“Ek FILM” AN
ABRIDGED SCENARIO
{For private &
restricted circulation.}
IDEA: … and what should I feel?
I am not to blame for
what happened to him.
Just as you are not to blame for what has
happened to me.
Because we are all beasts.
Ch#1 mother &
child
Piki, an adolescent boy, lives in his
mountain village. He is perhaps an only child with his Mother or Grandmother we
are not able to say as mountain women age so early in life. Mother loves Piki
and she loves too, her hens & rooster, her vegetable patch & the photo
of a man that sits in a sacred corner of the house among pictures of her Gods.
The house she seems to love just as she loves to stand in front of it on the
road and make conversation with passers by.
Piki is a quiet child. He loves nature, its
cycles and so many changes that salubrious blossoming bodies of youth are to
know. His bicycle, accidentally one day, kills a hen and the grief of Mother is
undeniable. It is as though she lost her own child. That then, is precisely
what happens. The same accident takes place again in precisely the same way;
this time it is Piki who flies over the handlebar, hits his head on a stone and
dies. The grief of Mother is exactly the same. Unable to see his situation
clearly, Piki rebels and runs away from this home in the hills.
Mother keeps grieving and continues to live
& love her elemental existence. Piki ends up working for his keep at a
dhaba in Bombay. He will never see her again in this life, his unborn children
would never know her. There are many young boys here who for an extra buck
stage road accidents and among them Piki, lives by his wits; a day at a time.
Ch#2
bonhomie
Piki, the smart kid on the block, in
Colaba. He represents no cast and comes from no creed, a nowhere man who the
rest of hide-bound young society of Colaba looks agog at. In their dreams they would
like to be like him but confronted, buckle to their knees at pinball machine
and billiard table; he could even pull a card trick or two in dire straights.
He’s got friends, some freakish painters & rich local kids; piki sleeps in
a vacant loft or an empty studio and moves about among boys mainly. He could
just as well sleep on the beach with a sky for cover. Piki is free because he’s
got nothing to lose.
One night, after staging an astonishingly
successful ‘accident’, Piki walks out of victim’s building, his pockets and a
bag stuffed with bank notes. He notices that his dhaba boss, the cop &
cabby are all looking elsewhere; & in that moment Piki turns away from them
all with a silent good bye. Loaded with cash at Sarver’s Joint Piki comes
across two other characters, paying up Sarvar for a boat ride to Abu Dhabi. Piki
joins in with his money & the three take off, on an adventure of their life
time.
Ch#3
comredare`
After a grueling voyage in the hold of a
trawler these three, who really come from different universes, turn into good
comrades; they come together with a single aim of making it good & fast.
They realize that they have been cheated, that they have been dropped back on
Indian soil further up North around marshy wastelands of the Gulf of Kutch.
This misadventure binds them together even more strongly than before as each
one’s survival now depends upon each other. There is little trust and mutual promises
sound hollow. Nevertheless they hang together because there is pestilence
around, the country is at war & communications have broken down. They have
to stay away from cities and in the forest armies are conducting search &
comb operations.
Ch#4
me & myself
Each one of them is separated from the
others due to some greed, misadventure or difference of opinion; even then
there are hopes and promises for each other when accidentally two of them meet
after suffering horrible conditions of isolation, deprivation, hunger and
mortal fear. Desperately they recount some of their deep fears and experiences
and promise to help each other, knowing fully well they are trapped by
commandos who are sure to shoot them down at sight, now any moment, their foot
falls and cat calls are highly terrifying. The two slip into their personal,
private, individual, own isolations, hiding away from each other in a desperate
bid to survive. Piki actually witnesses his friend being burnt alive in the middle
of a beautiful, olive green thicket in the forest. At last Piki is also caught
but because he is totally unarmed and innocent, the Commanding Officer spares
his life and couriers him back to Bombay on the next AN12.
Ch#5
self & the other
Piki looks groovy on the same old streets
of Colaba. Now no one seems to recognize him any more. His hair & beard has
grown; with a near death experience he looks more handsome than ever, actually
with all that realization behind him, in his new dockyard uniform overalls, Piki
walks along lit shop windows full of mannequins. Others pass by. The most
miraculous chase sequence occurs then
through the streets of Colaba, this chase begins in taxis up to Victoria
Terminus, then through empty, last train time platforms of VT the chase
actually moves along the central line on local trains running on parallel
tracks, Piki and his girl in one and the Cat chasing them in the other fast
train overtaking steadily. In the end our hero and heroin, {newly found …the
cause of this magnificent chase …} are the only occupants of an entire local
train compartment which is where their new dawn comes as the train is docked
for the end of shift. Our Heroin, then takes the Hero with his hand and they
walk away, hand in hand on the receding line of perspective of Bombay-Lonavala
train track, asymptotically … !!
Ch#6
married life & destruction
Piki now begets three children, count his
wife, mother in law, himself; six, & now father in law is to arrive this
evening to stay on after retirement; so seven souls live under this one room
tin roof, a tenement of the stone quarry where every one goes to work. The only
time they are together as a family is when they are resting during nights.
Proximity makes them shameless and the old man peeps in to watch what’s going
on with the couple. Children sleep with them on the same floor and the old lady
is somewhere in the dark rear with a dripping tap, often loudly making her
presence felt by dropping a steel vessel. There are so many different types of
gaze intersecting each other in this tiny, darkened space & Piki is in top
form. Staccato speech in such high strung quick tempo, hissing & flying.
Here every one is for them selves. There is no controversy about that. The planes
over head are too low and Piki just moves out to do susu when bombs begin to
fall on this locality. Piki is once again witness to the utter destruction of
his entire cosmology. It just burns up in direct hits and muffled agonized
screams while he finishes piddling. Next morning he is among many survivors who
do not know what to do. Everyone is shell shocked, bereft of their daily time
table & schedules they really are at a loss to find any meaningful gesture
or move to make.
Ch#7
recreation
This lazy, aimless crowd, Piki one among
them, moves aimlessly toward the railway station where there is no train going
any where and none arriving. No one is manning the ticket window. Some wiser
folk, knowing the value of these stacks of paper card tickets start collecting
them. Some start walking along the tracks. They form a sort of locality later,
on a sort of no-man’s-land; in between warring & opposing yet invisible
forces and their guard rooms & bunkers far off on top of the hills,
exchanging friendly bombardments on either side. This is where most people from
stone quarry settlement begin to re-recognize each other. Women begin to
re-group and men try on different professional masks as they have lost features
and props of their old ones; the settlement… gone now, family, businesses,
middle-men-ship, petty shops. Piki has stopped speaking altogether. He merely
makes some wondering or questioning sounds or gestures but he has no opinion on
any thing any more, it would seem. Eventually, he does find it funny that a
woman who is about to give birth to a child will not be helped by any other
woman till this one tells as to who is the father of the child! So he goes in
and helps her. There is an Aghori, hatha yogi who enjoys boiling and eating after-birth
and placenta while the baby is cleaned and put to mother’s breast by Piki.
… and Time has moved on …
The people of this refugee camp have all
gone away. No bunkers, no cross firing. There is a rivulet instead, streaming,
gurgling down the hill side. A woman drying some diaphanous cloth on a line and
a child splashes the back lit water, very clean. Piki sits burning holes in
bamboo reeds. He talks with the child through notes of music that he can create
on the flutes he makes. Piki plays flute interlude from the Beatle’s
composition called “The Fool on the Hill”
ξηď şŧąġė
Ї. Saturday, August 14, 2004. 11:53 PM
Ch#8
coda
Piki is walking up a steeply inclined
pavement of Carmichæl road looking like a jumbo bouquet of colorful flutes. He
is breathing steadily. Crisply uniformed in white & sky blue, children are returning
from school. Piki does not play his flute to attract them; he is slightly out
of breath. Children take no notice of him until; walking steadily up the
incline with his tree of flutes upon his shoulder, putting one foot after the
next it seems to him as though he has become motionless, instead it seems the
Earth is moving away, not letting his forward step touch the ground. The ground
just ahead is falling and there is no need to make any effort any more Piki
felt / Piki feels light as a feather in a gust of cool breeze as gravitation
slowly takes over and without him realizing it, Piki just keels over backward,
his head hits a stone; he passes out & away among children scurrying round
the body to make their way home. Some wise guys among them pick up a flute or
two from his bouquet and mothers are screaming from higher floors. His companion
& child would never know. They listen to sounds of flutes among bamboo reed
forests surrounding their stream of sparkling water, juvenile sun shining on
pale green grass and a sky, blue with fluffy white clouds who lazily tumble
over.
Ψ text prepared
by Rahat Yusufi for CACA (pronounced Kasa)
Creative Advancement
of Cinematic Articulation.
© Author would
appreciate it if his I.P. Rights are respected.
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