Playing in this year’s Proxima Competition, Indian filmmaker Yashasvi Juyal’s The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb is a contemplative romance in a toll booth. Shahran Morshed speaks to Juyal about community, family, migration, ghosts, and the challenges of being a first-time filmmaker.

SM: Where did the journey of The Ink-Stained Hand and the Missing Thumb begin? Was there a particular image, memory, or feeling?

YJ: It began when my hometown was going through a sudden change in its urban development, and a new highway was proposed near my house. There was a truck that crashed into a booth over there, and it became national news. So I went to visit the site of the tragedy and I saw that that same booth that was crashed into was already fixed the next day with tape and everything, and somebody was continuing to work from inside the booth. So I went to him and asked if he didn’t feel unsafe, to which he replied: “I’m not that person — that person has died. I’m the ghost of that person.” I think this was that first mundane, or you can say intriguing, quirky incident that actually gave the film its life, because that’s when I started writing the film.

SM: The film begins with a question about time. What does the concept of time mean to you?

YJ: The concept of time is very mysterious to me, and at the same time very well understood also. Sometimes I can explain it, and sometimes I cannot. I wanted this film to explore that, but I still don’t really have an eloquent answer to it. In philosophy, time is something very different, but in existential terms and how we are told to live and to exist, it plays a very dramatic role. So I think there is drama in it. Time for me is drama, and time for me is cinema. There was a desire to open the film with this whole idea of existence, and how to explain and define existence better than through time?

SM: Why did you choose a toll booth as the central space of the film?

YJ: I think these toll booths are spaces of liminality, somewhere in between. My grandfather came from Karachi in Pakistan to the upper Himalayas, and later we moved from there to our hometown of Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills. It is this huge history of migration that my work revolves around, and I wanted to go one step closer in exploring it. These Indian highways, which are carved out of rural belongings and rural spaces, create a very interesting dramaturgy and atmosphere. It is that touch of modernity mixed with folklore and old rituals, with an ancient way of living. I find that extremely fascinating. Commuting between their metropolitan workplaces and their homes in their villages, people pass these booths. People leaving their homes to look for work in the city also pass these booths. But these booth workers are stuck somewhere in between. What is their idea of home? That is how I use this space, to actually tap into the human absurdity of economic existence.

SM: How much of the film comes from your own memories of Uttarakhand and its changing landscapes?

YJ: A lot. I think everything in my existence is tied to Uttarakhand; that is my state. And the way Uttarakhand is — it’s a very young state. The kind of land, culture, and stories it brings and the kind of atmosphere it brings — it evokes a cinematic curiosity inside me that wants to go closer to it. It’s dark, but I really want to walk towards it. The way the state is slowly shifting in its development and urban sprawl is also something that is very important for me as a creator to look into. So the state plays a very important role, especially in my hometown, which has changed before my eyes. My stories used to come from my moments of boredom there, but now all conversations are about its change and how it has dissolved into a city that we are not familiar with anymore. The familiarity of the city is gone. So I think this film was a kind of homage to that early Dehradun that I remember, and that I miss from my childhood.

SM: Santosh’s return after death is mysterious yet deeply emotional. What interested you in exploring this space between reality and the unreal?

YJ: I think at the end of the day, the core of the film is love. It’s a romantic film about Santosh and Rajji, and it also talks about human relationships, the idea of commitment, the idea of how we look at each other as partners, but also how we sometimes tend to misunderstand each other. So it also talks about how Santosh is in its space. He is a migrant worker whose only goal is to find a permanent job in that toll booth. He is deeply attached to it because of the economic reasons it brings, but also because of the comfort of a community that he has generated around it. At the same time, Rajji has her own desires and ambitions to move on from this space but is not able to, maybe because of both of them staying together. For me it was always a story about these two lovers that I got acquainted to when I was doing a documentary about a very similar space. I recorded two toll booth operators of the same names who were living in a rented room close by, and the girl wanted to leave but the boy was deeply attached to this place. I found that a really intriguing way to look at this film. For me, Santosh is somebody who wanted to express himself poetically, but couldn’t when he was still alive. When he returns, he finds the words and gives Rajji a very personal goodbye, which is very important. So in the end, the film is about saying our goodbyes and about separation as well.

SM: The film feels somewhere between folklore, myth, and reality. Please tell us about your intentions and perceptions.

YJ: I think the film is not intended to purposefully do that. But in a way it is. This is the land where I was born, and in our culture accepting the existence of ghosts is very common. We perform a lot of rituals, and there are a lot of local tribal ceremonies where ghosts actually enter the human body and give advice to family members. It’s a very common ritual in the upper Himalayas, and I wanted to show the way we live, and the way culture is over there. The whole idea was to make a film about that, and it was exciting to me because of the stories my grandmother used to tell me about her encounters with a ghost. Sometimes we realize that it’s not normal, but it absolutely comes from there.

SM: Migration is usually shown through social realities, but your film explores its emotional side. Why was this important for you?

YJ: Like I said before, migration for me is more like the feeling of leaving your most comfortable space that you created out of love, and migration has been a very important part of my family’s history. What remains is memories. My grandfather used to tell me about his previous home, and my grandmother told stories about how she used to survive and about how she spent her childhood in the upper Himalayas. At the end of the day it’s all memories and emotions, right? And migration has a direct link to that. What it does is disrupt communities, the most important thing for anyone to survive. And we all have our communities. That is why it was very emotional to me, and I really felt that the separation of my family and people moving to places because of economic opportunities had led to a kind of melancholy in the reality and drama of my family.

SM: In an age defined by speed and constant movement, you chose a slow, contemplative rhythm for your film. Why did this pace feel necessary to express the ideas and emotions you wanted to explore?

YJ: I come from an era where the Internet didn’t exist. There is this memory in my mind how time used to feel when this whole age of hyper-stimulation through the digital world simply wasn’t there. And it made me imagine how a moment passes. So I always choose a slower, or you can say a natural kind of rhythm of life in my films, and will always try to do that to maybe live a bit more in nostalgia, because feeling nostalgic is difficult. So it’s better to create that feeling in your art and examine it, and feel it a little more potently. This pace is something which is very important for my practice in filmmaking.

SM: The sound design creates a powerful sense of silence and distance. How did you approach the film’s soundscape?

YJ: The co-writer of this film, Ankit Thapa, is also the sound designer and sound recordist for the film, and we have a long-standing collaboration. We brainstorm a lot in terms of sound and the aural parallel narrative of the film, and we like to create those worlds. I think sound is something that is absolutely of importance to the dramaturgy in all my films. For this one, we imagined from the beginning that when Santosh comes back after death, we are kind of subtly experiencing the world in the way we imagined how he might be experiencing it, and we tried to carefully create that in the sound design. We also figured out that we had to preserve the flora and fauna of the space that we were creating, so we had long conversations about the types of animals that we used to hear back in the day, but that are now missing. It is a culmination of all of that. I strongly feel that the marriage between sound and visuals is something very exciting, also pushing the possibilities within that marriage. Sound is fascinating, and I love going through the experience of that marriage.

SM: As a debut filmmaker, what was the biggest challenge in protecting your vision for this film?

YJ: I think the colossal challenge is to just stick to what you always wanted to tell. Somehow being true to that feeling is challenging. But if you manage to overcome all the challenges and still have your storytelling remain intact, it’s a beautiful feeling. I was always thinking about how this will be perceived by my audience, meaning my local audience, my people, because it’s something that they are not used to watching back home. Thus there was worry that maybe it was going to be too local for a global audience. When it’s your first film you don’t know, because you’re not exposed to many places and to understanding how cinema is conceived in other places. But once I completed the film and took it to various labs and pitching forums, I came to realize that the film resonated, and people wanted to have a conversation with it. I feel very fulfilled and very privileged that I could do it the way I wanted it from start to finish.

SM: After making this film, how has your understanding of cinema changed?

YJ: It has definitely evolved a lot, and I have started to realize that it is about looking inward and how you want the world to be, how you look at the world. It has made me more brave in attempting something that I shouldn’t shy away from. I think that is what honesty is, right? So it has definitely changed me to at least attempt to make films and stories that I really feel I want to tell. No matter if they are mundane, bizarre, quirky, or calm and composed. Making this film also definitely has changed my way of looking at my people and my region, and how I feel I have very limited time to tell their stories. And I want to tell all of them. It has given me this sudden push towards making more and more, and telling more and more.

Image copyright: Pulkit Tomar