Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) Review: A Tender Portrait Of Queer Life In Rural India

Bhushaan Manoj and Suraaj Suman in Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda). Photo: Supplied

Rohan Kanawade’s Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) offers a subtle portrait of queer life in rural India—ordinary, restrained, yet quietly radical.

Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) is an unhurried study of grief, duty, and queer lives and love in rural India. 

Built around the return of a gay man to his ancestral home after a death in the family, this is not the sleek, metropolitan queer world of a Made in Heaven.

In his Marathi-language directorial debut, Rohan Kanawade places queerness firmly within the grain of everyday life: the kitchen, the courtyard, the muted arguments, and the quiet solidarities.

Grief And A Tender Love

Kanawade’s cinema has always drawn its texture from the world he knows most intimately —  from the rural and small-town landscapes of Maharashtra (U For Usha) to the vibrant slums of Mumbai (his debut short film Sundar), and the lives of the middle and lower-middle classes. Kanawade’s queer characters must negotiate patriarchy and society in ways both unspectacular and deeply humane.

At the heart of Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda) is grief — a death disrupts family life and forces relatives to reconnect.

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), a call centre employee, travels with his mother  (Jayshri Jagtap) to their ancestral village, carrying his father’s remains to perform the last rites. He leaves behind the cramped confines of his small tenement in Mumbai, stepping into open fields — only to trade the freedom and anonymity that the city affords for the suffocating embrace of customs and expectations. He is bound by family duty, religious rituals, and the relentless gaze of a society that expects conformity.

The ten days Anand must spend in the village are made bearable only by the presence of his childhood friend Balya (Suraaj Suman). Unmarried like Anand, Balya skillfully deflects questions about marriage from his family and neighbours.

Under the camera’s steady gaze, grief and their familiar closeness stir something unspoken and tender - a love left unfinished from their shared childhood. 

Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda): A Gay Love Story

Bhushan Manoj and Suraaj Suman form the beating heart of Cactus Pears, delivering performances that balance tenderness, vulnerability, and quiet bravery in equal measure.

Their love unfolds gently on screen, free from melodrama or grand declarations, relying instead on subtle glances, shared silences, and a deep, unspoken understanding that speaks volumes.

Their nuanced performances invite viewers to witness a love story that is as much about survival and endurance as it is about affection, making their bond the emotional anchor in a story otherwise shaped by grief and duty.

Kanawade Refuses To Sensationalise Queer Lives

A still from Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda). Photo: Supplied

The characters around them - other family members- carry their own burdens. A sister-in-law, once a veterinarian, has abandoned her career to toil in the kitchen and serve as a caregiver.

The household reflects the quiet oppressions of rural India—expectations that women devote themselves to the family, pressures for men to marry, even the brutal consequences of sex-selective practices that have left some communities in India desperate for brides. Kanawade does not hammer these issues into the foreground, but they remain present, embedded like roots beneath the narrative surface.

This is both a strength and a limitation. On one hand, Kanawade’s refusal to sensationalise queer lives or reduce them to social issues gives his characters a measure of realism and dignity. They are not poster children for a cause; they are people living through ordinary grief, ritual, and responsibility. 

On the other hand, subtlety comes at a price. The structures that shape these lives—patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, systemic gendered expectations—remain in the background. 

The sister-in-law’s thwarted profession, the way female foeticide warps community dynamics, the silence around marriage pressures: all of these deepen the setting but are never fully interrogated. Even a conversation between the son and mother, about his late father’s treatment of her when he was under the influence of alcohol, remains incomplete. 

Quietly Radical

Kanawade prefers suggestion to confrontation, empathy to critique. Perhaps this is deliberate.

Kanawade’s cinema is not interested in polemic. His politics lies in normalisation—showing queer people not as intruders or victims but as part of the social fabric, embedded in family arguments, kitchen routines, and mourning rituals. His characters, like cactus pears, survive in harsh soil—spiny, resistant, and yet capable of unexpected tenderness.

With Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda), Kanawade, in his directorial debut, asserts something equally enduring: that mere presence, lived unapologetically, can itself be subversive.

Cactus Pears (Sabar Bonda): Reviewed at The Melbourne International Film Festival 2025. Running Time: 112 Minutes Language: Marathi Director: Rohan Parashuram Kanawade.

Screenplay: Rohan Parashuram Kanawade.

Camera: Vikas Urs.

Editor: Anadi Athaley.

Cast: Bhushaan Manoj, Suraaj Suman, Jayshri Jagtap.