Lifting the veil of violence

She explores the questions with Parindey,in which the stories of several abused inmates weave themselves into a fictional account scripted by Kapur’s theatre colleague Smita Bharti. “The main character in Parindey is Anupa Khurana,an upper-crust woman who is in prison for stabbing her husband to death in the jacuzzi of their bathroom. Her closest friend is a jailor,a caustic,tough-talking woman who has been trained to overpower and subdue the most dangerous prisoners yet is helpless against her abusive husband. Inside the house,she dons the traditional mantle of a submissive wife accepting her fate in a nightmarish marriage,” says Kapur.

All through her14 years in jail,Khurana has never talked about why she committed the murder,not even to the judges. And then,three months before she is to be released,she gets a visitor from Canada—her daughter,now an adult,who must know the truth if she is ever to exorcise the demons of the past. “The daughter lends a different edge to the film as a woman who has grown up to hate marriage because of her mother who had killed her father,” says Kapur.

The film embellishes the stories with poetry,music and biting dialogues. Kapur’s protagonist is presented as a poet whose lines on freedom make up the theme song. At other times,Khurana is more sarcastic: “Why don’t you kill your husband,too?” she says to the jailor. “That way,you’ll be free after 14 years.” In another sequence,she describes her life behind bars as “freedom,” unknowingly quoting from another film on domestic violence—Jag Mundhra’s Provoked with its tag line “In prison she found freedom”.

A small budget meant Kapur could make only a 55-minute film,not a feature. Instead,she roped in Bharti to play the lead and selected the rest of the cast from the Delhi stage. Bakul Dua enacts the daughter’s role while veteran Padma Damodaran plays the caustic jailor. Bharti also wrote Khurana’s poems and Jitendra Singh Jamwal set these to music.

Kapur gained special permission to shoot at Tihar jail for five days,and the film features a cameo by a eunuch prisoner. “Though the real-life Anupa never wanted to appear on camera,several other inmates were very keen. We have even captured an Afro-bhangra scene by Nigerian women and children,” says Kapur,who brought her directorial skills into the filming. She is ready with her next script— about dowry—and sets it in a haveli in Chandni Chowk.

She plans to screen Parindey at film festivals but the audience that,she insists,must watch the film is Delhi’s wealthy elite. “More than any other metro in India,Delhi’s social circuit is where a woman is identified only through her father,brother,husband or son. I know of so many women who put up with domestic violence simply because they don’t want to lose their social identity.” As Khurana would ask,“Why?”