The long walk home

The precarious existence of millions of people in the unorganised sector was thrown into sharp relief by the lockdown

Taxi driver Ghulam Hasan (Farooq Shaikh) — the protagonist of Muzaffar Ali-directed Gaman (1978) — gets a letter from his wife Khairun (Smita Patil), asking him to return home. His mother has had an accident, injuring her hipbone, and has been advised by doctors to go to the big hospital in Lucknow. Ghulam is a taxi driver in Bombay (now Mumbai) and his wife and mother are back in his ancestral village near Badaun in Uttar Pradesh. From the midpoint of the film’s narrative, when Ghulam gets the letter, till the end, the only quest the taxi driver has is