Termite, a 30-minute short, is documentary maker Shaunak Sen’s first fiction film. But it’s hard to tell the difference. He treats life as the introverted ally of storytelling; his nonfiction often designs the truth of an invisibilised India. It finds a controlled language to present what already exists. While Cities of Sleep traced the gloomy lyricism of Delhi’s insurgent sleeper communities, the Oscar-nominated All That Breathes shadowed two Muslim brothers who run a bird clinic in old Delhi. The camera — steady, studied, often static — reframes the people as characters, spaces as settings, and ecological relationships as cultural metaphors. Termite looks like it’s ‘following’ two men in the capital, too. A Tamil migrant, Ajith (Valavane Koumarane), shares a rooftop room with his Muslim friend, Saud (Faisal Malik); they spend tired evenings drinking tea and passively watching television.
It’s obvious that Termite shares a room with All That Breathes. It’s not just the fringes of the city, or that the catalyst of change in this film — an anxious middle-aged father (Vipin Sharma) who approaches Saud for his divorced daughter’s hand — is a man named Nadeem (the empathetic brothers from the documentary are Saud and Nadeem). It’s also the environmental block. Ajith works as a lowly termite inspector, but he’s more of an insect whisperer. He ‘exterminates’ them with care, understands their patterns, persuades them to leave, and connects with them because the allegory is right there: everyone sees the white ants as pests, but they’re crucial to the balance of the ecosystem. Given the way Ajith sees his own world — in soothing shadows, quiet mundanity, soft cobwebs and thoughtful shades — it’s the humans who become the metaphor for a post-liberalisation country divided into worker castes. He has a cat and befriends a goat, the original ‘inhabitants’ of a Delhi hijacked by crisscrossing wires and sweaty faith. He finds solace as a guest in both nature and civilisation.
But the remarkable thing about Termite is that it crawls into the woodwork of these margins. It delves into the fragile architecture of isolation for those who seek company in misery. Ajith and Saud are lonely, but they’re lonely together; Saud protects the non-Hindi-speaking Ajith from casual bigots, and Ajith indulges Saud in his desire to pursue a shady proposal against their better judgement. Both of them are the “other” in society, but in this tiny room, they’re “each-other”. Ajith’s relationship with his job — his deep curiosity for the creatures he detects — awakens him to the humanity of this arrangement. The two men are companions by need, but Ajith envies the community of termite colonies; he romanticises his reduced existence, seeing their room as a peaceful refuge as long as it contains a makeshift sense of belonging.
The little details lend the film the intimacy of a phase and the plurality of a time. It’s the 1990s, but except for the absence of cell-phones (which increase the reliance on flesh-and-blood attachment) and the sound of an old television set (Javed Miandad is mentioned in a program), there seems to be a permanence about the India on display. It could be 2026, but their anonymity rarely ages. The performances are so unobtrusive that the one jarring short-film habit — the subtext-feeding letters that Ajith writes to his uncle — becomes an integral part of the framework. You hear his reflections, and the story blooms into a wild tree of generational anxieties, retrospective grief and fading friendships. Suddenly it’s about living alone, not just dying alone.
I love that the entrance of Sadeem into their lives feels like a leap of tonal faith: a mix of magic realism and divine intervention. He looks and sounds like a figment of someone’s imagination, too good to be true and too untrue to be good. It’s almost like we see the man through the wary gaze of Ajith, not the hopeful lens of Saud. Ajith senses that if he is real, Saud may be reclaimed by own ‘community,’ so he almost wills the film into staging Sadeem as a translucent presence. It brings to mind the wistful appearance of a long-distance husband in All We Imagine As Light by Payal Kapadia, another accomplished Indian storyteller who uses nonfiction as a totem that doesn’t stop spinning. By the time Termite ends, it’s nearly impossible to tell the short film from a meditative documentary feature. The medium doesn’t matter, neither do the humans who fear the very insects — termites, cockroaches, students — they have displaced.
Termite premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival