Revisiting Shoojit Sircar’s October in the literal month of fall will not sound bland to those who regularly stop in their way when they glance upon a Jasmine flower. For them, October is a symbol of hope and new beginnings.
It’s the first day of October. I open my windows and see fallen leaves on roads, people walking by and going about their days. Fall has begun, I tell myself. On days, it feels tiring to believe that a new beginning exists even while simultaneously taking place.
For most people, significant moments do not give them a monthly reminder like a change in their calendars. These moments happen.
They happen when people are going on mundane tasks like working in their tedious job or cribbing about their unapproachable employer or maybe just randomly pondering over trivialities over chai with their colleagues.
For Dan Walia, his coming-of-age arc begins following events of a New Year’s Eve when a girl, Shiuli, falls off the hotel roof and goes into a coma.
The protagonist of the 2018 film October, Dan, starts as a man-child and a perpetually brooding hotel management trainee who wears the name tag “Understudy”.
The easiest way to understand his character is that he is like that kid in the classroom who is annoyed daily with homework, so he uses emotion-oriented coping strategies and performs poorly.
Dan takes no joy in doing laundry, tucking bed sheets, and swatting houseflies for people with big money at this luxurious five-star hotel. He constantly gets scolded by his supervisor and does not have an amicable relationship with his fellow staff members.
Shiuli Iyer is a disciplined and poised intern at the same hotel. Aside from their professional relationship, Dan and Shiuli have nothing in common, and they never even have interacted properly.
While hanging out with her colleagues on a New Year’s Eve, Shiuli casually asks about the whereabouts of Dan. The next moment she slips off the hotel roof and gets injured so severely that she goes into a coma.
For Dan, it would just be another tragic event in his professional circle if it were not for her last words – “Where is Dan?”. This incident leads to a chain of events significantly impacting his life.
Dan does not know why Shiuli took his name, but he knows she has not died yet. He constantly visits her in the hospital and engages in the uncharted territory of “taking care” of another human being.
The intensity at which Dan gets emotionally affected by Shiuli baffles everyone. His family and friends question him, but he does not have anything to say except, “how is it that you are not getting any affected?”.
Dan’s story is not conventional, and there is no adrenaline-fueled life-changing arc playing out. He is just a romantic with a lot of tenderness and hope.
Juhi Chaturvedi, the writer of the 2018 film, said for Dan, “If there is something called unconditional love, something called surrender, something called ‘purity of emotions,'” something like when you are doing things that to knowing somewhere within you that there is nothing you are going to get in return, she says, “Dan is the kind of character who will force you to believe in that kind of love.”
He loses out on many things but also gains new experiences simultaneously. His story of growth moves slowly but progressively as he evolves with the grief.
Despite being shown as having a hard time getting along with people, he forms an emotional bond with Shiuli’s mother and siblings, who were just total strangers.
Dan also grows as he moves through this beautiful world of comfortable silences and Jasmine flowers created by Shoojit Sircar.
The Night Jasmine flower blooming in October holds a special significance throughout the movie. In the last scene, Shiuli’s mother tells Dan about how Shiuli got her name due to her fondness for this flower, also called Shiuli.
When Dan keeps the Shiuli plant with him in the end, it is as much a symbol of his growth as his unconditional love for Shiuli.
