Director Sanjoy Nag on adapting Annie Zaidi’s short story for his film Yours Truly, and the difference between loneliness and solitude

Waise maine suna hai yeh manual announcement jo ho rahen hain na, ye band hone waale hain, aur uske badle ek computer waali madam announcement karengi. Pata nahin kyun insaan ki awaazein, dheere dheere band hoti jaa rahi hain,” says the voice of an announcer at Kolkata’s Howrah station. And it’s this voice that keeps us, the viewers and Mithi Kumar (Soni Razdan), the protagonist of the film, Yours Truly, hooked throughout the latest offering by director Sanjoy Nag. Yours Truly is an adaptation of The One That was Announced, written by journalist and author Annie Zaidi. “I had read the story four-five years ago. The germ for this film originated then. I then moved things here and there and adapted it for this medium,” shares Nag, over the phone from Mumbai airport, just as he is about to board the flight for New York. He will be showcasing Yours Truly at the New York India Film Festival (NYIFF 19) this month.

Yours Truly is narrated through Kumar, a woman who is on the verge of retirement from her job, and largely navigates her life in Kolkata, where she stays by herself in a rambling old house. She takes the train to work everyday, and is in love with the voice of the announcer at Howrah station.

“The entire idea of being in love with a voice excited me a lot. How do we interact with that voice when we don’t know who that person is? He/she could be sitting right next to you. We get enchanted with some voices, don’t we? And taking it further, we associate images with voices — does this voice belong to a kind person? Or a bad one?” says Nag.

Pankaj Tripathi in a still from the film.

Disembodied voices are a recurring motif in the film. The dominant one is of course of the station announcer — voiced by Vinay Pathak — and the other is of Kumar’s tenant, Savitri, voiced by Tapati Munshi. In the film, Savitri is actor Pankaj Tripathi’s wife. “We hear her many times, never see her, but she is omnipresent in the film. I know cinema is an audio visual medium, but we don’t give too much importance to the audio. The video kind of overpowers the narrative. And this challenge to play with sound and audio is what triggered me to make this film. We don’t see much of it in Indian cinema,” shares Nag, 50, whose debut, Memories of March, won the National Award for best feature film in English, 2010.

Yours Truly touches upon the theme of an inherent loneliness that has now become de rigueur in many urban spaces. There’s also the loneliness that many elderly people experience, as and when, their children fly the coop and set up their own families. “But Mithi enjoys this solitude. She’s there for her sister and vice versa, but she enjoys her space. And even when her sister coaxes her to sell the house and move to Bangalore, she doesn’t give in. She is happy with her life, which I think is quite difficult in this time and age, especially if you are living in an urban set up. The peer pressure is so much that you succumb to it because the society has set those parameters in place. Mithi lives life on her own terms, which is what attracted me to the story in the first place,” shares Nag.

Soni Razdan in a still from Yours Truly

Kumar comes across as a rare character in Indian cinema, who at 58, is not reduced to being a mother, sister or bhabhi. Instead she is assertive, recognises her desires and is pursuant of the same. “She is not going about it in the chest thumping, over-the-top way, the traits that now, many a times strong women are characterised with. She maintains her poise, which is her inherent personality. She is not the bechari mahila. And if we look around us we will see more of Mithi Kumars around, than the other two extremes,” adds Nag.

In an industry where 50-year-old actors still play young 20 somethings, Yours Truly brings to the fore narratives of people who are past their middle age and are finding love on their own terms. “I, too, was briefed about TG (target group), which falls between 25-35 and is the most coveted one. They are young and watch films. But people in that age group as well, would have seen their mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles. What are their stories? I am sure we all have an aunt like Mithi, or a school teacher who never got married. We could never ask or probe in their lives. But maybe, that teacher was a Mithi Kumar. These stories have always existed but somehow we have got into this TG thing, and we haven’t explored other narratives from other demographics,” says Nag. “But it’s changing. I just hope this is not a one off thing. With this whole new democratic platform, which is the digital space, we should have more of such narratives,” he adds.