Iqran Rasheed | Aadat (Habit) / 2019

appointment with the impossible

by Douglas Messerli

 

Iqran Rasheed (screenwriter and director) Aadat (Habit) / 2019 [13 minutes]

 

You might say that in Pakistani director Iqran Rasheed’s short film AADT (in Urdu), nothing actually happens. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, yet a great deal does happen and what it says about contemporary Pakistani LGBTQ culture is totally devastating.

    A young man, Ali (Abrahim Alavi) sits in a busy street cafe, talking with a friend who loans him money and leaves. Ali makes a phone call saying that he’d made an appointment for today, asking if the person can still meet. It’s clear that the appointment is still on, and he reports that he will be “there” in a half an hour.

    “There,” as it happens in a long trip through a littered alley into a derelict structure that you might describe as a kind of motel, where the “friend” who has met him, Tariq (Rahil Siddiqui) tells him to hand over his identification to the clerk. The price 600, Pakistani rupees (the translation describing it simply as “bucks”). For that he is handed the keys. He looks nervous, and has already asked whether it’s safe, of which he has been assured it is.

     The clerk says he will not leave a name, but they that should leave soon. The hall to the room itself unpleasantly askew, and they must climb several stairs to get to the room which looks as if in putrid upheaval.

      Tariq signals the boy to sit on one of the beds, suggesting he at least take off his backpack, and offering him a cigarette, which Ali refuses.

       After a long quiet period where Tariq smokes, the boy still sitting uncomfortably upon the bed, his would-be sexual partner turns to ask, “How long have you had this habit?” the boy, taken aback, responding “What habit?”

        “This.”

        “Haven’t done anything before.”

        “And what about you?” the boy shifts the focus.”

        “I get customers from time to time.”

        When the boy asks about condoms, Tariq jokes, “Will you get pregnant?”

         “The diseases,” answers the boy vaguely.

         “I have been doing this since I was 15. I never get diseases. Besides I wash with soap.”

      We realize we are in a 21st century city which lives in another era. And clearly any fears this virginal boy has had are by this time expanding by the instant. 

         When Tariq asks how much money the boy has, he answers seven hundred.

Evidently it is not the agreed upon sum, but Ali reminds him he is only a student and that is all he has.

          So what’s the hurry? Why doesn’t he wait until he has the money?

        Even getting up the bravery to meet with someone with whom to have gay sex is clearly not enough in this case. Yet Tariq relents, telling the boy to give him the money now, before sex.

         “Shall we start?” begins Tariq as he moves to sit beside Ali, the boy rubbing his hands together nervously. Finally the prostitute puts his hand on the boy’s knee and leans in to kiss him, the boy leaning a bit toward him as well, before quickly moving back, asking him to wash out his mouth.

        Tariq does so and returns, but Ali continues to look up the windows nervously. “Don’t worry no one will come, nothing will happen.”

        He finally moves to a hug, but can go no further, Tariq pulling away in frustration. Tariq finally asks the boy to stand, loosens his belt and bends for what appears will be a blow job.

          But at the very moment the police arrive, pounding at the door, “Open up!”

They slap Tariq and frisk Ali, demanding to know what his name is and why he is there. Is his family Muslim, and what would they do if they knew he was there?

        Ali denies everything, anything. They take the money he has given to Tariq, and escort him out, one of the policemen wondering where these “faggots” pick up such habits. He renters the room in which Tariq remains, the screen going black. We hear what appears to be the sound of a zipper.

        This would be hilarious if it were not so very sad. In Ali’s world even the attempt to explore one’s sexuality is thwarted, the “habit,” as homosexuality is thought to be, something that is nearly impossible to even acquire. Desire is quelled until one conforms to something in which he or she will be locked without love. If homosexuality is a house through whose closed doors you may not enter, heterosexuality is a prison through whose open doors you must.

        This is a world beyond homophobia since homosexuals are not even permitted to discover their sexual identity.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).