I have gotten into horror, more specifically, queer horror, recently. It is an innovative genre – but that is not what I intend to write about.
A couple of days ago in what can only be called a fit of impulsivity, I went to watch this Australian indie horror film called Leviticus. The film is advertised with a simple premise: “Two teenage boys are forced to go on the run to escape a supernatural entity, which can impersonate the person they love the most – each other.”
I read the description and was immediately hooked, because, of course, who doesn’t love watching teenagers being tormented by supernatural entities taking the form of their first love. The film is a masterpiece – it is crisp, the dialogue is sparse but sharp, the cinematography is brooding and ominous in a way that only makes the film that much more horrifying. And that is not even touching on the centrality of Christian hate and conversion therapy that the film is actually about – of the evangelical need for fear, of how otherization is normalized, and how the inconvenient are left to die.
The film is a devastating piece of queer media, more so because it is extremely tender, kind and caring to those who are forgotten and othered. But that is also not what I want to talk about.
The movie theatre is a 25-minute walk from my home in Kingston, in Ontario, Canada. The walk that I like to take is on quiet residential streets – tree-lined, silent, and interspersed with faint lights from kitchen windows, rustling leaves, and a darkness that is only possible when a city does not install too many street lamps.
I did not notice it at first, but I felt the tears before it actually occurred to me what exactly was happening. In a moment of sheer weakness, I was crying on a street, next to a quiet park. Nobody is out at this hour of night, no cars, no people, no eyes – just me, waterworks on full, and howling at the moon like it could fix something even I could not identify. And I felt raw for hours after.
What was it about this damned film that broke me so completely – I am not Australian, I am not Christian, I am not from a Hicksville town in the middle of nowhere; I am as queer and proud as I can be – there is nothing in my demographic dividend that should have caused this, and yet several days later it is still stuck in my head. If I think too long I can see Mia Wasikowska’s face as she says “We need fear” over and over again in Leviticus.
And then it hit me. It was not about the film. It was about me.
When I got the offer to come to Queen’s University in Kingston, I remember feeling thrilled about it. Not simply because this was a massive academic opportunity (I am not so wedded to my academics as people might think), but more so because it was the culmination of something that had long been at the back of my mind. That was the need to leave Kolkata, my birth city.
I love Kolkata from the bottom of my heart. The city has been privy to so much good that has happened to my life, and things that I had come to be at peace with. But there was also so much about it that has changed me irrevocably, in ways that I never asked for. When the offer came, I was sad to leave the people I had grown to love behind, but I was not sad to leave the city. I thought that the 26-hour flight to Canada would be a brand new start; that it would be like taking a dip in the Lethe, washing away all that bound me to the past, so that I could begin again. For a while it really did feel like that is what it might be – I did feel like I was a new person, changed and renewed for the better, new friends, new lifestyles, new wants, needs, desires. Hell, I completely redesigned the work I was doing because of what this new life inspired me to think with.
Yet, 11 months later, after being haunted by Leviticus, I realized something I should have realized much earlier. Every cut from the film that I replay in my head is mixed in with images from my memory – figures keep overlapping, stories seem to merge, places become indiscrete receptacles for things that I cannot actually locate.
I am haunted by the memory of my schooling in Kolkata, but in order to ‘see’ it, I have to first visualize the barren church where the teenage boys Ryan and Naim were cursed the first time. I am troubled by the memories of my childhood, but they can only make sense when I think of the pastor in the film. I am haunted by the memories of what I was told on the streets of Kolkata, and I can only remember them when I remember the closing scene in the film where the teenage boys leave, and the entity stares at them from the grass as if reminding them that they can never be free.
I am haunted by the film, and it torments me the way it does, not simply because it is good, but because I can no longer tell what the film was and what was mine any longer. The memory of my life in Kolkata, the parts that I had happily boxed and stuffed under my bed because they would bring nothing but trouble are the very ghosts that now refuse to leave me. No amount of running, no transcontinental travel, no seven dollar iced teas made with premix are going to fix the hole that exists in my heart of a city that I hoped would love me the way I had chosen to love it.
So much of this also rears its head as I prepare to return; as I try to figure out which boxes need to contain which parts of my life to neatly file away; as I try to work through what it means to return to the place that I wanted all my life to run away from, and wanted all my life to welcome me with the warmth and love that it is supposed to be made of.
No amount of escape has offered me the respite I needed from the memories I am made of, even if I choose, willingly, to never again see those memories. No amount of happiness that I found in this shoebox of a room in a city of seven streets and four cafes has been able to permanently overwrite the past 24 years of my life, and maybe that is the saddest part.
I cannot go home, because to go home is to be confronted by the enormity of everything I chose to leave behind. And I cannot stay, because denying my past has only brought me to the point where I am now a person that cries in an empty park.
Leviticus was a damned trigger, and the floodgates that it opened do not give me answers – only questions, questions and more questions. Maybe that is the true power of queer media.
About the main photo: A view of Kingston. Photo credit: Mihir Seth
Very often than not, we are trapped into staying and going away, on what to forget and what to hold on to … its hurts, but that makes us human.