How Stories Come to Me

Stories come to me out of thin air.

They come at their own will. I don’t really choose them. They come because of circumstances I find myself in, because of something I have witnessed, something I have felt, or something that has moved through me and refused to leave. They are deeply affected by the emotional landscape of my mind at the time they arrive.

They also seem to come to push me from one chapter of my life to the next.

Over time, the stories become extremely private and personal vehicles through which I navigate my own life. I make them, but in some way they also make me. They take me somewhere I need to go. They force me to look, to feel, to understand and to evolve.

Sometimes I feel like Shahrazad from The Arabian Nights -- the woman who saves her life by telling the king a new story every night, always leaving the story unfinished so that he will allow her to live another night to hear its ending. As long as there is another story to tell, there is another chapter of life ahead of me. And sometimes I wonder if, when I am done telling stories, it will be time for me to die.

The Salt Route came to me in a particularly profound way. While making The Difficult Bride, the film was almost physically inside my body. The emotional impact of making it was enormous. It was good, very, very good, but it was enormous. I came out of that experience carrying a very strong feeling in my heart: love, admiration, gratitude and respect for the ones who had been instrumental in making the film possible. That feeling stayed with me.

It left my heart unusually open and tender, almost like a place where something new could grow. After losing Abbu from the earthly realm, my heart had become an icy, hard place. Spring seemed almost impossible. And yet, somehow, while making The Difficult Bride, spring happened. The Salt Route grew out of that opening.

The first time I went to Lisbon, I arrived around midnight and went to Martim Moniz. I saw this little Bangladeshi corner of the city. It felt neglected and dirty. The men there seemed small, almost invisible, as if they were an unwanted part of the society around them.

Then the next morning I met the Tagus.

Something happened when I saw that river. I felt I had been there before. There was a strange familiarity that I had not experienced elsewhere in Europe. The Tagus is a mighty river that flows into the Atlantic. Portuguese sailors travelled from Lisbon through these waters and reached Goa in 1498, setting in motion encounters that would profoundly change our part of the world.

I went to the Museu de Marinha and saw history presented from the Portuguese side. Ships, voyages, maps and discoveries. And I began to think about all the history that is not written in museums.

Where is the history of the bodies that travelled through these waters? The people who were displaced, exploited, desired, abandoned? Where is the history carried by people who never had the power to write it down?

Perhaps history is not only written in museums. Perhaps it is also written in water, in nature and in the bodies of people who carry memory from one generation to another.

The body and nature hardly lie. They remember.

Around this time, I had a dream. I saw myself being thrown from a ship into the river. There were two of me. One was thrown into the water. The other stood and watched. I woke up feeling wronged, angry and helpless. I had a very strong feeling that I needed to externalize what I had seen. I didn’t know yet what the story was. But I knew there was something there.

Walking the streets of Lisbon for hours and spending long stretches of time beside the river, watching it and smelling it, kissing orange blossoms and other wild flowers. I was overwhelmed by the place and by a very strong desire to tell a story there.

It became the story of Nusrat, a woman from Sandwip whose life is shaped by the waters of Bengal and eventually takes her to Lisbon and the Tagus. Her journey moves through migration, undocumented work, restaurants and the Museu de Marinha, while opening into a much older connection between Bengal and Portugal.

The story was then visited by the figures of Saint Raphael and Khidr, and the Quranic idea of Majma al-Bahrayn, the meeting of two seas, where new knowledge is possible. These elements are allowing me to approach history through something less literal and more instinctive.

I actually don’t know if The Salt Route will ever get made. I don’t know if the right people who need to come together will come together. I don’t know if the circumstances will allow the film to find its way into the world. This story may never be made into a film, and that’s fine too. Not every story makes it into a film, but they are very precious nevertheless.

When we begin to make a film, we have almost nothing but our desire. We have an image, a feeling, a story that exists only inside our body. And then we have to somehow manifest an entire universe around it and invite other people into that universe. A film begins as something completely private. It lives inside you. And then you try to give it a life outside yourself.

As I travel from city to city delivering The Difficult Bride to the world, this film no longer belongs to me, I no longer reside in that universe. For now, The Salt Route is very much inside me. Now I live in the universe blasting out ‘where the streets have no name’ from the remastered edition of Joshua Tree. It is a desire, a dream, a feeling that began by the Tagus. I don’t know yet where it will take me, but for now I survive in that dream.

Rubaiyat Hossain is a film mentor, screenwriter, producer and director. She is a visiting faculty at Smith College where she teaches Gender, Film and South Asia Studies.