Rakhi’ to his wrist.
A raw human moment is documented for the cameras when Sister Selmi says she told her colleagues that she would take her time going to visit Singh. “I wasn’t ready for forgiveness yet,” she mumbles honestly. “I need to prepare myself to get there.”
Chapter III. Terror and the Mom
Kia Scherr holds the strings of the third chapter of Svati Chakravarty Bhatkal’s documentary, almost single-handedly. She narrates the story of a single night (26 November 2008) and the hundreds of nights after that were tinged by pain, pathos and loss. Kia’s husband and 13-year-old daughter were killed in the barrage of gunfire that terrorists let out on the evening of 26/11 at the Oberoi Hotel. The duo were eating a meal at the time, and had hid under their table to escape the onslaught – but to no avail.
Kia weeps inconsolably through her retelling of the night, and remembers the phone call that changed her life. “I had thought Alan might succumb to the injuries because I’d been told they were serious, but Naomi – they told me – had been well-hidden. When the woman from the Embassy told me they had passed away, I remember repeating stupidly, ‘And Naomi? Naomi too? They’re both dead?’ What could she have said!”
Kia charts the rest of the story for Bhatkal in her years after, when she returned to Mumbai year after year to hold seminars and workshops on peace and forgiveness. As her taxi cruises along a red-streaked Mumbai skyline, a teary-eyed, smiling Kia pronounces: “I feel like Alan and Naomi are both present and absent in this city. I feel like I must come back every year.”
What stands out about Rubaru Roshni is its depiction of raw emotional vulnerabilities – a theme that’s bound to touch a nerve, almost universally. It largely makes you overlook the patchy production at certain points of the docu, as also the Hindi dubbing on Star that was mostly out of sync.
It’s still worth a watch, and a 110 minutes of good television.
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