The Care of Others

by: Nilanjana Bhattacharjya , February 6, 2024

The Ghost Stories (2020) anthology title guarantees that its first film, directed by Zoya Akhtar and written by Ensia Mirza, includes a ghost. Yet throughout most of the film, we do not perceive its presence. Nurse Sameera attends to the bedridden Mrs. Malik, who suffers from dementia and is isolated, except for the nurses who monitor her health. Sameera learns that Mrs. Malik’s son was supposed to have visited her, but the stench reveals otherwise. Over two to three days, Sameera tests her patient’s blood sugar levels, empties her catheter drainage bags, empties her bedpan, administers her medicine, feeds her, bathes her, and freshens the fetid air with incense. Mrs. Malik keeps asking about her son’s whereabouts, while Sameera also waits for a man—her boyfriend, a married man who keeps breaking his promises to join her. In this film, Akhtar and Mirza reinterpret the gothic horror film and the ghost story through a focus on the intimacy of care, and how care generates women’s agency.

Horror within the context of the popular Hindi film industry in India was long synonymous with the Ramsay Brothers, who produced more than thirty low-budget, kitschy horror films during the 1980s (Sen 2017: 47). However, as Meheli Sen notes, the expansion of multiplex cinemas in the 2000s helped transform horror into a mainstream genre through films like Raaz (2002), Bhoot (2003), Bhool  Bhulaiyaa (2007), and Phoonk (2008). In 2020, Anvita Dutt Guptan wrote and directed the critically acclaimed hit Bulbbul about a demonic woman who avenges her murderers and abusers, and her film’s success has resulted in more mainstream recognition of women’s contributions to horror in India (Kirpul 2020).

Zoya Akhtar has directed several feature films and series that have achieved critical and commercial success, outside the realm of horror, and is one of the most significant figures within the contemporary Hindi film industry in India. She hails from a particularly prominent family within the industry: her father Javed Akhtar is a lyricist, poet, and screenplay writer; her younger brother Farhan Akhtar, an actor and director; her mother Honey Irani, a screenplay writer; and her stepmother Shabana Azmi, an actor. Akhtar likely gained a foothold within the industry more easily due to her familial connections, but unlike many similarly privileged peers, has garnered sustained critical acclaim and commercial success since her debut Luck by Chance (2009) with subsequent films including Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), and Gully Boy (2019), and streaming series, including Amazon’s Made in Heaven (2019).

Streaming networks such as Netflix and Amazon have enabled Indian directors and writers to explore more innovative themes and storylines across genres (Shambu 2019) and acquire global audiences, resulting in a surge of releases of new Indian horror series and films including Bulbbul. In 2013, Akhtar collaborated with three prominent Indian (male) filmmakers, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, and Anurag Kashyap, on the anthology film Bombay Talkies and since worked with the same three directors on another anthology film for Netflix, Lust Stories (2018), before Ghost Stories (2020). Writer Ensia Mirza has written and directed a short horror film, Indrajaal (2017) in addition to a horror pilot, Sihr (2019), and most recently, she has written for the second season of the popular Netflix series, Delhi Crime (2022), featuring a female deputy commissioner of police.

In Ghost Stories, Akhtar and Mirza draw on typical Gothic horror tropes: a young woman hears mysterious noises as she cares for a creepy old woman in a cavernous, possibly haunted space. However, the boyfriend who could rescue the woman cannot be relied upon, and the old woman’s son never shows. Instead we get Mrs. Malik, an upper-class Parsi woman accustomed to serving caramel custard at luncheon parties, and Sameera, who has grown up in an orphanage ‘with nothing’ and resents dealing with ‘shit and piss’ as a nurse.

Akhtar and Mirza’s decision to focus on these two women illuminates how women within eldercare disproportionately provide labour as caretakers and are neglected as patients. We witness the elderly woman’s loss of autonomy and anticipate our own loss, a common theme in horror films (Prochuk 2019). But this film’s most disturbing element lies in its forcing us to acknowledge our complicity in neglecting the elderly. As a middle-aged American woman, I admit that the prospect of my own parent abroad dying alone is one of my worst fears. Across India, adult children, especially those who have had to move away for work, are struggling to meet the historical expectation to care for their parents. If adult children can afford to outsource their parents’ care, they do, but passing on this duty can be a source of guilt and shame, especially for women who until recently usually served as caretakers within the family. A growing number of nursing homes, itinerant nurses, and healthcare aides are available to those who can afford them, but they often only partly ease the elderly’s sense of isolation and vulnerability. Akhtar’s casting and writer Ensia Mirza’s knowledge of eldercare establish a standard of realism that heightens viewers’ ability to identify with the narrative. The late Surekha Sikri, who plays Mrs. Malik, had in real life been partially paralyzed after a stroke, and her muscular atrophy and frailty are integral to her performance. Ensia Mirza generously shared with me that she had based this story on her own experiences as a young woman caring for her elderly grandmother, and these experiences have typically not appeared onscreen.

In one scene, Mrs. Malik recites the opening lines of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode to Intimations of Immortality’, which Sameera disregards as nonsense:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose….

Most upper-class Parsis (Zoroastrians) like Mrs. Malik would have had an elite English education, so her command of Wordsworth and Sameera’s ignorance of the same speak to their difference in class. However, when revisiting the original poem, I was struck by the lines that immediately follow those recited:

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

In my video essay, I add these ‘silent’ lines in which Wordsworth suggests how our maturity gradually obscures what we see so clearly at birth—nature’s beauty and divinity. These lines also gesture toward how Mrs. Malik and Sameera connect. Perceiving the potential in Sameera’s youth, Mrs. Malik inspires Sameera to acknowledge and exercise her independence, and Sameera develops the empathy to recognise Mrs. Malik’s humanity and the value of her wisdom. Their connection manifests in their intimate engagements with giving and receiving different forms of care throughout the film—as a mutual concern. The ‘missing’ ghost eventually reveals herself as the patient, who died alone three days earlier. But why would a ghost need corporeal care? The film suggests that the woman and the nurse each need care, and through this spectral communion, attend to each other—as only women can, in the absence of men.