Lust Stories, and Whose Want Gets a Hearing

Near the end of Lust Stories, a young schoolteacher climaxes in her in-laws’ living room, in front of the whole family, because her husband’s grandmother has picked up a remote control without knowing what it operates. Karan Johar, who directed that story, lays the title song of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, his own grand family drama of 2001, over the moment. It is the scene everyone talked about, and it was built to be talked about.

The scene that stays is quieter, and it comes second. A woman who cleans a bachelor’s flat in Mumbai is making tea for two families who have come together to arrange his marriage. She serves his parents. She serves the other parents. Then she carries tea into his bedroom, where he sits beside the young woman he is going to marry, on the bed where, on ordinary days, he sleeps with the woman carrying the tea. She serves them too, and goes back to her work. When she has finished, his mother offers her a sweet to celebrate the engagement, and she takes it, and eats it.

She says almost nothing through any of this. One reviewer at the time counted barely two lines for her in the whole story; another, barely two words. She does not need more. Everything the story has to say is in the tea.

Lust Stories reached Netflix in June 2018 as four directors’ answer to a question mainstream Hindi cinema had long left to its vamps: what does a woman want, and what happens when she says so? It was praised for its frankness, and the praise was earned. But set its four stories side by side and something else comes into view. All four women want; the film never doubts that. What differs is whether the want gets a hearing, from whom, and at what price. A lecturer explains herself at length to the camera and to almost nobody in her life. A banker makes her husband listen, in a room she chooses. A bride’s want becomes the whole family’s business before her husband has ever listened. The woman who cleans the flat is heard by no one at all.

That is the argument here. The frankness of Lust Stories is real, and it is rationed, and the ration follows power: who teaches whom, who pays whom, whose house it is. The film’s quietest story is the one that knows this best.

The record first. Lust Stories is a Hindi-language anthology of four short films, about two hours in all, directed in turn by Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar, and produced by Ronnie Screwvala and Ashi Dua. The same four directors had made Bombay Talkies in 2013, an anthology celebrating a hundred years of Indian cinema. This one went straight to Netflix, on 15 June 2018, and it was nominated for two International Emmy Awards, for best TV movie or miniseries and for Radhika Apte as best actress. In Japan it streams under a title that means, roughly, an anthology of longing, which is a gentler word than the English one. This essay will come back to that.

Apte plays Kalindi in Kashyap’s story, with Akash Thosar as her student, Tejas. Bhumi Pednekar plays Sudha in Akhtar’s, opposite Neil Bhoopalam as Ajit. Manisha Koirala plays Reena in Banerjee’s, with Sanjay Kapoor as her husband, Salman, and Jaideep Ahlawat as his closest friend, Sudhir. Kiara Advani plays Megha in Johar’s, with Vicky Kaushal as her husband, Paras, and Neha Dhupia as her colleague, Rekha.

This essay discusses all four stories to their ends. What it says happens comes from the film’s published record and from reviews written when it appeared. Scenes are described rather than quoted, and where accounts disagree, the essay follows the record or says nothing.

Kalindi teaches at a college. Her husband, Mihir, is older, lives abroad and has urged her to build a sexual history of her own, as he built his. It is worth pausing on the shape of that freedom. It arrives as a husband’s suggestion, almost an assignment, from a man who is not there, and she sets about it the way a conscientious person sets about homework: anxiously, and with a running commentary.

The commentary is the film’s device. Again and again Kashyap lets her step out of the story to explain herself straight to the camera, like the subject of a documentary answering an interviewer we never see. In one of these speeches, as a critic recorded it, she wonders how anyone can expect one person to be friend, lover and fantasy at once. In another she describes the life full of stories her husband has had, and says she wants one too. She is articulate, funny and contradictory, and she is heard. We hear everything.

The person her story concerns hears almost none of it. She sleeps with Tejas, one of her students, and then, afraid of attachment, keeps him at arm’s length. She tries what she calls a monogamous affair with a colleague, Neeraj, and ends it after one awkward night. When Tejas moves on with a classmate, Natasha, jealousy takes over. Kalindi follows the couple. She spoils their time alone. At last she lets herself into his flat. And the moment he offers to leave Natasha for her, she tells him she is married and walks out, leaving him bewildered.

It would be easy to make her a cautionary tale, and the film declines to. Her reasons deserve their due. She has been handed a freedom she did not invent and told it will be good for her. She is afraid of becoming the woman who clings, and becomes her anyway, which is one of the oldest and most human of plots. The story hardly judges her: she is neither the saint nor the vamp that Hindi cinema once offered as the only places for a woman with an appetite. That is a real gain. The same story also contains the film’s most exact joke about consent, and the joke deserves to be taken seriously.

After they sleep together, Kalindi has Tejas record a statement that what happened between them was consensual. It is played for laughs, and it is funny. The young man stumbles over the word itself, and one critic called the scene some of the blackest comedy Kashyap has made. The laugh is earned because the scene is exact.

The power in it should be named plainly, because the film names it. She is his lecturer; he is a student at her college, a young man, and nothing in the story suggests he was unwilling. But a student’s yes, recorded at the request of the lecturer who marks his work, can tell a later listener what was said. It cannot tell anyone whether no was ever a real option. And the record is not made for him. It is made for an audience that does not yet exist: a college committee, a rumour, a court. It protects the person who asked for it. Consent is not a statement collected afterwards. It is a condition that has to hold while things are happening, including the freedom to stop without it costing anything. A recording can prove only that a word was spoken, never that it was free.

Now run what she does next with the genders reversed. A married professor sleeps with his student, has her record a statement that she consented, and then pushes her away. He follows her and her new boyfriend, spoils their time alone and lets himself into her flat, and when she offers to give up the boyfriend for him, he announces that he is married and leaves. Few viewers would watch that as comedy. The film can play Kalindi’s pursuit for laughs partly because it can rely on an old assumption, that a young man cannot really be harmed by an older woman’s attention. The film does not quite believe the assumption either. It leaves Tejas bewildered, which is the only register in which it allows his hurt to show.

None of this makes Kalindi a villain, and the film is not a disciplinary hearing. The point is narrower. In the one story where a woman holds institutional power over the man she wants, the film gives her an unlimited hearing, since the camera will listen to her for as long as she likes, and gives him a record. Keep that asymmetry in mind for the next story, where the power runs the other way, and so does the hearing.

Zoya Akhtar’s story runs to about twenty minutes and stays close to Sudha as she works in Ajit’s flat. The days have a rhythm. She makes his tea and his breakfast, makes his bed, hands him his towel. He sleeps with her. She goes back to sweeping the floor. Akhtar films it with almost no words, the shots flowing into one another so that the routine seems to have no edges, which is how a routine feels from inside.

In bed, as one critic noticed, the two of them trade rough, teasing names like equals, and for those minutes they are. Everywhere else in the flat the order is plain. Then his parents come to stay, and the two of them avoid each other. His mother is kind to Sudha, and when she orders tea for the household, she leaves Sudha out of the count. Prashila Naik, writing in Café Dissensus soon after the release, caught a second small cruelty: the mother complains that her son’s home is a mess for want of a wife, in a flat that Sudha keeps.

Then a family arrives with a marriage proposal, and the walk with the tea follows. Naik called it a stunning indictment of how deep the class divide runs. It is also a precise piece of staging about who gets heard. In the living room, two families are negotiating a marriage out loud. In the bedroom, two young people are being given a moment to like each other. Sudha passes through both rooms with a tray, and in neither is there a sentence in which she could be a party.

Her want is there all the same, and it matters to say so. The film makes plain that she had quietly hoped for more than Ajit meant by any of it. To read her only as someone used would take from her the one thing in the story that is hers. She wanted him. She hoped. The hope is what the walk with the tea breaks, and nobody in the flat will ever know it existed.

The film does not show Ajit forcing her, and this essay does not suggest that he did. What it shows is the ground her yes stands on. He pays her. The bed is in her workplace. A no would cost him an afternoon; it might cost her the job. That does not turn her yes into a no. It means that her yes cannot be read, by him or by anyone, as simply free, and the arrangement is built so that he never has to try. Nothing in the flat obliges him to find out what her yes was worth.

This is the part that deserves anger, and the anger belongs to the arrangement, not to a man and not to a country. Consent is not only the absence of force. It is a no that would cost nothing, said to someone who is listening, and it begins with a question that somebody bothers to ask. Nobody in this flat asks Sudha anything. Her employer does not ask what she wants. His mother does not count her when she counts the cups. The visiting family does not know she exists as anything but the woman with the tray.

And then the sweet. The film leaves it open, and it has been read in several ways. Naik saw Sudha, putting the piece of burfi in her mouth, as a woman finally making peace with the conflict in her head. It can also be read as swallowing, the one gesture open to her that the household will recognise as correct, or as dignity, a refusal to let anyone see anything at all. It may be all three. What the sweet cannot be is a hearing. It is the household’s courtesy to a woman it does not count, and she accepts it the way she accepts her wage.

Dibakar Banerjee’s story is the one about an affair, and it is the one in which a woman speaks most directly to the people who matter. Reena, a banker, is married to Salman and is the mother of his two children. For three years she has been seeing his closest friend, Sudhir, at Sudhir’s house by the sea, where most of the story unfolds. When Sudhir tells her that Salman has started to suspect, she wants to tell him and live openly. Sudhir cannot face losing his friend. One critic singled out a scene in which Reena listens to the easy camaraderie of the two men in her life, both of them steering around the one thing she has asked for.

So she does it herself. She calls her husband to Sudhir’s house and tells him the truth: that she is unhappy, that she has become a caretaker for his children rather than a partner, and that the affair has lasted three years. It is the most expensive sentence in the film, and she delivers it in person. Salman breaks down and begs her to stay for the children. She stays. The next morning she ends the affair, tells Sudhir that Salman knows, and gives him one instruction: never let Salman see that he knows it too. Then she leaves with her husband.

It is tempting to call this a defeat, a woman who tells the truth and is walked back into the marriage she has just described. It is tempting, too, to call it a triumph, a woman who takes over the story that two men were too timid to tell. The film allows both and settles neither, and this essay will not settle it for her. Something structural can be said all the same. Reena is the only woman in Lust Stories who decides who hears what. She gets her hearing, and she spends it setting the terms of a silence: everyone in the triangle now knows, and she alone decides who may be seen to know. Honesty and secrecy are not opposites here. She uses the one to buy the other.

It is worth knowing what the law heard at the time. When Reena’s story reached Netflix in June 2018, adultery was still a crime in India, and a crime of a particular shape: a man committed it by sleeping with another man’s wife without that man’s consent or connivance, and the wife herself could not be punished. In the statute book, a story like Reena’s was a matter between two men. A little over three months later the Supreme Court struck the provision down, finding that what it protected was not the sanctity of marriage but a husband’s proprietary claim. This Library’s essay “India: What Gets Negotiated Inside an Arrangement” sets that autumn of judgments in its wider context. The film applies no law, and neither does this essay. But it is hard to watch Reena take the telling into her own hands without noticing that in the law of the day she had no part in the story at all.

None of the three adults comes out clean, and the film does not ask us to choose among them. Salman’s grief is real, and so is his plea for the children. Sudhir’s loyalty to his friend is also a way of protecting himself. Reena’s choice may be love, duty, exhaustion or strategy, and probably some of each. What the story will not do is pretend that the truth, once told, sets anyone free. It sets new terms.

Karan Johar’s story is the broadest of the four and the most openly comic. Megha, a schoolteacher, is newly married to Paras, who is loving, attentive and finishes too soon. His family is already pressing her for a child. What she wants is simpler than anything any other woman in the film wants: for her own pleasure to count. Her colleague Rekha suggests a remote-controlled vibrator.

Megha tries it at home. A commotion in the living room calls her out before she has finished; the remote goes astray; Paras’s grandmother picks it up and starts pressing its buttons. In front of all of them, Megha is overtaken by a climax she cannot hide, and the soundtrack swells with that song from 2001. Paras’s mother demands a divorce.

Johar is laughing at himself in one layer of the joke. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham is a saga about a family’s love for itself, and its title song is sung by Lata Mangeshkar. A member of the singer’s family was reported at the time objecting to its use under this scene, describing it as a song like a hymn and its use here as a desecration. The objection says something in its own right. The anthem of family feeling had never been asked to accompany a young wife’s pleasure, and when it was, some could hear only an insult.

Under the farce there is something exact. The family wants Megha’s body for a grandchild and is scandalised by her pleasure: her body is the family’s business when it concerns children, and a disgrace when it concerns her. And look at what actually happens in that room. The device was hers. Its control passed, by accident, into another person’s hand. What her body did next was not something she chose to show anyone. A physical response is not consent, to an audience or to anything else, and it is not an offence either. Yet the punishment, the demand for a divorce, falls on her, for something done to her body by someone else’s hand.

A month later, living apart, she meets Paras secretly in a café. He does not want to separate, and he agrees to pay attention to what she needs. When she reaches for her ice cream, he stops her and feeds it to her himself. The gesture can be read as tenderness, a man learning to serve her pleasure rather than his own, or as a man taking charge again, deciding how she eats. The film lets it be both. What it plainly offers is a hearing at last, from the person the want concerns: modest, uncertain, and the happiest ending in the film.

The film ends two of its stories with a woman being given something sweet. Sudha takes a sweet from the mother of the man who is marrying someone else. Megha is fed ice cream by the husband who has just agreed to listen. One is a household’s consolation to a woman it does not count. The other is a promise, uncertain but real, from a man who has started to. The distance between those two sweets is as close as the film comes to stating its argument about class.

Now set the four hearings side by side. Kalindi’s audience is the camera: she explains herself to us, at length, and to almost nobody in her life. Reena chooses hers: one husband, in one room, and afterwards she decides who may be seen to know. Megha’s is involuntary and enormous, the whole family, and only after the scandal does it narrow to the man it concerns. Sudha’s audience is the camera alone. Nobody in her story sees her want except the film, and us.

This Library’s essay “Three Women, and the Audience a Want Acquires” argued that what decides the fate of a private want is often less the wanting than who is watching, and who gets to tell it afterwards. It also recorded an objection one of that book’s critics made: that even when women are heard, it is often only the right kinds of women. Lust Stories carries the same objection inside itself. Three of its women are a lecturer, a banker and a teacher, and their wants, whatever they cost, get spoken. The fourth works in someone else’s house. Hers is the story that lingers, and the one in which the film is most honest about the limits of its own frankness.

Even the film’s own hearing was allotted. The year before it streamed, India’s film certification board refused a certificate to Lipstick Under My Burkha, a film about four women’s secret wants, calling its story lady oriented. An appeals tribunal cleared it for adults, with cuts, ruling that there could be no embargo on a women-oriented film. Lust Stories went straight to a streaming service and never passed before that board, whose remit covers films shown in cinemas. Some of its frankness, in other words, was a matter of channel as well as nerve. That is worth remembering whenever a film like this is read as a measure of what a country is ready for. It says at least as much about which doors happened to be open.

The series itself came back to Sudha’s line. In Lust Stories 2, in 2023, Konkona Sen Sharma turned it around: a woman who lives alone comes home early, finds her maid in her bed with the maid’s own husband, hides to watch, and keeps coming home to watch, until the two women, at opposite ends of one household, find they share a secret. A third collection followed in 2026. Neither is this essay’s subject. It is enough to notice that the anthology knew where its nerve was.

In Japan the film goes by a title that means, roughly, an anthology of longing. The English word lust is blunt. The Japanese word is soft, a yearning toward someone, with an old-fashioned romance about it, and a viewer who chose the film by its title may have expected something gentler than she got. Yet of the four women, the Japanese title fits one better than the English does, and it is Sudha. Nothing she feels is lust in the English sense. It is longing, carried in silence, for a man who will not hear it. Whether or not anyone intended it, the translation names the story that the original title passes over.

For a reader who lives between two languages, that small renaming may feel familiar. A want can change its name on the way across a border, and something is always lost or added in the crossing. Anyone who has tried to say what she wants in her second language, to a partner, a doctor or an employer, knows how much of a hearing depends on the words she is able to use, and on who is listening for them.

Japanese cinema has its own professor and its own recording. In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, another anthology of women’s wants, the second story sends a married woman to a professor’s office to compromise him. He insists that the door stay open. She reads him an explicit passage from his own novel, recording it in secret. He does not take the bait, and they talk honestly instead. Later a mistyped address sends the recording to the wrong person, and the scandal ends his career and her marriage. Set beside Kashyap’s story, the rhyme is close: an office, a professor, a recording. Hamaguchi’s professor protects himself with an open door, and the recording is made against him; Kashyap’s lecturer protects herself with the recording. In neither can the device hold what the people in the room actually felt. A record does not keep a want safe. It hands it to whoever hears it next.

Japanese television has its own story of paid work inside a home, and it points somewhere Lust Stories cannot go. In The Full-Time Wife Escapist, a woman with a graduate degree, let go from a temporary job, is hired to keep house for a thirty-six-year-old systems engineer, and the two turn the job into a contract marriage, with a wage and days off. The essay “The Full-Time Wife Escapist and What Becomes Visible When a Relationship Admits It Has Terms” argued that the contract did not add terms to the relationship; it took the disguise off terms that were already there. Set that beside Sudha and one more thing becomes visible. The Japanese romantic comedy could put its terms on paper because its two people stood on comparable ground. Sudha has no paper, and nowhere to stand from which to ask for one. The difference that matters is not the country. It is where a woman stands in the house.

Megha’s story needs the least translation. A viewer in Japan who has been asked at a family gathering when the baby is coming will recognise the pressure on a new bride, and the odd way a family can take a close interest in a young wife’s body while treating her pleasure as unmentionable. That recognition is worth holding lightly. It says nothing about Japanese families in general, and nothing about Indian ones, only that the arrangement Johar is laughing at is not peculiar to one place.

It would be easy, reading Sudha’s story from Japan, to file it away as a story about another country’s households. That would be a mistake in both directions. Here are a few sentences from two law books, and none of them is a score.

India’s law against the sexual harassment of women at work, passed in 2013, names a dwelling place or a house as a workplace, defines a domestic worker as a woman employed to do household work for pay, and counts the household that employs her as her employer. A domestic worker’s complaint goes to a local committee rather than to the household. Whatever its reach in practice, the statute sees Sudha’s room for what it is.

Japan’s Labour Standards Act was written to leave out domestic workers employed directly by a private household, and as of September 2026 it still does. They come under the Labour Contract Act, but not under the main law on hours and conditions. The labour ministry published guidelines for employing them in 2024, and a study group the ministry convened, reporting in January 2025, concluded that little reason remained to single them out; the statute itself has not yet been changed. Japan also admits foreign workers to do housework in private homes under a special-zone programme, employed by approved agencies rather than by the households, and the programme names the promotion of women’s participation in work among its purposes. In Japan too, then, some women’s working lives rest on other people’s work in other people’s homes, and the law has found that room hard to see.

Japanese criminal law, meanwhile, has a sentence for the ground under a yes like Sudha’s or Tejas’s. The essay “Babygirl, and the Difference Between Surrender and Leverage” set out how, since July 2023, the offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse has turned on a state in which it is difficult to form, express or carry through the will not to consent, and how the circumstances the law lists include worry about disadvantage arising from someone’s economic or social position. The Ministry of Justice explains that the social relationships meant include those of the household, the company and the school. The film’s two power gaps, the lecturer’s and the employer’s, sit squarely on those words. This essay applies no law to fictional people and says nothing about what any court would decide. It notes only that a vocabulary exists for what the film shows.

Neither law can hear what Akhtar’s story is about. A statute can reach harassment, hours and pay; it cannot reach a hope. But law does decide whether a room counts as a workplace at all, and the two countries have answered that question differently, at different times and for different purposes. Setting their answers side by side is not a contest. It is a reminder that a house is hard for any legal system to see as a workplace, because it is also somebody’s home.

There are good arguments against this essay, and it should meet them at full strength.

The first is that it invents a unity the film does not have. Lust Stories is four short films by four directors with four temperaments, placed in an order that may mean nothing in particular. Reading them as one argument about hearing is a critic’s arrangement, not necessarily the film’s. That is fair. The claim here is about what the four stories show when they are set side by side, not about what anyone planned. The film chose one title and four women. The rest is this reading.

The second is the strongest, and it is aimed at the story this essay admires most. To praise Sudha’s silence is to risk making a virtue of a poor woman’s voicelessness. Tanul Thakur, reviewing the film for The Wire, argued that her story, for all its poignancy, is constrained by the very society it criticises: to stay credible, it can end on only one note. And a camera that watches a domestic worker’s silence so closely can make it visible without ever offering her words. On that view the restraint this essay admires is one more room in which nobody asks Sudha anything, this time with a camera in it. The essay cannot fully answer that. It can point out that the film does give her a voice in one place, in bed, and that it lets the silence everywhere else stand as a fact rather than dressing it up as peace. Whether that is respect or another way of not asking, the film does not settle, and a reader outside it cannot either.

The third is that the essay is humourless about Kalindi. The film’s gift is a woman allowed to be a mess, neither saint nor vamp, and reading her through consent and power imports the language of a complaints procedure into a black comedy. There is truth in that. The comedy is part of the point, and a viewer who laughed has done nothing wrong. But this essay did not bring the recording into the story. The film did. It is the film that has her collect consent on the record, and the film that makes the joke land on the word.

The fourth is about the endings. Megha’s is tidy for a story that began with a family demanding a divorce: one month apart, one café, one promise, one spoon. And Reena’s can look like a woman walked back into an unhappy marriage and told it was her choice; Suktara Ghosh, reviewing it for The Quint, wondered whether her quiet revenge on the two men was enough for her. The doubt is reasonable, and this essay shares it. What it has tried to describe is not whether either ending is enough, but who, in each, finally gets to speak, and to whom.

This house sells private companionship, and it should say where this film leaves it, because the answer is not flattering. Its business puts money and attention in the same private room. Akhtar’s story shows what can happen, in any room where money runs one way, to the want of the person on the receiving end of it: nobody asks about it, and the arrangement is built so that nobody has to.

Money is a line of power, and in a paid evening it runs straight through the room. The standard the film makes visible is easy to state and hard to keep. The person who is paid must be asked, must be able to say no, and must be able to stop without it costing anything, and the person who pays must be just as free. That is a standard, not a claim that it is always met, and a reader is entitled to doubt a house that writes it down about itself.

There is a second reason for doubt, and it is sharper. A house that sells attention has an obvious interest in the conclusion that women’s wants go unheard, and a reader who suspects that the conclusion was waiting here before the film began is entitled to the suspicion. So it should be said plainly that nothing in the film points this way. What finally gives Megha a hearing is a husband at a café table. What Sudha lacks is not an evening of anyone’s attention. It is standing, in the house where she works, and that is not something this house or any other can sell.

What this Library takes from the film is smaller and more general. A want is not settled by being felt. It needs a hearing, and a hearing needs someone with the standing to answer; who that is, and what it costs to be heard, depends less on the want than on where you stand. You may recognise one of these rooms. Perhaps you have explained yourself at length to everyone except the person concerned. Perhaps what you wanted was heard only when it embarrassed somebody. Perhaps nobody has ever thought to ask. None of that says anything about whether your want was legitimate. A want that has never had a hearing has not been judged. It has only not yet been asked about.

This is a reading of a film. It diagnoses no one, the fictional women included, and says nothing about the lives or experiences of the actors who play them. It applies no law to fictional people, and where it describes the law of two countries, it does so to show what each can see, not to rank them.

Whose want in your household has never been asked about, and who would have to do the asking?

When you last said what you wanted, who heard it first: the person it concerned, or somebody else?

Is there a yes you once gave to someone who could make your life harder? Were you free to say no, and did anyone ask?

If someone works in your home, or you work in someone else’s, what can be said in that room, and what cannot?

Which title fits what you want: the blunt one, or the gentle one?