FEATURE FILM SCENARIO #2

“WOMAN IN THREE PARTS” – SCENARIO  

{For private & restricted circulation}

IDEA: To take a close, sympathetic look at the origin, current status & future of Gender sensitive culture in an orthodox, upwardly mobile society   …   and then gently float it into the vast embrace of “Advait Vedanta” …

There has to be a woman. She will have to grow in the film. The film has to be about this woman. Yet she must turn into a metaphor. Three parts can be roughly divided as:

 Ossification

 Impression

 Immersion

 Coda

OSSIFICATION

This is happening in modern times. Like in any suburban house we see in Hindi t.v serials; a house with a lawn & verandah, uncles & aunts, other young & olds, including babies. She is one among all of these. The house leaves every one pretty much to them.

She has a boy friend, a young film maker. He’s got a powerful motor bike, real test driver’s helmets, even for pillion rider. He likes to play songs for her on his guitar in public parks, in other places he blows upon the harmonica that’s always in his jacket pocket. He likes to go fishing with a rod and baited hook, plays tennis & billiards. She is an air hostess, likes to party anywhere on off nights. They are on board a plane, accidentally. He is returning from a shoot, flirting openly with the lead girl. She comes to serve them. There ensues a subdued implosion within the aircraft. Other film crew, guys & girls, senior hostesses & flight attendant, even the Captain turns up for a toast as they are pronounced Man & Wife by a Christian Priest co-passenger on flight. This is known as ‘Janasakshi’ and restoration of peace. She gets ten days off for honeymoon during which they separate. She gives up her job as well. If there isn’t anything in it for her, she isn’t gonna take it.

An aunt in the house is a social activist. She, our leading lady, we call her Gimmi, is helped along to meet women’s groups who hate men. There Gimmi meets with a female partner called Squirrel. They start living together. While social work takes her further into public life, emotionally something seems to whither away somewhere deep within. She keeps pet cats that sleep with these women in the same bed. Her sensual nature oozes out in her professional dynamism. Her house is like a den and so is her car, but this sublimation is flawed; there is a vacuum somewhere. A void that is not to be filled with anything but the truth. What ‘truth’, she doesn’t think of all those things at all, but there is something missing, it is telling upon her health, every one can see that. The aunt runs a ‘gift your toys’ link with poor children and manages to secure a male child for Gimmi to ‘virtually adopt & support at a distance’ by means of checks paid monthly to a name; picture of this child she remembers seeing in the agency reference on Facebook. She has a link saved somewhere. She is at the top of her carrier. A comfortable plateau or caesura from her giddy, meteoric rise where physical time and personal space were on premium, now like in a time capsule she is shrouded in ennui & cloud computing.

IMPRESSIONS

Gimmi & Squirrel decide to jump in their car and wheel it to where their adopted child is situated. They look up a flight map like and hit the road with little other than a checking account book & a bottle of Bisleri. This journey by road opens up certain horizons for both G & S. There occur several incidents to give them ‘reality check’ and help them back to basics. After the glorious autobahn like speeds up to Pune they have to be slower on the route to Hyderabad.  First thing to break down is the a/c of their car. It is hot on Southern Plateau and they run out of gas at a meal stop on the road. As they struggle to start their car, G & S are hounded by little and large children constantly ogling at them, their curious eye-balls are plastered upon the flimsy clad, sweating bodies of these women. She is reminded, despite her best efforts to avoid, that Adoor, the child she adores could well be one such brash brat. Fact is that rural kids are totally shameless and inquisitive. A car driven by female, another female passenger to boot. This in itself is a sight for village children. Boys & girls alike, they stare them down to limits of embarrassment. Squirrel decides to quit. She has had enough. They have a show down and Squirrel catches a bus in opposite direction which had stopped to give them a helping hand. Gimmi is at a null point. After a caesura with local women who take her down to their village to dinner at their house, she steels herself for the onward drive. There are other things, new observations, experiences & situations that have made her act in certain ways she would never have dreamt of in her city based professional life. Tedium of solitary driving, coping with unknown languages and crude cultures, irregular eating habit and sleeping just anywhere to avoid falling asleep on the steering wheel while speeding on straight stretches of road on Deccan Plateau with its fantastically breathtaking molten lava honey droplet like rock formations, no trees, extreme weather; all these combine to give her a weary, far out contemplative look. She is discovering or being led by force of circumstance to feel for ‘the other’. And she finds it difficult and tedious to do so because, “what’s there in it for me?” she reasons.

The car for the most part has behaved. She has remembered to fill gas and have it serviced at Hyderabad, where she has had a most charming Muslim family sell her some of the most exquisite dresses imaginable called ‘shararas’ & ‘ghararas’. She feels like a princess in those softest of cotton textures and styles for summer. The road is now getting easier on her. She is really beginning to enjoy driving at high speeds. She goes up Nandi Hill for fun on hairpin bends. Once up there she is not able to take her self away from spell binding bird’s eye view, cloud formations, squeezing and funneling between lower down hill tops for days. She has never connected with time & space like this before. She finds herself staring at the clouds like those children stared at her. And who was that … yes, that black, monstrous looking Tamilian bus driver who said that, ‘the only true relation in this world is that of a Mother & Child’. He’d even addressed her as ‘Amma’ & she’d felt that he regarded her as one. At that moment it had irked her vanity to be called Amma. But in the South even little daughters are called Amma. This mind blowing journey is acquiring the form of a pilgrimage now for there is a strange look of determination on her face, such as we see only on pilgrims driven by some spiritual or fantastic zeal.

Gimmi is well on her way, she is approaching the East coast. The weather is mild. She can live off her car and not have to stay at hotels. She is losing her gender consciousness insidiously, not aware of it yet her self. Children’s staring does not trouble her at all any more, for instance. Somehow, or probably due to this loss of consciousness in her, children have actually ceased getting attracted to her vibrations. She tries to make efforts to be friendly with children she comes across. They do not speak the same language but connect in startlingly refreshing & creative ways. These children are something else again; she thinks fondly of Adoor and drives on.

 IMMERSION

The orphanage, she reaches late in the evening, housed in a French colonial building with a compound in Pondicherry. All along the drive way there are vegetables growing. It is a huge house, leaky during monsoons, damp & dilapidated. Here some twenty or more boys & girls live and share all their existential works and pleasures. There is a man who almost looks like and behaves like their mother. They call him ‘Mother with Moustache’. Gimmi is amazed at this strange family who are singing happily and serving their guest. The Man is silent for the most part, courteously enjoying how Gimmi soaks in details of their dense, emotional & sensual energy. This group or family knows nothing about her nor do they speak her language. The ‘Mother with Moustache’ speaks English haltingly, but he chooses his few words well. As the meal is done and over, current goes off. Children light up the place with candles or oil lamps. It is an amazing magical sight. She is handed one candle and shown to her room with the promise that her ‘child’ Venkatesh, will bring her coffee in the morning.

In her room, first thing that strikes Gimmi is the quality of silence here. Without electricity silence is darker, a deep roar of distant sea is filling it through huge French windows with no barriers. Sleep is impossible. She wants some coffee now. The whole house is dark. ‘Mother’ is walking up & down in silence, bare feet, upon the drive way. She still doesn’t know his name. He makes her coffee in his rooms. They have a silent conversation. Sitting there, Gimmi realizes, ‘…they are so coherent because they have practically defeated consumerism and abolished dependence on paper currency. They have found joy in elemental life and they are digging it…’

In his rooms, there is a charge, perception heightens with blazing aroma of freshly ground well roasted coffee. The roar of Sea seems to have become louder on the rear verandah, silence has deeper tones filled with sighs of worshipful joy; the tide is shifting; all fluids moving toward a cosmic orgasm. One adorable convenience being lesbian was you disregard contraception. So here, she conceives, tonight. Her pilgrimage is complete. She sees herself behind the wheel of her car, driving home with a benign smile of contentment. Soon to be a single parent.

CODA

Early the next morning, however, Adoor brings her a good tumbler of steaming coffee as promised. She is delighted to find that this is the same boy who’d come to town responding to her call for street directions to the Orphanage and now she recollects him being silently near her through out last evening. She hadn’t reacted to the vibe, that’s all. They have washed and cleaned her car. It is sparkling in early morning sunshine against the lovely period building with cabbages in foreground. Suddenly its time for taking pictures. She goes to town with children buying things they want or need or wish from a town, that is to say a market place. She finds a ticket to Bombay on a night flight the same day. In the evening they go to see her off at the airport; ‘Mother’ comes along as well. At the airport she tells him that they should keep her car and use it, she is tired of driving and that she will come back soon. Then they will need to use this car and hurriedly moves away from disbelieving eyes of children. There is eye contact with Mother, but no one goes inside the airport & all. The movie should end here. Unless there is some earth shaking idea forthcoming, this is it. -----------------------------------------------------------

Text prepared by Rahat Yusufi for CACA (pronounced kasa)

Creative Advancement of Cinematic Articulation.

© Author shall be pleased to see his I.P. Rights intact.