Mr and Mrs Iyer

One of the movies I love to watch again and again is Mr & Mrs Iyer. I watched it again with my roomies yesterday. It is very nicely written and directed

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This lovely little movie called Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, involves a bus journey from the hills to the plains and a continuing train journey up to Calcutta, where a little young Tamil mother, Mrs. Iyer, with her son Santaanam is taken care of by a Muslim. Their bus is halted on the way because some Hindu has been killed in an accident, and the Hindus are up against the Muslims. They drag out everybody who is suspected of being a Muslim from the bus. A very old, gentle Muslim couple are slaughtered. But Mrs. Iyer saves this Muslim who is with her by saying, "He is my husband." At the start of the movie, she won't even touch the water that he gives, and in Tamil curses freely. But later on she asks for the bottle which he has put to his lips and drunk from and drinks it. Then, one particular moment, very tenderly photographed, they are almost about to kiss when somebody says, "Excuse me," and passes on. That moment of romance was broken. But it shows, what a little love, what a little care can do, because within this scope of a bus journey lasting perhaps ten hours, expanded into three days by much violence on the way, a young married girl with a baby could fall in love with a Muslim bachelor just because he took care of her, looked after the baby, put it to sleep; when she spilled milk, he brushed it off the floor, things like that.

Love is something we all speak about all the time, or most of the time, but about which we know nothing. Generally, Love among human beings is friendship, dependence, need and, at the most, affection. And affection is what we have between all of us—I mean whether it is brother and brother, sister and sister, husband and wife. And to call it love, and to expect what you cannot expect from affection is the most, shall we say, shattering experience in life, because we expect so much without knowing what to expect. And thereby resulting in break-ups. We have only affection; we have only need-based relationships. Everybody knows this; it is nothing new. And when we read about love, especially through poetry, and see it in the movies, we think we are missing something. You can ask any couple in the world whether they are happy. Very often, nobody will be able to answer, "Yes, we are." Unless they are very old, and have lived together fifty years, and all their desires, their needs have fallen off, and then "nothing but he and I remain".