Sleep, interrupted

If it is human to want a proper place for sleeping, to be deprived of such a place must  mean becoming less than human. Indeed, we are 'conditioned' to sleep in a familiar and known space. This underscores what it means to be a person. But when someone is unable to find a place to sleep, the line that separates the human from the animal becomes nebulous. This realisation haunted me after watching Shaunak Sen's documentary film, Cities of Sleep. It is a superbly imagined and crafted film on what afflicts the poor in some of the most neglected corners of New Delhi's urban landscape. The night lives of the city's homeless are brought into focus as their liminal existence and choices are explored as unobtrusively as possible. The subtle background score lends a melancholic touch that goes well with the film's disturbing themes and the uncomfortable questions it poses.

Ranjeet, a caretaker at a sleep shelter, philosophises in the film, "It's not just about the dearth of money. Poverty means you can't become fully human." This statement goes to the heart of the problem. When you are poor, you have less of everything that comprises the idea of life. Cities of Sleep shows us the world of sleep shelters, where the human and the animal can enter each other's territory and blur the distinctions between the two. There is a telling scene in the film where a dog is discovered sleeping in one of the shelters on a wintry night. But the caretaker kicks the dog out saying, "the place is not meant for dogs". The sleep shelter claims its 'human' territory and excludes the animal. The dog is an uncomfortable presence for the caretaker, perhaps because its state resembles the state of the people sleeping there. Once the dog is kicked out, through an act of control and power, the space is reclaimed for humans. It is a similar act of control that often keeps other people, who don't meet the shelter's standards for admittance, out in the cold as well. The same attitude allows the law, and the policemen enforcing it, to banish human beings into the animalised corners of the city.