By Ila Ananya

If you start watching the pilot of the new web series The ‘Other’ Love Story, having read the numerous articles announcing it as a lesbian love story, and expect to be taken straight in the middle of the romance, you’ll have to hold your horses. The story, written and directed by Roopa Rao, who has co-directed Kannada and Tamil feature films like Vishnuvardhana and Kurai Ondrum Illai, takes time to unfold. The first episode, called ‘The Meeting’, is 10 minutes long, and we only see Aadya (Spoorthi Gumaste) and Aachal (Shweta Gupta) talk to each other for about four of those 10 minutes.

Set in Bangalore in 1998, the series is set up to reflect the late 1990s, not only with landlines and small doctors’ clinics, but also in its pace. It’s nice, because you know that there will be more — it’s as much a love story as it is about old Bangalore, and friendships.

The opening scenes of the series set the tone for the first episode. We see Aachal sitting in a Tata Sumo between her mother and aunt on the way to Yeshwantpur railway station, and in the background, you can hear Anuradha Paudwal singing, “Hum tere bin kahin rah nahin paate, tum nahin aate toh hum mar jaate”. With that one fragment of background score, Rao transports us smoothly to 1991 (Paudwal sang the song in the Sadak soundtrack).

Throughout the first episode, the men are silent and unimportant – not even hovering irritatingly in the background – and the women are doing the talking. Aadya’s father is an extension of the furniture and while Aachal’s brother has more to do, all he radiates is his “extra” status. Early in the episode, he tells his mother that Aachal is crying at the station. He doesn’t seem to have it in him to talk to her himself. At the end of the episode, in the middle of a flashback, he is seen sitting on a bed while Aachal irritatingly feeds him cough syrup, saying, “Muh kholo, muh kholo (Open your mouth),” as though he’s a toddler rather than a teenager. The episode is propelled entirely by the women, who are given time to develop. We only know them through each other or individually, with no relation to the men.

The ‘Other’ Love Story is crowdfunded — Rao says that finding producers for the series was tougher than she had ever anticipated it to be. She knew she wanted two girls who looked of college age to play the roles of Aadya and Aachal, and so she approached college students. Those who seemed to suit the role had parents who said they couldn’t be part of such a series. “Some producers would ask us if it was porn and how many sex scenes it had,” Rao said. Another producer who had agreed to be a part of series suddenly disappeared mid- correspondence.When he returned, he said his family had found out about the series and didn’t want him to go ahead with this.

Finally, it was produced by Harini Daddala.

But what made everybody so hesitant to produce this series? Were they only afraid of showing physical intimacy between two women? Rao says she hadn’t planned to have any sex scenes anyway, so that shouldn’t have been an issue. “I grew up in the ’90s and loved Yash Raj films,” said Rao. “It’s going to take a long time for them [Aachal and Aadya] to realise they’re in love; I wanted to explore that slow journey of discovering first love.”

In the pilot, we see Aachal and Aadya meet outside a doctor’s clinic, and a quiet Aadya is awkward in front of the more extroverted Aachal. She almost grudgingly gives Aachal her number – a landline number – telling Aachal she isn’t used to talking on the phone much. When Aachal calls her anyway (after 10 pm!), and invites her home, Aadya says, “I don’t really go to anyone’s home without a reason. My mom’s a strict teacher, and she doesn’t really like me hanging out and all that.”

We’re shown the Kannada household that is Aadya’s. Before we know anything about how lost she feels, we hear a slow Kannada song and see the pale pink walls of her house. Then we notice her sitting on a bed in their small living room reading a statistics textbook, where the wooden side table has a white cloth, and the shelf behind her has dusty-looking awards and fat textbooks. There’s also the all-too-familiar Bangalore Press calendar on the wall (Aachal’s house has a Hindi equivalent of this). Aadya’s mother is sitting on the other side of the living room correcting school papers, and the first Kannada we hear spoken is by her mother asking her to total the papers she is correcting.

There’s something so endearingly ordinary about this exchange and it’s with this sense of normalcy that Rao underscores how expansive the changes have been in the past two decades, in the way that we approach and engage with each other; particularly as women.

Ask Rao about  the series, and she laughs and says her hair has gone grey, and that she hasn’t slept in months. Rao wrote the story 10 years ago, and decided that it now seemed like the right time to make The ‘Other’ Love Story. Most of the difficulties that they faced once they began shooting involved making it seem like it was set in 1998 — “We couldn’t have WhatsApp beeps in the background, or phones ringing,” she said. The other challenge was making Gumaste and Gupta comfortable with each other in the intimate scenes. The camera has a keen eye for discomfort, Rao pointed out.

Rao has given interviews in which she has described the series as being about “two human beings falling in love who happen to be girls”; “It’s about mainstreaming a story like this,” she says. What she wanted to do was to show the love. “Physical intimacy for me should be an extension of love, of what is happening inside,” she said, after explaining that she finds identity tags like those related to sexuality smothering. That’s why she is careful to not call the series a “lesbian love story”.

In showing us all this, the series doesn’t restrict the women to types like other movies on lesbian love seem to quickly do — remember Girlfriend, with Isha Koppikar and Amrita Arora, where Koppikar played the psycho lesbian who falls out of a window and dies? Or even Khanum, from Margarita with a Straw, who, after everything else in the lovely movie, tells us a story of coming out to her parents that we have heard in movies multiple times? The ‘Other’ Love Story seems to choose to give these women the time to tell their stories, so it doesn’t seem to matter that we only get a glimpse of Aadya and Aachal together, because everything that we’ve seen of the world around them has come together to make these women who they are, to guide the way the both see and present themselves.

At the end of the episode, both Aachal and Aadya, with their eyes lowered, allow themselves a hint of a smile. That’s when you know that for all the paraphernalia that might fill the screen, it’s their love story and no one else matters.