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The
streets of Bombay are choked with children-runaways, castoffs, cripples-whose
lives are lived at pavement level, with the stink of truck fumes and the
din of traffic never out of their heads. They are pantomime artists, pickpockets,
a flamboyant miniature circus; they will dance, sing, blow bubbles, slap
your windshield with a dirty rag or deliver milky jars of tea, anything
for a few paisa in the pockets of their outsize pants. They sleep on cement
cushioned only by cardboard or, like Salaam Bombay's! tiny Insect,
in a wrecked motorcycle sidecar, one eye cocked for the police vans that
swoop down to take them to the institutionalized children's homes the
kids call Chiller Rooms, not without reason. Their survival-more than
that, the spirit with which they persist-is an ongoing wonder.
An
equal miracle is director Mira Nair's assured and passionate film about
them (at the Nuart), fiction with its roots in the bitter truth. It manages,
in same way that The 400 Blows managed, to lift us beyond its pain to
compassionate understanding of a troubling scene. Nair has a wonderful
eye and a truly cinematic sense of story. She doesn't tell in words what
the eye of her camera can say with more authenticity. (Her cinematographer
is Sandi Sissel, whose control of lighting and composition may remind
you of Maria Cosindas or of Mary Ellen Mark.)
But
as a director, Nair must also have a fierce insistence on truth, because
none of her film's core of real street-kids can ever be discovered 'acting'.They
range from early teenagers down to the tiny eight-year-old (Hansa Vithal)
who has the crucial role of Manju, the child of a brothel prostitute and
her handsome, thuggish pimp, Baba (Nana Patekar). We pick our way through
this feverish world with the same curiosity as the film's central figure,
ten-yearold Krishna (eleven-year old Shafiq Syed, a phenomenon). Abandoned
when his traveling-circus employers move out abruptly he has headed uncertainly
for the first big city where he can earn 500 rupees- Bombay. It's the
price of a scooter he. has destroyed: the price, he hopes, of winning
back his mother's favor. In the city, he's green, a 'bumpkin,' a mark
for kids even half his age. But soon he's swept into a little experienced
clot with Chillum (Raghubir Yadav), a twenty-year old drugaddict, at its
centre. Krishna gets a job working as a tea-boy, he even loses his name
to the nickname Chaipau 'one who gets tea and bread.' The Kamathipura
area's brothel No. 109 is the film's main setting. From there, Chillum
sells Baba's drugs, sampling them liberally himself. And after one glimpse
of Sweet Sixteen (Chanda Sharma), a tearstained, shanghaied innocent whose
virginity will bring the brothel 10,000 rupees, Krishna/Chaipau haunts
No. 109 too, mutely captivated. Salaam Bombay's! intensely cinematic quality
is heightened when Sweet Sixteen and Chaipau must mime their feelings;
she speaks only Nepali, he only Hindi. Somehow there is an echo of Broken
Blossoms.
Like
Chaipau, we are thrown into this precarious life with no explanation.
But the film-makers are canny. We identify so quickly with Chaipau that
when, for example, Sweet Sixteen dashes the glass of tea he's brought
her on to the stone floor, we know her gesture will cost him money at
the tea-stall. Or when his customers complain that there's too much water
in the tea, it's because the drenched boy has been making his rounds in
the pouring rain. No sociologist made points more poignantly. Bizarrely,
even as we watch Chaipau's life at close range, Salaam Bombay! hasn't
quite the bleak hopelessness of Pixote. It even has moments of outrageous
sass, although they come at appalling points in the action. The movie's
liveliness also comes because the film vibrates with the mad, electric
colors of India itself, from painted wood with a faded patina to the golds
and silvers and prints of Manju's gaudy dress-up clothes. If the young
actors are impressive, the film's professional actors are their equals,
in particular Manju's tragic mother (Aneeta Kanwar), the voracious Madame
(Shaukat Azmi) and Yadav's full-scale portrait of the irrational despairing
drug habit. (The film is Times-rated: Mature for its subject matter.)
Chaipau's maturing-wising up is nearer the mark-is tragedy enough. Nair
lets us watch the subtle changes in him, from the open-faced little boy
in the country to the face of ravaged innocence at the close. (The last
sequence is framed by a wild street festival for the elephant god Ganpati,
which will inevitably bring back memories of Children of Paradise). It
is a luminously intelligent performance by Syed, making the question of
his future all the more poignant.
Salaam
Bombay! won Nair the Camera d'Or as best new director at Cannes this
year. (Last weekend, it won first prize at Los Angeles' Women in Film
Festival.) Watching the strength of her vision and her craft, balanced
by the empathy shown in all her work so far-her earlier documentaries
as well-there is every reason to believe that Salaam Bombay! marks the
opening of an extraordinary career.
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