Bombay Begums: How Alankrita Shrivastava rewrote bisexuality and infidelity…

Plabita Borthakur as Ayesha. Netflix

In “Love,” the second episode of Bombay Begums, the new Netflix series created, co-written, and co-directed by Alankrita Shrivastava, comes an unsuspecting scene that I thought was subversive in its agency. Ayesha (Plabita Borthakur), a junior bank employee saddled with turning the company’s welfare scheme into reality is sitting at a pub with its first beneficiary, Laxmi Gondhall (Amruta Subhash), a commercial sex worker. Although this moment marks a sort of an icebreaker between Ayesha and Laxmi, it’s a red herring. Ayesha is really there to watch Chitra (Sanghmitra Hitaishi), a jazz singer perform. The camera captures the duo locking eyes several times throughout the evening; each moment is suffused with tension and ambiguity equipped to hold several backstories of its own. Chitra continues singing about the tragedy of waiting long for a “different song”. Then, she blows a kiss towards Ayesha. Caught off-guard, Ayesha responds with a briefest of smiles, looking down as if over-compensating for having her desires acknowledged.

Although the show doesn’t make it explicit, there is ample evidence of something potentially romantic simmering between Chitra and Ayesha. What especially held my attention is how Shrivastava chose to stage this scene, crafting it essentially as a reversal of Hindi cinema’s oft-relied meet-cute. Think, a hero stumbling upon a young, attractive female performer at a crowded pub (Aashiqui, Rock On 2). The plot goes like this: he ends up being irrevocably besotted by her, taking her under her wings and then embarking on a romantic relationship with her. What the movies don’t underscore is the power dynamics in such a situation: The woman is always “seen” by the man, always being the object of desire and rarely a participant in it.

By virtue of a gender reversal, Bombay Begums side-steps that. Neither does one “discover” the other in this scene, nor is the attraction a means to an end. Shrivastava succeeds in envisioning a meet-cute that is supplied with agency, where one person doesn’t hold power over the other. In many ways, this allows the two women to transcend from being objects of desire to living, breathing subjects of desire.

Naturally, this scene is designed in a way that elicits more questions than answers. Is Ayesha, an attractive 20-something, who the show otherwise pits as the proverbial straight girl (after being turned out of her paying guest accommodation, Ayesha seeks refuge in an ex-boyfriend’s cramped 1BHK), bisexual? Are there actually sexual undertones between Ayesha and Chitra or is it entirely a figment of our making? Even though Bombay Begums evades clean resolutions, it provides a clue in another sensationally crafted sequence toward the end of the same episode.

Ayesha waits outside Chitra’s house. Netflix

The scene opens with Ayesha nervously standing outside Chitra’s house. She rings the bell; Chitra opens the door. We get a sense that Chitra is pleased to see her. Ayesha enters the house and after indulging in the usual niceties for a minute, proceeds to kiss Chitra. The camera is especially observant here, taking its time to chart the gentleness of the kiss, accurately evoking the feeling of someone unlocking a part of themselves that feels instantly familiar. A following shot focuses on their feet – as they inch closer toward each other, Chitra stands on Ayesha’s feet. The pleasurable hypnotic quality of this moment is broken when Ayesha leaves without any warning midway through the act. In the next moment, she is outside another door. This time around, it’s her male colleague, Ron (Imaad Shah). We watch Ayesha initiate another kiss. It feels similar yet different. There’s that same shot here as well, except Ayesha has to stand on her toes to reach Ron. Her feet which were earlier on the ground, now have to strain.

Ayesha and Ron (Imaad Shah). Netflix

I’ve replayed this sequence several times since the show released a few days ago and every time, I’m awed at how much the makers have managed to convey without revealing much of anything, really. As a viewer, you have the choice of reading this sequence as an outburst, that is a protagonist on the throes of becoming fluent in her bisexuality. Or you could read it the way I was inclined to: as a reckoning, that is a small town-girl holding herself back, having spent a lifetime conditioned to buy into the heteronormative expectations of romantic living. Irrespective of how the scene works for you, it still feels like an achievement, mainly because it succeeds in dissecting the origins of bisexuality without a judgemental lens that alienates the experience from the status quo.

In the later episodes, Bombay Begums, otherwise unnecessarily contrived and verbose in its intentions, maintains this understated approach to Ayesha’s romantic preoccupations. The show is replete with bisexual imagery – two women kissing, cuddling, and going down on each other – that has long been absent in the depiction of the female experience onscreen, a gap that Shrivastava’s past outings have consistently been focused on shrinking. But it isn’t a depiction of bisexuality for the sake of treading new ground.

To me, the singularity of Shrivastava’s take stemmed from her willingness to tackle bicuriosity, and by effect, the shackles of confusion that delay someone from wanting to be who they really are. Ayesha eventually confronts the nature of her sexuality by the end of Bombay Begums but she doesn’t start out as clear-headed. Her latent desires overshadow every sexual interaction. The first time after they hook up, Chitra asks Ayesha whether she has ever been with women. Ayesha doesn’t have to answer her for us to know the truth but it takes a perceptive filmmaker to not fall into the trap of casting Ayesha’s inexperience as a dealbreaker or even romantic dishonesty. Instead, Bombay Begums crafts her straightness as an aftermath of sexual suppression. That Shrivastava recognises that any authentic depiction of bisexuality, especially one that passes muster, is incomplete if it also doesn’t allow room for bicuriosity, is a testament to the indispensability of the female gaze. For instance, Ayesha’s bisexual encounter with Chitra isn’t made to compete with the sexual relationship she starts with Ron. This is a depiction of bisexuality that rests not on a script or even an audience but a depiction that is shaped by the perspective of women. Its intent is to simply measure the distance between how society expects a woman to behave and what happens when that mask is finally pulled off.

It’s the same approach that spills over to Bombay Begums’ portrayal of infidelity as well. Even for a show with some of the the worst-shot sex scenes in Indian streaming history, Shrivastava infuses the implications of the acts with genuine empathy. Rani (Pooja Bhatt), Fatima (Shahana Goswami), and Laxmi, the three other protagonists are shown forging affairs with men other than their husbands at different points in the show. They’re all stilted in their domestic realities in their own ways but their decision to start an extramarital affair rests more on attraction than domestic unfulfillment. As a result, they’re never burdened with guilt. That doesn’t mean that the show doesn’t underline that they’re effectively cheating. What it does is to resist being a moral authority that decides on an universal idea of right or wrong and passes it off as fact.

In her last outing Dolly Kitty Aur Chamakte Sitare, Shrivastava, a relentless recorder of the ways women are denied ownership over their own needs, implied that a woman’s sexual satisfaction should be deemed essential for any marriage to survive. If anything, Bombay Begums builds on those ideas in ways that are nothing short of revolutionary. I wasn’t a fan of Bombay Begums but it’s impossible to not be taken by its moments. When Shrivastava gets them right, there’s really no stopping her.