Margarita with a Straw, and Why Needing Help Is Not the Opposite of Wanting

A band from a university in Delhi wins a music contest. Its lyrics were written by Laila Kapoor, who has cerebral palsy, uses a wheelchair and has a crush on the band’s singer. When the prize is announced, one of the judges explains it to the hall: the win belongs to the lyrics, and the lyrics are special because a “disabled” girl wrote them. Laila answers with her middle finger.

It is a funny moment and a crude one, and the whole film is in that gesture. It was meant as praise. That is the trouble. The praise was not for the lyrics. It was for a story about her body that the judge had already written, a story in which a disabled young woman’s work is moving because she is disabled, and the finger is her refusal to be cast in it.

Keep the finger in mind, because the film’s other important gesture happens in a bathroom. Early on, as the Indian critic Baradwaj Rangan recalls the scene, Laila announces that she has a crush on a boy while her mother is helping her bathe. Months later, in a Delhi summer, it is her mother who is unwell and Laila who helps her mother bathe. In the same room, with the roles turned round, she tells her mother that she is bisexual and in love with a woman.

Between those two baths the film says nearly everything it has to say. Almost everyone around Laila meets her first through what she needs: hands in the bath, a lift to college, a helper assigned in class, a judge’s kindness. The film is about what she wants: love, sex, a man, a woman, an evening of her own. It is also about making the people who help her meet that person too. This essay’s reading fits in one line. Needing help is not the opposite of wanting. The film puts both in one body, and it will not let either explain the other away.

Its last image says it in a glass. A margarita is an adult’s pleasure, and she drinks it through a straw. The straw is how. The margarita is what.

Margarita with a Straw is a 2014 Indian film directed by Shonali Bose, who wrote it with Nilesh Maniyar, credited as co-director. Kalki Koechlin plays Laila. Revathi plays her mother, Shubhangini, whom Laila calls Aai, the Marathi word for mother; Sayani Gupta plays Khanum, and William Moseley plays Jared. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2014 and won the festival’s NETPAC award, given to the best Asian film by a first- or second-time feature director. It opened in Indian cinemas in April 2015 and in Japanese cinemas that October, and in 2016 Koechlin’s performance won a Special Jury Award at India’s National Film Awards.

It began with a birthday. Bose has said that when she asked her cousin, the disability-rights activist Malini Chib, what she would most like as a present, Chib, who has cerebral palsy, answered loudly and clearly that she just wanted to have sex. Chib is not Laila. She wrote her memoir, One Little Finger, by typing it with a single finger, and Koechlin, who spent time with her while preparing the role, has said that Chib’s vivacity, her humour and her love of a drink went into the character, and the last of these into the title. Bose wrote herself in as well. In the first drafts, she has said, Laila was straight. Bose, who is bisexual, brought her own experience to the character, and Laila changed with it.

One note before going further. This essay discusses the whole film, including the death of Laila’s mother and the last scene. It follows the film in treating Laila’s disability as part of her life rather than a problem to be solved, and it says no more about her body than the film does: she has cerebral palsy, and she uses a wheelchair. Her sexual life is an adult’s, and it is discussed as one, without description.

In Delhi, Laila’s life is full, and ordinary in the way the film insists on. She studies at Delhi University, writes lyrics for a band called Tribe, swears, plays chess, laughs with her friends and fights with her mother. Aai bathes her and sings with her, and, in the critic Vikram Johri’s summary of her days, drops her at college every day and worries about whether love will find her daughter. Her friend Dhruv, who also uses a wheelchair, is in love with her. She is in love with the singer.

Notice what the people around her are fluent in. Her mother is fluent in her needs: the bath, the drive to college, the daily logistics of a body that needs help. The judge is fluent in a story about her. Almost nobody is fluent in what she wants, and the first part of the film is a small education in that gap.

The singer turns her down, and she is heartbroken the way anyone her age is heartbroken, completely. It is an ordinary heartbreak, and the film lets it stay one. Meanwhile Dhruv loves her, and she does not love him back. There is a piece of arithmetic the film quietly declines here, the one that assumes a young woman who uses a wheelchair should be grateful to be loved by a young man who uses one. Her wanting does not sort people by their bodies, in either direction. Dhruv’s feeling is real, and her no is hers to give.

Then the prize, and the finger. In 2012 the Australian disability-rights activist Stella Young gave a blunt name to what the judge is doing: inspiration porn, the use of disabled people as an inspiration to everyone else on the strength of their circumstances. The phrase is rude on purpose, and so is Laila’s gesture. Both make the same point. Being turned into an object of feeling is another way of not being seen.

A scholarship takes Laila to New York University for a semester. Her mother goes with her, over her husband’s doubts, finds them somewhere to live in Greenwich Village and settles her in. In a creative-writing class, a British classmate, Jared, is assigned to help her, and she is drawn to him.

The film makes the help literal. In one scene, as Rangan describes it, Jared carries her into a toilet and steps outside; when she has finished, he comes back in, straightens her clothes and lifts her from the seat. A scene like that could be played for pity or for embarrassment. What Rangan noticed in it was desire: the film, he wrote, lets us see exactly what Laila is reacting to.

Putting those two things in one scene is the film at its most exact. Help that touches a body is not an invitation, and wanting someone is not gratitude. It is easy to get this wrong in either direction: to assume that a body which needs help cannot also want, or to assume that a woman who wants the person helping her has simply been confused by the help. Laila is neither. The help is help. The wanting is hers. The film keeps them apart without pretending they live in different places, because in her life they do not.

This is where consent enters the film, long before any bedroom. A woman who needs help every day is touched more often than most people, by more people, for reasons that have nothing to do with desire. That can make it harder, not easier, for everyone around her to remember that her body is also hers to give. The film remembers. Nothing Jared does for her in that toilet gives him a claim on her, and nothing she comes to feel for him is repayment.

At a protest, Laila meets Khanum, an activist of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent who is blind and fiercely independent. They fall in love. They look after each other, and before long Laila moves in with her.

It is easy to read past how new this is. Until now, the help in Laila’s life has run in one direction: towards her. With Khanum, for the first time in the film, it runs both ways, between two women who each need something and each have something to give. The film does not make a lesson of it. It lets them be a couple, in a city where nobody has known Laila since she was a child.

Away from home she discovers that she can love a woman, and the discovery arrives the way such discoveries often do, out of order and before there is a word ready for it. Rangan wrote that Koechlin plays “an unplayable emotion, the feeling of having to redefine yourself after you thought you knew all there was to know about you.”

Anyone who has built a second life in another country will recognise what comes next. A self takes shape abroad that the family at home has never met, and sooner or later a summer arrives when the two lives have to be put in one house: a partner at the family table, a language that changes mid-sentence, a version of you your parents have never been introduced to, standing in their kitchen. In this film it is the mother, knowing nothing, who sends the invitation. She asks Khanum to spend the summer with the family in Delhi.

Before that summer, Laila does something the film declines to excuse. Still unsure of what she is, she sleeps with Jared, once. She regrets it at once, and she says nothing to Khanum. That summer in Delhi she tells her, and Khanum, who feels betrayed, ends the relationship and flies back to New York.

A film that pitied Laila could not have written this. Pity needs a saint, someone made good by what she has had to bear, and it has no room for a young woman who wants two people and handles it badly. This film makes the room. It lets her be wrong in an ordinary, adult way, and it lets the wrong cost what such wrongs cost.

The disability-rights movement has a name for the principle underneath. In 1972 the American writer Robert Perske called it the dignity of risk: taking reasonable risks is part of a person’s dignity, and overprotection that looks kind on the surface can take that dignity away. Love is the riskiest thing in this film, and the film lets Laila take its risks with her own hands, including the risk of hurting someone she loves.

The hurt is real, and it is worth being exact about it. The film treats the night with Jared as something Laila chose and then regretted, and it keeps those two apart: regret is not the same as not having chosen. What wronged Khanum most may have been the silence afterwards. The secret made a decision about Khanum’s own relationship without Khanum in the room. To be someone’s partner is to share some choices, and one of those was taken from her.

Rangan offered a different reading: that sleeping with a man may have been Laila’s way of proving to the world, or at least to herself, that she was “normal”. It is a possible reading, and the film leaves room for it. This essay prefers a plainer one. She did not yet know what she was, and she found out the expensive way, as people do. There is a serious objection to this turn in the story, and it is taken up further on.

Go back to the start of that summer.

Aai is unwell. She lets her daughter help her bathe, the way she once helped Laila. And in that room, where until now the care has run one way, and where she once announced a crush on a boy, Laila tells her mother that she is bisexual and that she loves Khanum.

Why there? The film does not say, and any answer is a reading. Here is this essay’s. The bathroom is the one room in which nothing has ever been hidden between them. Aai knows her daughter’s body better than anyone, in the way only years of daily care can teach. What she does not know is her daughter’s desire, and that is not something a body can tell anyone. It has to be said. This Library argued in “Intimacy Is Not Closeness. It Is Being Accurately Known.” that two people can share every kind of closeness, a house, a routine, the daily care of a body, and still not be accurately known to each other, and that accuracy, unlike closeness, has to be spoken before it can be confirmed. The bath is the film’s picture of that. It is as close as two people can be, and it is still one sentence short.

There is a second reason, and it belongs to the reversal. For once, Laila is the one holding the towel. She speaks from the helper’s side, as one adult to another, and her mother hears it at her most exposed: unwell, being bathed, in her daughter’s hands.

Aai is confused and angry. She does not break down in front of Laila. She crumples later, in front of a mirror. Rangan read that moment as exhaustion, and it may be. It may also be a mother keeping the worst of her reaction away from her daughter for one more hour, which is a kind of care as well. Either way, it is worth honouring what she has been asked to take in. She has organised her life around this daughter’s needs, and she has just been told, in the room where she knows her best, about a life she knew nothing of. The film does not punish her for the anger. It gives her the mirror, and in the mirror she is a person too, not only a mother.

Then the illness comes back. Shubhangini’s colon cancer, treated once before, returns in an advanced form. Laila looks after her in hospital, and in the time that is left the two of them find their way back to each other. Her mother dies. At the funeral Laila speaks about how much she loved her: the only person, she says, who ever really understood her.

That line holds the film’s hardest truth. The person who could not accept what Laila told her is the person who understood her best. Both are true, and the film does not ask us to choose. Understanding is what a lifetime of attention builds: knowing how someone sleeps, what she can bear, when she is pretending. Acceptance is something else, the willingness to let someone be a person you did not plan. Shubhangini had the first for all of Laila’s life. What the film gives the two of them is time, and this essay will not claim more for that time than the film does.

By now the care has turned round completely. The daughter who was bathed nurses her mother; the mother who managed everything is the one being looked after. An essay in this Library, “Petite Maman, and Meeting Your Mother as an Equal”, wrote about what a daughter can almost never reach: her mother as a person for whom nothing had yet been settled. In that film the way there is a path into the woods behind a grandmother’s house. Margarita with a Straw finds a harder road to the same equality. It runs through a hospital ward.

Families of disabled children often carry one question above the others: what happens after we are gone? In Japan the question has a name that appears even in the welfare ministry’s own documents, oya naki ato, after the parents are gone. The film does not answer it, and Laila still has a father. But it shows the morning after the parent who helped her bathe is gone.

After her mother’s death there is a short scene in a kitchen. Laila, as Rangan describes it, breaks eggs over a skillet and cleans up “the mess of shells and spilt yolk”. Watching in a cinema, he wrote that there is “not one overdone motion” in it, and that the woman sitting next to him murmured bechaari, Hindi for “poor thing”. He wanted to tell her that Laila was anything but. The scene, he wrote, is practically a celebration of her independence, now that her mother is no longer there.

That murmur in the dark is worth staying with, because it is the reflex the whole film is built to refuse, arriving at the moment it is least deserved. A young woman has lost her mother and is making her own breakfast in a house that no longer has her mother in it. It is grief, and it is competence, and it is ordinary. The word for it is not “poor thing”.

Then the last scene. Laila goes out on a date, and the date is with herself. She drinks a margarita through a straw.

It would be easy to read that as loneliness worn with a smile, and the reading would miss what the film has spent a hundred minutes building. She has needed people all her life, she will go on needing them, and nothing in the ending pretends otherwise. What she is doing at that table is choosing her own company, which is a different thing from needing nobody. This Library once put the distinction into a title, “Being Good at Solitude Is Not the Same as Needing No One”, and the last scene could stand beside it. The straw is not a concession inside the image. It is the reason she can have the drink. In this film, access is how a pleasure reaches her, not a sign that she has been excused from pleasure.

When the film opened in Japan, its title became something like “Cheers, with a margarita!” The glass stayed. The straw went. A release title is a marketing decision, and nobody should read an intention into one, but it is worth noticing which word a cheerful title found it could do without.

The film’s question, who gets to be treated as a sexual adult, has a history in the country the film comes from and in the country where this essay is read. Setting the two side by side is not a league table. Each has its own record of answering the question about other people without asking them.

India first. When the film opened in Indian cinemas in April 2015, the Supreme Court had, sixteen months earlier, restored Section 377 of the penal code, a colonial-era law under which consensual sex between adults of the same sex was a crime. The court did not strike down that part of it until September 2018. In 1998, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, a love story between two sisters-in-law, had its cinemas attacked weeks after it opened in India. Fire has a disabled woman in the house too: Biji, the mother-in-law, who after a stroke can neither move nor speak, and who sees everything and can do nothing. In that film the disabled body is a silent witness to other women’s desire. In this one, it is the body that wants.

Japan. The film arrived in 2015, first at the Aichi International Women’s Film Festival and then, in October, in cinemas, introduced in the vocabulary of cheerful overcoming. A film listing described a girl living positively with her disability, and the festival programme praised a brightness that makes nothing of it. A university student had become a girl. Copy like that is written to sell tickets, and a phrase in a listing is not a country’s opinion. But it is the frame in which a disabled heroine is most easily sold, and it is the frame this film spends a hundred minutes refusing.

The next summer, that frame was answered on national television. In August 2016, opposite Nippon TV’s long-running charity telethon, NHK’s Bari Bara, a variety programme made with disabled performers, broadcast a live debate on inspiration porn, borrowing Stella Young’s phrase, with its cast in yellow T-shirts that mimicked the telethon’s own. The programme spoke openly about disabled people’s sexual lives, which television had long treated as unmentionable, and in 2022 it turned to disabled women’s bodies and sexual lives in particular.

There is a harder history as well. From 1948 to 1996 a Japanese law allowed people with disabilities and certain illnesses to be sterilised, and many were forced. In July 2024 the Supreme Court held those provisions unconstitutional, and a compensation law in force since January 2025 opens with an apology from the Diet and the government. For nearly half a century, in other words, the state answered the film’s question for a great many people and did not ask them. That is the part of this history that deserves anger, and the anger belongs to a law, not to anybody’s family.

The nearest Japanese film may be 37 Seconds, released in Japan in 2020. Its heroine, Yuma, has cerebral palsy and a mother who still helps her bathe and decides what she may wear; she wants to earn her independence drawing adult manga, and is told she cannot draw what she has never lived. The film won the audience award in the Panorama section at Berlin in 2019, and its lead, Mei Kayama, has cerebral palsy herself. Two films, from two countries, found the same room: a mother, a grown daughter and a bath. Neither is a portrait of its country, and neither country comes out ahead.

There are several objections, and at least two of them should trouble anyone who admires the film.

First, the casting. Kalki Koechlin is not disabled. She prepared for six months, spent time with Malini Chib and with Chib’s physiotherapist and speech therapist, and worked on movement and speech in workshops; the craft is not in question. The objection is simpler. A role like Laila’s is one of very few in which a disabled actress could be seen as the whole person the film insists she is, and it went to an actress who is not disabled. Maddie Rehrman, reviewing the film for Incluvie, put it without softening: the character is disabled, so the character should have been played by a disabled actress. Koechlin has also said that Chib is more acutely disabled than Laila, her speech harder to understand and her movement more limited; the film, in other words, made the disability lighter than the life it came from. 37 Seconds shows that it could have been otherwise. This essay has no answer to the objection and does not pretend to.

Second, the night with Jared. Rehrman called it out of character and a fall straight into the “cheating bisexual” trope. The one wrong the film gives Laila is the one a stereotype already expects of bisexual women: that she will stray, and stray towards a man. The dignity of risk is a fine principle, but a story chooses which risk its heroine takes, and this one chose the cliché. The reading offered above survives only in a narrower form. The film honours Laila by letting her be wrong in a way that has consequences, even if the particular wrong was badly chosen.

Third, the cancer. It becomes a major part of the story late, and Rehrman found it somewhat out of place. A death that closes the argument between a mother and a daughter can look like a device, in which the illness does the reconciling the two women had not yet done in words. The tenderness in the hospital is real. So is the convenience.

Fourth, the ending, which this essay leans on. Rangan, who admired the film, called the last scene “overly symbolic” and “as twee as the title”, and thought it came dangerously close to the triumph-of-the-human-spirit message the rest of the film avoids; he also found the judge scene too strident. A woman, a cocktail and a straw is exactly the image a poster would choose. The narrow defence is that it is a small, private image, a victory over nothing. The objection stands anyway.

Fifth, comfort. Laila has a scholarship to New York and a mother who can leave home for a semester to go with her. The film, Rangan noted, tells us little about what it is like to be disabled in India, and what it does show is lived inside one comfortable household. It asks its question from a position of comfort, and a reader is entitled to notice that.

Sixth, the kindest thing in the film may be the least realistic. Three people want Laila: Dhruv, Jared and Khanum. This Library’s essay “The Right to Sex and the Difficult Question of Whether Desire Creates Entitlement” set out why that matters. Who is desired is patterned, by disability among much else, and no examination of the pattern gives anybody a claim on anybody. In life, the harder question may be less whether a disabled woman wants than whether she is wanted back, and no film and no argument can oblige anyone to want anyone. That is true for everyone. It is not equally easy for everyone. The film’s generosity is a privilege of fiction.

Last, the objection aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship, and an essay concluding that a woman’s wanting needs nobody’s permission is a convenient essay for it to publish. Weigh it accordingly. The film itself does not end with anyone paid to keep her company: its last date is one she takes alone.

Disability is not beside the point here. It is in every scene: in the bath, in the toilet, in the straw. What the film takes apart is the assumption that a life organised around needs has no room left for wants, and the quieter assumption, among people who love someone, that knowing what she needs is the same as knowing her.

There are good reasons families organise themselves around needs. Needs are urgent and daily, and failing at them has consequences that failing at wants does not. A mother who has helped her daughter bathe for years has earned the right to believe she knows her. Shubhangini did know her. She was one sentence short, and the sentence could only come from Laila.

So, once, to you. If the people closest to you know your needs better than anyone, the pills and the stairs and the bad days and how you take your tea, and have never been told what you want, that is not a failure of their love, and it is not a failure of your nerve. It is a sentence nobody has made room for yet. You are allowed to want things that nobody helping you planned for. And if you are the one who has done the helping, the day she tells you something you did not plan is not the day you stopped knowing her. It may be the day you begin to know the rest of her.

Who in your life knows your needs best? Do they know what you want?

When has being praised made you feel less seen, rather than more?

Is there a room in your life where you are always the one being helped, or always the one helping? What might be said there if it turned round?

What would a date with yourself look like, and what would you need in order to take it?