At 85 minutes, one wouldn’t have imagined Arun Karthick’s remarkable second feature, “Nasir,” an adaptation of the short story, “A Clerk’s Story” by Dilip Kumar, to move along leisurely. A day in the life of Nasir, a Muslim garment store attendant, it’s a deeply intimate, lyrical portrait of a man who has long stopped living for himself. Capturing the rhythms of an everyday existence adeptly from the first frame, Karthick approaches “Nasir” with thought and sensitivity, choosing to observe than comment. We get long-shots and close-ups on the minutiae of Nasir’s life: counting money, standing in a queue for water, sipping on tea, waiting on his colleague, smoking a beedi. Karthick is unyielding—there’s a reason why “Nasir” is sketched so carefully. We aren’t supposed to understand him; we are supposed to be him.
There is ample skill on display here. Nasir resides in a mostly Muslim neighbourhood of Coimbatore. As he makes his way out of its sinuous lanes with his wife, the sound of prayer grows dimmer and is finally replaced by the babel of the world we now live in, where demagogues scream into microphones and hate is freely distributed over loudspeakers. The two worlds have co-existed peacefully till now, but by the end, one will have violently infiltrated the other. Nasir has inured himself to ignore the growing anti-Muslim sentiment that surrounds him; even as his colleague casually exchanges nasty remarks with a friend on the phone, Nasir’s face does not register even the faintest of flickers.
There is inexpressible pain here. Nasir’s mother has cancer, he has a mentally challenged adopted son, debt, an ordinary job. And yet, for someone has every reason to complain, he seldom does. He pulls two women shopping for saris into conversation with the warmth of a son. He pours himself into his poetry, expresses how much he loves his wife through a handwritten letter to her. We listen to its contents over a series of extended shots, each word bringing the man we have been watching throughout into sharper focus. There is a simplicity about him, about the way he does everything he is asked to, about the way he maintains the innocence of his minuscule world.
Films about communal violence often linger on the suddenness of it, and the emptiness. But it’s terrifying just how quickly we move on. “Nasir” is no different. In retrospect, the signs were all there: the provocations over loudspeakers grow increasingly vile. Karthick sets us up for tragedy with the flair of an old-timer. In the final shot, Nasir is sprawled out uglily on the ground in an alley of his neighbourhood. In the poetic opening shot, we see him sleeping in a foetal position. A streetlamp imparts light through a window. In both images we see his silhouette. A life has been cruelly snuffed out by a hollow act of violence. The world we see it as just another person dying. But we won’t; we will mourn it. Karthick’s triumph lies therein.
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