When Anu covers her fear, Mumbai keeps watching

In Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, a young Hindu nurse disguises herself in a blue burqa—not for faith, but for survival—revealing how Mumbai’s everyday spaces still demand secrecy when intimacy crosses religious lines.

By the time Shiaz finds the right moment, the danger is already built into the city’s air. In Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light (2024). when Anu slips into a blue burqa to meet her Muslim lover. it isn’t framed as romantic rebellion or religious conversion. It’s tactical camouflage—an answer to the simple, terrifying idea that a single sighting could end everything.

“You know my neighbourhood, right? If anybody sees you like this, we’re screwed,” Shiaz tells her.

The film’s world is Mumbai: long celebrated as liberal and cosmopolitan. a place where people from different religious and linguistic communities are supposed to rub shoulders without consequence. Kapadia doesn’t deny that proximity exists—trains, hospitals, apartment blocks and crowded streets keep pulling strangers into contact. But All We Imagine as Light insists on the cost of that contact. It shows how socio-religious cleavages don’t disappear just because people share the same city. They travel through everyday routines, informal surveillance, and the moral expectations carried by neighbours, roommates, supervisors, and colleagues.

Anu is a young Hindu nurse. originally from Kerala. part of the large Malayali community that has long supplied labour to Mumbai’s hospitals and service sector. She is suspended between family loyalties and the possibilities urban life seems to offer. Away from her family but not entirely free from their influence. she has to manage the pressures of work. friendship. and desire in a city that is at once liberating and constraining.

In a conventional romantic reading. Anu’s transformation—from a recognizable Hindu Malayali woman into a woman “undistinguishable” while wearing a burqa—might look like a poetic masquerade. The film’s point is sharper. The burqa is a temporary refuge from the social gaze. It lets her move through Mumbai without drawing attention to a relationship that must be pursued discreetly. Intimacy, in this telling, can’t simply happen because two people want it. It requires logistics, timing, and concealment.

Shiaz understands this instantly. Earlier, when Shiaz asks whether she owns a burqa, Anu responds with surprise: “Why should I have a burqa?” His answer is immediate: without it, “there’s no plan.”

The plan becomes possible because of another detail that feels small until you realize how much it costs. Shiaz has found a rare opportunity—he has relatives at a wedding. and that means he and Anu can spend time together away from the prying eyes of a crowd. The city’s scrutiny doesn’t need formal laws. It runs on attention.

Inside the hospital, the story offers a glimpse of how equality can seem real. Anu’s flat mate Prabha is also her supervisor. In the hospital’s fluorescent corridors, patients and care workers from different regions, religions, and social backgrounds temporarily share space. Professional roles impose a degree of equality. Uniforms flatten visible distinctions. The routines of care create fleeting complicity among individuals whose lives may rarely overlap outside the workplace.

But those brief institutional harmonies don’t extend into the deeper textures of private life. Anu and Prabha share an apartment and understand obligations, social behaviour, and freedom very differently. Prabha struggles to accept Anu’s determination to pursue a relationship whose difficulties seem obvious to her. Anu. in turn. cannot understand why Prabha remains emotionally bound to a husband who has long since disappeared from her daily life.

Even their conversations mark the fracture line. When Anu remarks that she could never marry a stranger. Prabha’s response lands like a moral counterargument: “sometimes people close to us become strangers as well”. Neither woman rejects the other outright, and neither fully understands the moral world behind the choices. What emerges is a harder problem than prejudice in the abstract: a subtler difficulty in understanding lives organized around opposed emotional and moral horizons.

That gap doesn’t stay inside the apartment. It spills into social space through the ordinary channels of gossip and surveillance. When Shiaz enters the picture, Anu treats the relationship as a matter of personal choice and desire. Shiaz is more attuned to the social realities surrounding it. When Anu is scrolling through photographs of prospective husbands her family has sent her. Shiaz asks: “If I used a Hindu name. would your father send it to you?”.

Then comes the informal scrutiny that makes the burqa necessary. A colleague urges Prabha to “keep an eye” on Anu because she is seeing a Muslim man and everyone is gossiping about her. Prabha dismisses it as none of her concern. The colleague insists: “But she’s your roommate. You should keep an eye on her.”.

This isn’t a scene of dramatic confrontation. The film’s tension is in how social disapproval moves through ordinary social ties rather than formal prohibitions. It circulates through roles that sound harmless—roommate, supervisor, colleague—until they become a monitoring network. The burden is not only on Anu’s body. but on the people around her who are expected to notice. interpret. and respond.

The burqa, then, becomes more than disguise. It turns into a statement about what intimacy costs in a pluralist society that still withholds trust. Anu and Shiaz aren’t separated by walls, laws, or distance. They are close enough for trains and hospitals to carry them into each other’s orbit. Yet being together still demands improvization—concealment, maneuver, and careful timing.

In Kapadia’s Mumbai, the film’s concern isn’t classical segregation. It’s the way boundaries persist inside everyday spaces of contact. Proximity generates anxiety as readily as familiarity, and those who live nearest aren’t always those who understand best.

A decade of “global village” promises has trained many viewers to expect plural cities to behave like they look on postcards—easy. borderless. inevitably harmonious. But All We Imagine as Light pushes back against that comforting logic. The burqa scene isn’t a fantasy of conversion or a romantic trick. It is a reminder that the search for intimacy still has to contend with socio-religious cleavages. even in a metropolis celebrated for liberalism and cosmopolitanism.

And in the end, the film leaves you with a question that doesn’t feel theoretical. It feels like Anu walking out of her apartment, knowing exactly what can happen if the wrong person sees her.

How does one continue to share a world with those whose histories. loyalties and futures appear increasingly at odds with one’s own?. Kapadia’s answer is built from the smallest motions: the everyday spaces where people keep encountering each other anyway—apartment blocks. hospitals. workplaces. streets—and the ordinary ways they make room. or refuse to make room. for the lives next door.

Payal Kapadia All We Imagine as Light Mumbai cinema Indian independent film burqa Hindu Muslim romance intimacy informal surveillance religion Kerala nurse hospitals cultural identity