"I loved my friend. / He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say. / The poem ends,
Soft as it began,— / I loved my friend."

Langston Hughes, from ‘The Weary Blues’ (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926)

2020 was a strange year for me. Of course, there was the pandemic. But even before the world came to a standstill, I spent the early days and weeks of 2020 in a haze of heartbreak. I loved a friend, and she loved someone else. When I met her near the end of winter that year, we were both still in our early twenties. The anti-CAA-NRC protests were still raging across India, and she was visiting Kolkata one last time to collect her degree certificate from NIFT. We had dinner in Park Street, and desserts at the Patisserie on Russell Street. As our time neared its end, we stood hand in hand watching the protestors perform a street play in the Park Circus Maidan. A few weeks later, the pandemic would spread and all this would be gone. I’d only see her one more time, two years later in Jaipur, but it would never be the same again. We’d eventually drift apart and fall out of touch the year after. But I didn’t know that yet, and wouldn’t know that until much later. That night, surrounded by so many people who had come together for a shared cause that they — we — believed in, standing next to her, I felt something not unlike happiness even though I knew in many ways that she had come to say goodbye.

As I watched the brother-sister directorial duo Tanmay and Tanvi Chowdhary’s short film ‘Madhu’ (Honey), I was reminded of that night near the end of winter in 2020. Inspired by a Ferris wheel ride the siblings took one night during Durga Pujo — the biggest festival of Bengalis in Kolkata and elsewhere — the film was written, cast, and filmed within three days during the festival. Shot with a shaky, handheld camera with tight, longer focal lengths, and complete with original music by Rohan Prasanna, the documentary-style film follows two friends who meet again for one night during Durga Pujo after many years apart. Older and somewhat changed, the two reminisce while falling back into a familiar rhythm of sharing laughter and longing.

As the night changes, their unspoken feelings linger in stolen glances, spontaneous smiles, and an unwillingness to end the night. Drifting between their past, present, and future, their lives oscillate between a notebook entry by Madhu from her school days when they first met, this night with all its implications, and a postcard that Satakshi sends Madhu from the terrace of a new café in Southern Avenue six years from this memorable night. It’s her first letter to Madhu, Satakshi writes in the postcard. Is it also the last? We never know.

Bittersweet, nostalgic, and pulsating with the thrill of reunion between two people who are unmistakably drawn to each other, Madhu captures, with tenderness, the dizziness of longing evoked by people and places that exist in the obscure domain of love and desire. What-ifs and hopes of second chances provide a melancholic strain when dawn approaches, but the beauty of the night remains fresh in our minds, as it does for both the protagonists. To borrow from Hughes, the film ends, soft as it began.

Watch ‘Madhu’ on Nowness Asia here.

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