Notes On Neeraj Ghaywan's Homebound & The Lifelong Friendship Of Grief
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Homebound is about so many things. Reducing it to a simple friendship tale only plays into the very privilege it critiques. One must look for the core of humanity that the film so clearly platforms. |
 | Rahul Desai | |
MY BEST FRIEND died in early 2023. It feels strange not to write “last year” or “earlier this year”. It hasn’t been that long. But losing your person turns time into a paradoxical entity — the older the grief, the younger the absence. The further you move away from the day of the wound, the closer you inch towards the permanence of the scar. I miss him, but I’m not sure if it’s more or less. All I know is that it’s deep and quiet; I’m a tenant of the no-BHK estate between denial and acceptance. It’s also a strange phase. Imagine a warped vigilante thriller in which a widower goes around punishing strangers who take their marriage for granted because he cannot stand those who don’t appreciate what they have. He had the perfect soulmate, so he has no patience for people who fail to be nice partners. I’m in the friendship version of this thriller: a man going around yelling at anyone who takes their close friends for granted. I’ve not only cut off from some of my own friends for being on autopilot, but I’ve also fought with (or judged) others for resorting to detachment as a defence mechanism. My partner has been at the receiving end of these vigilante-coded spirals — last year, I implored her to make an effort to preserve long-distance friendships, and this year, I fell out with one of her long-distance friends because, apparently, they weren’t as invested as I might have been if my friend were still around. |
I know it sounds a bit unhinged. Sociopathic, even. But that’s how the cookie of grief crumbles: inexplicably, unreasonably, unfairly. It’s a price I’m prepared to pay for the rest of my days, even if it means meddling in someone else’s business and offering unsolicited opinions. It’s a lose-lose situation. I either antagonise others for not doing enough as friends or get jealous of them for doing too much as friends. Sometimes I look at genuine “besties” and feel like barfing, largely because they have something that I do not. Basically, imagine the widower deciding to target happily-married couples as well. Oh boy. ALSO READ | The Great Expectations Of Past Lives Sometimes I get angry with myself for being so anal. But I mostly get angry with him, not because he left so soon, but because he spoiled me by merely existing. He raised the bar, so those dizzying standards now cripple me. All these fallouts are a consequence of my being unable to fathom that I tasted the richness of brotherhood only to have it taken away. It's worse when you know what’s gone. There is no Plan B because it never felt like a plan to begin with. We just happened, and our bond was oddly uncomplicated in an age of transactional emotions. I got used to the luxury of co-existing and growing and travelling and belonging, only for this luxury to be cut short. It reminds me of the self-pity I embraced when I used to blame my dad for letting me experience an “upscale life” every time he landed a high-profile job, only to lose said job with his drinking and yank us back down to a hand-to-mouth hustle. This wasn’t the same, but the sense of sudden desolation after the myth of stability felt agonisingly familiar. |
I have chosen to feel the full force of this void over the last few years. It does not subscribe to the conventional idea of “moving on” (whatever that means), especially in Indian society, where mental strength is directly linked to the power of suppression; where courage is equated with the capacity to deflect and escape. I can tell that many have distanced themselves from me because I’ve been too open about the longing. Perhaps some dismiss it as performative, perhaps others might rather block out my display of fragility. It can’t be comfortable to see someone invoking the past in a culture that thrives on the illusion of linearity. But I’ve also subconsciously been trying to pick a fight with my friend. They say he would’ve wanted his loved ones to live to the fullest and not dwell on bygones. Maybe rebelling against him — by continuing to be ‘stuck’ on our friendship — is my way of showing my anger. It’s fitting that our only disagreement has happened after he’s gone. MORE FROM THE AUTHOR | The Cinema Of Wishing & Acceptance: Notes On Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar & Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa He would not be pleased with how I’m dealing with this, but I’m not trying to please him. I’m being authentic, and that’s something he wouldn’t mind at all. Thinking of him every hour, feeling lost and euphoric in spurts, and reflecting on what we had — and what I’ll never have again — is the only language of linearity I understand. Just as it takes courage to get over a tragedy and soldier on, it takes courage to stay rooted in one and make it a home. It’s also the only way I know how to keep dreaming of him. The other night, he appeared as a photographer and cancer survivor at a media party. I observed how he spoke to strangers and befriended them so that I could learn before he disappeared; he was fine, but it felt like we were running out of time. He was not a photographer in the real world, but I think he emerged as one in my dream because he made others feel seen. He was forever the lensfinder. |
As a film critic, I have this habit of using movie references to cushion the randomness of life. That’s the point of this column, too. But I’ve often found myself searching for fiction in this case; very little can explain the shapelessness — the cumulative toll — of grieving. So instead I grasp at rogue moments, themes, subtext and primal approximations. For example, while watching Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound recently, I started to look beyond its sociopolitical identity and its remarkable ability to draw a map of India with the blood of its bigotry. I started to scratch beneath the circumstances and context. At some point, everything else became a blur, and all I could see were two inseparable friends, one of whom died in the arms of the other. On the brink of a future together. Now this can be a handicap for someone paid to write about cinema — the perpetual threat of personal emotions reducing a story to a vessel of relatability and human projections. Homebound is about so much more. Limiting it to a simple friendship tale is playing into the hands of the tone-deaf privilege it critiques. Yet, this can also be a superpower of sorts: to spot the very core of humanity — stripped of all the man-made labels and divides and boxes — that the film platforms. As an upper-caste Hindu male writer, I can only pretend or attempt to understand the oppression and erasure it is shaped by. But the grammar of attachment in it is universal. Both friends are the ‘other’ in the context of the narrative, but when they meet, they are each-other. |
I began tearing up long before the climax, because a small detail — like the specific role of each friend in an alliance — chipped away at my heart. One of them is more disenfranchised and therefore slightly more dependent. Halfway through, he quits his own journey and takes a train to his friend in another town without a second thought. It’s muscle memory, despite a spat they had. Once he reaches and talks, you can see his body instinctively crumple, exhale and be more relaxed; this is his safe space. He can rest in pieces. In his friend’s company, he is no longer the sole provider, the survivor, the tough Muslim boy in an Islamophobic place — the baggage of his aspirations and identity melts away. He can be the purest echo of himself and, for once, be taken care of after an endless loop of caring and resisting. I remember being destroyed by this passage because it occurred to me that I was this person in our friendship. Around him, I could just let go and take a break from all the designs of adulthood. When we travelled together, he did the planning and plotting; taking care of things came naturally to him, no matter how much he was going through. Even when I visited him during his chemotherapy cycles, he made sure that I had an apartment to stay in and groceries to use. He asked if I needed cash. When we texted, his health updates were short and dry, almost as if he were shielding me from the gravity of it all. In these last few years, with him gone, the one change I’ve felt is this constant sense of tiredness. I relied on him for perspective, for the stillness of having someone look out for me when I needed a breather. I haven’t been able to pause anymore; the responsibility of living and loving and adulting offers no respite. |
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s earlier this year. Caring has become more of a duty than an act of compassion; it involves plenty of giving and no taking. It’s difficult to watch a parent lose their bearings and hold onto a silhouette of who they were. There are times when I just want to break down and be ‘weak’ in front of my friend. Maybe I wouldn’t have done that if he were actually here, but there’s nothing more calming than the omnipresence of a friend who exudes the essence of “you got this” without saying it. Even if I lost everything and everyone, I had him, and he had us. The Neeraj Ghaywan Interview | 'I Want Homebound To Be Watched By The People It Is About' Now I’m just hoping to manifest him — like a moral-support hologram — through the chaos of my grief. It’s a cocktail of delusion and freedom. He can be anyone I want him to be. I can find him in films and dreams. But the reason I’m committed to a future of yearning is because his death has lent a face to a condition I’ve long suffered from: nostalgia. The other day, I looked at the blankness on my mother’s face, wondering why none of her siblings bothered to check on her, and fondly recalled the evenings she’d tease her brother when he lived with us during my college years. I’d be irritated with their humour but marvel at their familyhood. As that college student, I would reminisce about the Sundays my parents and I spent playing carrom on the bed after a swim. As that kid playing carrom on Sundays, I would remember the mad school picnics and the happy fatigue on the homebound bus. As a child on those picnics, I would think of how my grandparents used to wait for me outside kindergarten in a green Fiat. |
I’ve spent days missing the good old days, like a Matryoshka doll of grieving the demise of time rather than the passing of it. My presence is tethered to the past, and an innate battle to trust that so much of living is leaving; that so much of life is watching people, places, and selves get tinier in the rearview mirror. It’s been hard to wrap my head around the fact that death — of eras, phases, memories, feelings, routines — is the fuel of evolution. That moving ahead is one non-stop gesture of realising there’s no going back. As I type this in late 2025, I miss the disorienting warmth of the church in early 2023 that held a funeral where nobody felt alone. As I stood in that church waiting to deliver a eulogy for a friend who was dead but not absent, I missed the nonchalance of missing his call two weeks ago. He texted that we would speak after he rests. He had no regrets, but I do. The haunting will never end — at least not until I become a caped vigilante who hunts down every careless fool that misses a call from their dying friend. He would not approve, but I guess he’ll have to return and fight me. I will rebel without a pause. After all, I have a new best friend: his name is Grief. |
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