Twinn Swan

How many little nuances, how many small details, how many of the inner unspoken words that are given a voice are utterly and sorely missed when a literary work is transformed from the page and to the screen.

When voice must change to a moving image, much is lost, but much is also gained.

As those of you reading this blog would know, I have been indulging in the Indian TV series Stories by Rabindranath Tagore on Netflix. One of the stories that was brought to the moving image is: The Cabuliwallah (The Fruitseller from Kabul).

The story is that of an unlikely friendship that blossoms between an older gentleman and a little girl by the name of Mimi. Young Mimi is a bit of a chatterbox and her father is an author in the midst of penning his first novel. How wondrous that scene and that concept seemed to me: to have a father who is a man of letters!

Anyways, with time–and with treats of nuts and fruits–the friendship between Cabuliwallah and Mimi begins to grow and blossom. The mother, however, cautions her husband against the friendship between her daughter and the stranger from Kabul. She cites the usual age-old concerns: child kidnapping, slavery and so on. Regardless of the wife’s concerns, the father allows the relationship between Cabuliwallah and Mimi to grow and to flourish.

It seemed unlikely that two friends, so far apart in age, would subside into their old laughter and their old jokes. But that is exactly what happened day after day.

At the very end, however, the viewer discovers that it was the memory of his own daughter that kept Cabuliwallah coming back to speak to and to play with Mimi day after day. All he had as a memory of his daughter back in Kabul was the impression of two ink-smeared hands that had been laid flat on the paper.

The friendship of Cabuliwallah and Mini is born of a man who deeply missed his own little girl and had found ‘a replacement’ for the bond he sorely missed in someone else’s child.

But things change as they do with the annals of time. While the age gap remained the same, the child that Cabuliwallah loved and cherished as his own daughter became an adult. She was now a bride-to-be, about to embark on the biggest milestone of a traditional Indian woman’s life.

Due to the Cabuliwallah’s long absence from Kabul–which also included a stint in jail–he would neither find the same ‘home’ nor the same ‘daughter’ that he once knew and adored.

The short story made me see that the person and the relationship that we yearn for may cease to exist. Time inevitably demands that our relationships undergo the changes necessary for their station in life.

Even when the Cabuliwallah returns to his hometown, he would find an entirely new daughter whom he would have to make friends with anew. But just before Cabuliwallah returned home, he received a remarking blessing from a fellow father:

Go back to your own daughter in your own country… May the happiness of your meeting bring good fortune to my child.

It seems, then, that the relationship between the two fathers had not changed.