A family in Jammu City plans a trip to Kashmir. It is not easy for a number of reasons. What we see here isn’t something dramatic, but the very ordinary, day-to-day signs of what it means to be displaced from one’s home. That’s the quick review. A longer analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Batt Koch (The Lost Lane) is directed by first-time filmmakers Ankit Wali and Siddarth Koul, and it was screened at the New York Indian Film Festival this year. From the inside, the joint family that we see in the story is like any other joint family in any other part of India. The grandfather and grandmother keep squabbling, which may also be a way of finding someone to talk to when everyone else is busy with their own life. Their son Rajesh, played by Anil Chingari Koul, is the breadwinner. When we first see him, he has come back from a tiring day at the office. His wife Neelam, played by Kusum Tickoo, is a homemaker. She has her hands full feeding the family and making sure that their teenage daughter is “following the rules”, like coming home on time. The daughter has a boyfriend she hasn’t told her family about. There’s also a son.
But this isn’t just any other family. They live in Jammu City, and they are Kashmiri Pandits who have fled from their home in Anantnag. This is a story of displacement and adaptation. MK Raina plays the grandfather, Poshkar Nath Koul, and we see his memories of being a postman in Anantnag. One of the directors’ grandfathers was indeed a postman, but this profession makes sense in another way. A postman is the person who connects people with those who live outside. And now, in the present day, many of these connections are cut. What remains with this former postman are the bits of Kashmiri that his daughter-in-law speaks and the Kashmiri songs that she sings in the kitchen. The grandchildren know the language, but they are seen conversing in Hindi. Instead of dramatic displays of what separation from the homeland can do to a family, we get these very ordinary signs of things being okay – and yet, not entirely okay.
The plot, so to speak, gets going when the grandmother expresses her wish to go to Kashmir, for a visit. The film makes us see that this is not an easy thing, for this desire to return to her birthplace is tied up with the question of whether it is safe to go back. This is not about Sharmila Tagore wearing a traditional outfit and sitting in a shikara in Kashmir Ki Kali. This is about a very real threat that looms over the desire to revisit your home. After a series of events, when the family does manage to go to Anantnag, it’s again nothing dramatic. What happens is something very ordinary, something that used to be taken for granted when the grandfather was a postman. But in this ordinariness lies something extraordinary. He may no longer recall what time of the day it is, but he remembers his postal route. He remembers every single name, every single house. Batt Koch, finally, is a memory piece. We learn to adapt and survive, but there is only one home that truly lives on in our hearts.
