Prepared as you are for what’s to come at the end of A Fly on the Wall, a beautiful chronicle of the last days of a man, the final moments can still give the illusion of fiction. This can’t be real, you think, when on the screen a 60-year-old man called Chika Kapadia sits comfortably on a couch and jokes about Parle G biscuits, even as he knows he will take a drink in half-an-hour and die within minutes.
Chika had asked for it – a physician-assisted suicide – as well as the filming of his death by a dear friend. Yet, in those final moments, could he not have had second doubts or a meltdown, or at least a teardrop on his face. His calmness is disturbingly unreal, as he takes his drink, recites Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods, murmurs ‘I can feel it now’, lets his head fall back and dies. And yet, magical.
That death can be so beautiful, that the final moments of a person can be filled with happy moments in the company of friends and family in place of pain and suffering, is the message Chika wanted to convey. When he learnt he had stage four cancer in May 2022 and realised it would only get worse, he booked himself a physician-assisted suicide in Dignitas, a nonprofit organisation in Switzerland. Ten days before his date with death in August of that year, he asked his friend and filmmaker Shonali Bose, who told humane stories in her films such as Amu, Margarita with a Straw, The Sky is Pink, if she could come and shoot his death.
Shonali does it with the heart of a friend and the head of a filmmaker, letting her co-director Nilesh Maniyar make the tougher decisions.
“Nilesh, Chika, and I are very aware that in a country like India where the right to live with dignity does not exist… how can there be the right to die with dignity. Of course, it is an enormous privilege and that is why it was Chika’s dream and vision and passion, whether it is in a small village or town or any place you live in, you should have the right to die with dignity and peacefully so you don’t just build up massive hospital bills and your family goes into debt and you have to die a horrible ugly death,” Shonali says to her audience at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK).
At noon on August 23, her film had just been screened. A certain stubbornness takes over Shonali when the filmmaker in her wakes up and has to take a call. She begs and fights with the organisers to march to the front of the hall and talk to the audience, because, she says, the whole idea of coming to Kerala has been that. She is not unkind, she thanks the organisers profusely for letting her, when they had other plans.
But the film, the filmmakers, and most importantly the protagonist of the film have a purpose – start conversations on death. Only Dignitas allowed access to anyone in the world, the other centres in Canada and the UK were open only to its citizens. Chika, who had been a successful electrical engineer, had the means to go to Zurich and book himself into Dignitas, but there should be affordable alternatives for all, Shonali says.
She had not planned to be in the film, but at the suggestion of Nilesh and her editor Tushar Ghogale, she shot herself and some of her moments with Chika, thinking that it could be a useful video diary. But later on, after Chika’s passing, they convinced her to keep footage of herself in the film, and these become some of the most emotional moments. She is a friend too, close enough to agree to do something this taxing for Chika, but breaks down in her conversations with him, in the unexpected conflicts that arise.
Chika had wanted only well-prepared interviews, where he came off as handling his illness well. He did not want the vulnerable moments in the morning, before he took his pain medications and felt better, before he dressed up and looked as healthy as the next person. In most of the film, he is that guy who walks cheerfully into rooms, sips beer with his friends, laughs easily and reminisces about the old days. But Shonali wanted it to be personal and they’d fight over it. In one scene, he can be heard raising his voice to turn off the camera.
She tells her audience that she did let him know that she was going to keep all of that footage, where Chika is caught off-guard – all the shots that were honest and interesting.
She touches on the point of his unusual, almost disturbing calmness in the face of death – Chika was performing. “Chika performed his death. I say this with the highest regard for my friend, not putting him down. By choosing the mechanism of performance it helped him overcome that enormous fear of taking that last sip,” she says. He even reminds the woman who hands him the drink that she had to ask him a question, as part of the procedure – if he knew this would kill him, if he was ready.
Unlike Chika, Shonali lets her emotions pour out in the film. In one scene she is on a glider and telling her guide about her son Ishan’s death at the age of 16 and how it had made her accept death as part of life. She identifies with Chika’s family when they say they did not want a film camera shooting his final moments, they did not want their grief to be dishonest. But when Chika postpones his first date with death by a week, they leave, and only Shonali stays back.
“When his doctor finds him healthy and asks him if he shall push the date by a week, Chika’s only concern was if he would get another date, since the blue house [as the Dignitas room is called] is always booked. He did not want the date to be too far away, his whole idea was to beat being in the hospital,” Shonali says.
The date it finally happened was August 23, and on the same day three years later, the film was screened at the IDSFFK. It wasn’t planned. That is Chika’s doing, Shonali jokes.
Only, you’d wish Chika was able to realise the final item on his checklist – to cry. You hope he might have – in the privacy of his solitude or with his close ones. It’s fine if it is not in film. Clearly, he wanted his lasting image to be of a man welcoming death with a smile and a poem.
Shonali goes a step further, slips in a clip of his standup comedy act from years ago, when the room was filled with laughter, just the way Chika would have liked.