On food, intimacy, and In the Mood for Love

cw: discussion of ableist language

Dinner is a very intimate thing. Anyone can go for coffee or a drink, but you agree to have dinner with someone, that’s different. It has a meaning. You really see people when you watch them eat – Wong Kar Wai

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I started cooking as a young boy, watching and mimicking what my mother was doing. You could say it was my way of connecting with her, trying to be a part of her world, even if I was not conscious of that at the time. When you are brought up in a culture as I was – a child growing up in India, where parents are placed on a kind of divine pedestal and you fear them – it becomes easier to connect with your parents by participating in activities they perform, rather than just having normal, everyday conversations.

Over time, making food became very much my thing, rather than an emotional anchor between my mother and I. I truly loved food. Not just that, I loved the feeling of loving food. Whether it was eating by myself or preparing a dish for someone else. The happiness that you witness on another’s face in that split-second before they are ready to devour their fish kebabs is indescribable. I obsessed over remembering the favourite cuisines and food choices of the people I cared about. I made sure I got the particular details right: how was their palette? More salt or less? Add more chillies or go easy? I would make a note of everything. It was my way of proclaiming unconditional love; remembering someone’s favourite dish and making it the way they liked it.

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Much before I became a film snob, I knew In the Mood for Love would be a film that would stay with me. Now, I can go on this grand discourse about how Wong Kar Wai is one of my favourite auteurs, or how Christopher Doyle’s framing imbues nostalgia, or that I’m a huge sucker for dramas which hinge around unrequited love, but the truth is a lot simpler than that. I was around fifteen when I first encountered the film and that’s when I started piecing together what intimacy as a human experience must be about. And, for me, it all comes back to food. After all, no one else better than Wong Kar Wai understands that the seemingly insignificant, down-to-earth reality of food, and sharing it with someone, can be as potent, sensual and fulfilling as any other act of intimacy. I remember feeling understood. With time, I’d learn to mimic all kinds of other critical appraisals – extremely valid ones – justifying why Wong Kar Wai’s movies appealed to my senses. But those are all peripheral things. In the Mood for Love will always be special to me because it laid the foundation of helping a young Indian boy articulate something he wasn’t sure could be articulated.

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I remember things. I remember the first time I heard the phrase ‘Cerebral Palsy’. I didn’t know how to spell it or what it meant. But I remember the tone in which it was uttered. And I knew from the tone that this was an important phrase – that it would come up again and again in my life.

I remember the first time someone called me ‘retarded’. I remember the person’s face. I remember what day it was. I remember what clothes they were wearing. I remember how they had whispered the word, hoping I didn’t hear it, but I had. I remember coming home to look up the meaning of the word. I remember learning the language through which I was to be ridiculed.

I remember the first time someone began the sentence with, ‘if you don’t mind me asking’, and then proceeded to ask me if everything was in working order down there, pointing to my pelvic area. I remember them telling me it was meant as a joke. I remember telling myself, that it was okay, after all it was only a joke.

I remember all sorts of things. Random trivia. Like Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote the ghazal guloñ meñ rañg bhare on 29th January 1954, in Rawalpindi’s Montgomery prison. In the song Aayega Aayega, the word ‘aayega’ is repeated twenty-nine times. But the human mind is a funny beast. It jumbles up all that you remember and forms new and inventive combinations of punishing you. Excuse me, don’t mind me asking, but can you tell me. Stop. Meaning of retarded (adj): slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development. Stop. Aayega, aayega, aayega, aayega aanewaala. Stop. Chale bhī aao ki gulshan kā kārobār chale. Stop. Cerebr—STOP.

Managing a physical disability like CP stretches your emotional bandwidth on a daily basis – so much that the whole epiphany about sexuality fell by the wayside. Just the thought of how to physically get through the day always seemed so urgent, so necessary to tackle, that everything else became secondary in comparison.

Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just a rationalisation after the fact, an excuse, a copout? Somewhere, deep down, I was afraid to admit to myself what I knew but couldn’t articulate when I first saw In the Mood for Love. Knowing that there was such a massive stigma around people with disabilities not being recognised as sexually active beings in their own right who experience attraction with sexual needs, desires and wants. I didn’t want to perpetuate that. So, of course I felt sexual attraction. I had to. There was no other way. Not after everything I’d been through.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Epiphanies only happen in hindsight, in the memory vault; where you can rewind, play, and pause moments at your own pace, allowing you to construct your own narrative. Real life as it unfolds doesn’t afford us that that luxury.

What I do know is that I’m tired. Physically. Emotionally. Mentally. I’m tired of forcing myself to feel. Something. Anything. I’m tired of being tormented by the irrational fear that somehow I am unable to understand something so basic about what it is to be human that most others seem to organically understand. I’m tired of the self-loathing, of constantly wondering how cruel I must be for not being sexually attracted to someone, when they can be sexually attracted to me.

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The original conception of In The Mood for Love differed significantly from the final, released film. Originally, Tony Leung’s character intended to lure Maggie Cheung’s character into bed in Singapore as a form of warped revenge. In fact, Wong fully intended to include this scene, but when the production ran out of time to make the Cannes submission deadline, Wong improvised the metaphysical finale that unfolds in Angkor Wat. The entire trajectory and emotional impact of the film changed because the film was promised to a festival. I wonder how the young fifteen year old boy would have reacted to the original conception of the film had that been released. Would it have had the same impact? (True to being a Wong tragic, I come back to a ‘what if’ scenario. How typical, sigh!)

Instead, this is the film we get, and this is the story we have. As Wong Kar Wai says, “if you are paying attention, you realise that every story can go in so many directions. And each of those directions can also go in many more directions.”

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References: The quotes from Wong Kar Wai in this personal essay are excerpted from ‘Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps: 37 Views of Wong Kar Wai’, in ‘WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai’, written by Wong Kar Wai and John Powers, Rizzoli International Publications, New York (2016).