‘Sabar Bonda’ Movie Review: Call Me By Your Shame

Midway through Rohan Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), the 30-year-old protagonist, Anand, listens to the story of how his parents met. His father, who worked as a driver in Mumbai, was visiting his ancestral village in the 1990s. He came to meet an eligible young woman, but ended up ‘choosing’ her uneducated sister because she cooked well; he arrived as a lonely bachelor and left as a companion. Years later, a heartbroken Anand is back home for grave reasons: his father is no more, and the family is fulfilling the tradition of a 10-day mourning period. Yet there’s a sense of history repeating itself. A young man is visiting with his mother to grieve the passing of his father, but it feels like a family visit to cure the loneliness of a bachelor. The formality of death is indistinguishable from the desires of life. Once the Mumbai-bound Anand rekindles his bond with a childhood friend — also illiterate, also someone who loves to feed — the ritualistic nature of loss conceals a quiet quest for companionship. After all, when a funeral pyre burns, sparks always fly.

The difference here is that Anand is gay. As is his childhood friend, Balya. Balya hides his own ineligibility deep in the closet: he’s a farmer, he doesn’t own land, he’s in his 30s, he has no stable income. But his resistance is wavering. The two reconnect because they’re cornered by society. Kanawade’s semi-autobiographical storytelling does something profound with the language of queer love. Usually, such movies are defined by the dangers of public scrutiny and forbidden emotions; there’s always a sense that a tragedy — being caught, exposed, lynched, killed — is lurking around the corner. But Sabar Bonda refuses to reduce the identity of a love story to its courage. Instead, it unfolds like a secret in plain sight: a meet-cute that’s looking for anonymity rather than invisibility. There are no prying eyes and dramatic conflicts.

It’s almost as if everyone in the village knows, and their silence is the opposite of complicity. Anand spends time at Balya’s house, chatting with his family and praising his mother’s food, as if he’s subconsciously trying to win them over like in the films he’s grown up watching. Balya passes by Anand’s house every morning and asks his mother if he’s asleep; sometimes he leaves a gift. It’s like the parents are getting involved without actually getting involved; it’s like tasting a cactus pear without the thorns. When they shepherd together in the fields, it doesn’t feel risky — it’s an extension of those private walks that prospective couples take while their families wait in the living room. When they kiss, it isn’t laced with urgency or paranoia — nobody needs to watch them to legitimise their fear. The ubiquity of male friendship becomes a front for a dance of romantic compatibility.

Despite the tonal camouflage, the film stays grounded to the agency of its setting. There’s an indirectness about the way people behave, communicate and love. Every other action and sentence is a surrogate for things they mean but cannot say. Neighbours and uncles wonder aloud why they don't marry because they can't get themselves to spell out their suspicions. Anand has to stay barefoot for ten days, but when he opts to join Balya in the meadows on sunny afternoons, he is repeatedly reminded that “you’ll burn your feet”. They’re essentially being warned to be careful and think twice. When Balya floats the idea of moving to Mumbai to find work, his parents fight with him like they’re hoping to change his mind without broaching the elephant in the room. The elders taunt Anand for encouraging his friend to stay with him and his mother (“You three can't live together forever, no?”). It's not that the others are feigning ignorance; this is their way of reasoning with the couple without incriminating themselves. There’s a sense that homosexuality is a ‘decision’ in a region where female infanticide has skewered the gender balance. But instead of claiming victimhood, Balya remarks that he’s surprised by Anand’s shyness because “others like us just do it and leave”.

A still from 'Sabar Bonda'.

The indirectness is best manifested by Anand’s own. His widowed mother, Suman (a terrific Jayshri Jagtap), misses her late husband because they shared the ‘baggage’ of confidentiality about their son. She starts to reveal her support through little gestures and calibrations of truth — gestures that don’t convey acceptance so much as the reluctance to reject. She makes up a story about a girlfriend who broke Anand’s heart to fend off nosy questions (it was a boy). When relatives insist on arranging his marriage, she stands up for his ability to make adult decisions and provide for his family; everyone acknowledges the money he spent on his father’s treatment. Instead of asking Anand if he likes Balya, her code is “he also doesn’t want to get married?”; she refers to Balya as well as an ex-lover as a “special friend”. She alludes to his life in euphemisms and phrases, using the repression in the village as a smokescreen.

The most poignant aspect of the film is this unsaid understanding between mother and son. She's so used to putting on an act to protect him that her grief — she breaks into loud wails the moment she's around others — becomes an offshoot of her performance. She behaves the way others expect her to behave while trying to uphold the authenticity of her motherhood. The cinema of compassionate parenting in queer stories (Call Me By Your Name, Schitt’s Creek) is often shaped by bookish wisdom and privilege. But Suman is a rare character who keeps upending the notion that education is the cornerstone of empathy. If anything, her outlook is unburdened by the optics of morality and learning. It’s moving to watch because she’s painfully human, not feel-good fiction in a utopian narrative. Her approach to Anand is pure and full of contradictions.

In the case of the central couple, this performative nature becomes a tool to express truth, not hide it. They squeeze sensuality out of the most mundane acts, stealing touches and glances and words under the guise of living. Balya’s bemusement with the greys in Anand's curly mop leads to a soft ruffling of his hair: like postcoital tenderness without the sex. Anand pretends to forget that Balya’s eyes were brown so that he can look into them. A casual swim in the lake becomes the prelude to a naked embrace. A waist is clutched — and caressed — during a motorbike ride. Anand sits next to Balya's mother and quietly watches him bathe with the shampoo he bought him; their covert intimacy poses as boyish banter. When one of them hints that he’s falling for the other, they’re sharing headphones to hear the music of the Marathi intercaste epic Sairat; he jokes about how, as a child, he assumed that love happened only if they sang and danced around trees. He wants to say that their fantasy is too real to look like a film. Anand and Balya are on a similar village-to-city trajectory, except the social stigma here is so internal that the world would rather not mention it. They can’t afford the spectacle of elopement or violence because nobody is chasing them.

Bhushaan Manoj, as Anand, beautifully exhibits the multitudes of longing. He’s grieving the erasure of the person he used to be. You can tell Anand misses his father because the man was the first to validate him; he’s worried that, with him gone, he might lose the capacity to be himself. It’s why his scenes with the mother unfold like a different kind of love story. Like most sons, he never expected much from the homemaker. But now he’s discovering her, clutching at her almost, disarmed by her maturity at a time of emotional duress. She was probably the one that empowered her husband to perceive him.

It’s what Sabar Bonda excels at — none of the characters conform to our preconceived notions of ‘difficult’ themes. The subversions are subtle. Suraaj Suman’s unassuming turn as Balya allows the character to seep into the film as a peripheral figure; the viewer, like the camera, barely even detects him in the beginning. Their bond sneaks up on us while we’re busy anticipating a dramatic entrance. When they do begin to talk, Balya seems like the token closeted local primed to hurt Anand, but his affection becomes its own protagonist. It takes us a while to recognise that Balya is the other half of their story. Similarly, it’s implied that Anand’s parents had a fairly conventional marriage; he drank, she submitted. But they were not in denial about their son’s struggle; their preservation of who he is in a distant land may have resembled the conspiratorial efforts of those who safeguard the identity of a female vampire-superhero in a movie like Lokah.

Sabar Bonda’s exploration of familial memory and mourning brings to mind Somnath Pal’s animated short Death of a Father (2017). The young man gets so preoccupied with following the age-old customs of loss — no footwear, no rice and milk, no black, no cap, no temples, no hair-washing — that he doesn’t get the time to cope. But prohibition is such an integral part of who he is that a romance is almost easier to navigate in these shackles. At one point, Anand describes how he remembers his dreams vividly; Balya does not. Because for Balya, Anand is that dream: a big-city striver, the one who got away and dared to survive on his own terms. The inference is that Mumbai enables the lucidity, or at least the option to blend in without standing out. At some level, their thinking evokes Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, a film that gently dismantles the myth of Mumbai for migrants who conflate escapism with ambition. They still believe in the illusion because they have nothing if they don’t. Perhaps Anand and Balya will get disenchanted with the city in the future. Perhaps they will one day return to the familiarity of their village. Perhaps they will choose to be unseen, not shunned. And perhaps they will become an inextricable slice of local lore: those two lifelong buddies who came back home after their wives left them, slept in the fields, smoked on the terrace, ate cactus pears, swam in the lake, and lit funeral pyres.