Maya had finished watching Aamis, an Assamese film released in 2019. Over shared curiosity and feasting on exotic meat delicacies, an older, married female paediatrician forms a candid and emotional bond with a younger male PhD student. Moral societal constraints inhibit both from ‘crossing the line’. To get physical, the man prepares a dish with his own flesh and feeds the woman, who after the initial shock, enjoys it and demands more. To satiate her hunger, he kills a man but is caught and both end up in police custody. The last scene of the film shows them standing close to each other in the police station. The woman inches her fingers towards the man’s, their hands entangle, finally establishing a physical contact between the two.
Maya pondered over the how the film depicted food as a conduit for desire. The suppression of the desire to be physically intimate by the film characters found its way in the preparation of different dishes (it also resulted in the killing of a man, which is a separate matter). The transgression was in the form of preparing, sharing and consuming food. The scenes depicting the preparation of the exotic dishes and its consumption by the characters were powerfully stimulating. The way their hands, fingers, and eyes moved over the food items, the culinary paraphernalia shown during the preparation of the dishes, and the way the camera panned onto the characters’ lips and mouths as they chewed, swallowed, and shut their eyes in sheer pleasure of the taste was nothing short of erotic.
Food can also be equated metaphorically with desire. Just as some desires are seen legitimate and others are not, some food choices too are seen as admissible while others are perceived as wild and uncivilized. There is a scene in Aamis where the woman’s husband and his friends pass unsavoury remarks about the food habits of certain sections of the population. The PhD student, who is perusing the culinary practices of the people of North-East India, asserts that food which is taboo in one community may be well received in another. Food can be as divisive as desire. Certain foods are celebrated while others are downright stigmatized, and people who indulge in these foods can be ostracized and even killed, as evidenced by the hounding of beef sellers by the Hindutva vigilantes. Earlier, Hindu widows were not permitted to eat non-vegetarian food like egg, fish, and meat, and the centuries of conditioning still acts as an inhibiting factor for many of them.
Similarly, desire within the sacrosanct domain of heterosexual marriage is celebrated but beyond it is punished. Even within heterosexual marriage, if the woman expresses a desire for foreplay and sex, she is mocked and tainted by her husband as shown in the film Mrs. (2023), never mind what Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra discusses extensively about female pleasure and autonomy in relationships. And homosexuality is considered a ‘western import’, while our own Konark and Khajuraho temples are replete with depictions of same-sex desires.
Transgression of boundaries in Aamis sets the protagonists as well as the audience on a path of realization that nothing is off limits. What can be eaten, what cannot be eaten, who can be desired, and who cannot be desired are just some of the questions that the film explores. The appetite of humans for food and desire cannot be contained. The garb of respectability within the confines of morality leads to suppression of desires. The intimacy that the protagonists craved between themselves was never expressed in words or actions. Instead, their forbidden desires found a release in food. Even the boundaries of what can be eaten are surpassed when they start feeding their own flesh to each other. It may appear macabre to many, but the desire to consume and be consumed exists, aptly described by the phrase ‘consumed by love’. When the so-called illicitness of the desire between them, which they had tried to mask all along, comes out in the open, it liberates them from the constrictions of morality. They acknowledge their physical attraction for each other and act upon it for the first time ever by holding hands.
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Prompted by these thoughts, Maya called Kabir and joked that they must do it lest their suppressed desires express themselves in such sinister manner as had transpired in the film. She had been filled with dread since she had acknowledged her feelings for this benevolent and gorgeous man. She was frightened by the intensity of her feelings for him, though they had only recently started communicating. He was intelligent, passionate, and funny. They talked about anything and everything. All the while she was aware that he was already in a serious and committed relationship. Morality constrained her from pursuing him, but her emotions defied any logic.
As Maya traced the contours of Kabir’s face with her delicate fingers, she searched for his eyes. Her eyes found his and his eyes were somewhere else. She knew that faraway look, a look of detachment. It filled her with profound sadness, but she also realized that it liberated her from the attachment that she had built with him. In that moment she felt free. The days of trepidation and guilt were behind her. She smiled. He was not as emotionally invested in her as much as she was and that unbound her from her obsessive dependency on him. His eyes were a testament to the different things that they wanted from the relationship. She had put up physical boundaries and he had set emotional ones. The hesitation that kept pulling her b ack left her. She would always love him deeply and uncoupling the threads of desire that had wrapped around her would take time. The desire would never leave her. But the desire would no longer require him either. She would no longer be living in the fantasy that they would become emotionally involved.
Maya was glad that she met Kabir to ‘sin’. Emotionally, she was already sinning by romancing a man who was already in a committed relationship. In the act of sinning, she found the truth and the truth set her free. Trespassing her moral boundaries by romancing the ‘taken’ man, she acknowledged her desire for him. The realization that he was passionate about her in a dispassionate way brought her fantasy in direct confrontation with the reality. But she did not look away from the truth. She looked at it squarely in the eyes, and it emancipated her.
She would always desire Kabir, but she did not require any reciprocity from him anymore. As she stepped into the rain, she let the raindrops soak her to the bone and danced with joy in her new found freedom.
Your words beautifully juxtapose emotions that the mind often tries to suppress. I’m curious, where do you draw your inspiration from?
Human stories carry much more intrigue than what can be conjured in fantasies. “Truth is stranger than fiction ” is so true.