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Making a splash

Deepa Mehta's daughter Devyani Saltzman has come up with a book, Shooting Water

It is nothing like a conventional narrative about the making of a movie. Though Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman does tell the untold story about the plight of widows in Benaras in the 1930s,it is more like a memoir, or a travelogue, a book of self-discovery. It could be described as an unorthodox mélange — everything packed into one volume of elegant, poetic, immensely readable prose.

A lot of the detail was unnecessary, especially the descriptions about hotels, room linen and upholstery, homes and furnishing, and so on. Shooting Water, a Penguin book, (Rs. 295)did not even require retelling of the sordid details about the author's parents' divorce.However, the minute observations about places and events or redeemed nostalgia do succeed in drawing vivid pictures. And there is an obvious honesty of purpose. "When I tried to tell Maria what was happening, my voice stopped in my throat, frozen, like an invisible barrier had been lodged in my windpipe — a fine piece of glass sliced into muscle and skin. I called my parents in Canada."

In her afterword, mother Deepa Mehta tries to demonstrate a similar honesty of purpose. "The mother-daughter journey continues long after the film Water is completed... After all these years of hurt, guilt and absence, here we are, Devyani and myself, living under the same roof in Toronto... For me, it is like making up for our lost time together. Whenever I saw her hunched over her computer writing this book with such fierce concentration, I turned away." In that sense, the title of the book is misleading. It isn't really about shooting Water alone, but about piecing together moments either suspended in time, or lost in recapturing them. And though well written, that turns out to be the major flaw of the book. Too much of the personal has gone into and beyond the mirage of the objective.

"It was March 7, 2004, 11 months since we had spoken on the phone in Oxford and four years since Water had been shut down in India. I arrived in Colombo... Sri Lanka was the perfect alternative location. The lush foliage and rivers could pass for rural India without the threat of the Hindu Right."

One will have to await the release of the film in India to ascertain that and various other claims so effortlessly pieced together.

SURESH KOHLI

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