JOIN USIn ‘The Village’, Lalwani draws the reader in with rich characterisation, interactions, dialogue and more that paint a sad story of hope and despair, writes Monideepa Sahu
Ray Bhullar, a young British woman of Indian origin, arrives in India to shoot a documentary film on prisons for BBC. Ashwer seems like an ordinary Indian village, but within its tin-roofed shanties, each family has one member who is serving a sentence for having killed someone. Ashwer is an innovative open prison based on the principle of trust. Prisoners live here with their families, and are free to leave the village during the day and earn a living. Ray wants her first major programme as a director to do justice to the prisoners and their families, convey many things; “how important it was that they found a way to represent these people as human beings rather than ciphers or ideas.
How much beauty, honesty, trust, dignity and inspiration there was in this country. That it was more forward-thinking, this project, than anything you could find in the West.
Inmates were living with their families and not choosing to reoffend.”
As Ray prepares the ground for producing an objective and moving documentary, she has to team up with Serena, the arrogant and bossy producer, and Nathan, the presenter, who has served sentences in British prisons for armed robbery. As the weeks progress, Ray’s idealistic aims make way for practical realities. Along with Serena and Nathan, she manipulates the villagers to get desired reactions on film. To get the right sort of footage, Ray finds herself repeatedly flouting the basic rule of documentary practice by failing to ask permission from her subjects. She cringes at the vanity of her thoughts, the “uneasy boundary between the honourable and dishonourable reasons for coming here.” Nathan jokes at one point, “The lens is so cruel. I know I’ve been exposed. Darkness is mine.”
His words reflect the layers of darkness that emerge in the course of the novel.
Lalwani lays out concentric circles of manipulation, prejudices and varying perspectives with a masterly touch. Nathan and Serena display racist prejudices when they comment on “why they drown their girls at birth, like kittens, in this country.” Ray lashes out at Serena and Nathan’s ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality, but is she herself completely free from it? While filming some workers in a quarry without taking their permission, Ray realises that “she had treated them like animals in the ground for some natural history film.” While filming Nandini, a dignified and educated woman who was nearly burnt to death by her former husband, Ray realises that she is merely mouthing formulaic words of sympathy to make Nandini burst into tears before the camera.
Ray feels “a soreness, a blister on her conscience.” While Ray’s scruples grow, Serena and Nathan focus on what they think will make for interesting viewing. They do not hesitate to ruthlessly exploit the villagers to get good camera footage. The BBC crew enter Ashwer with an aura of superiority; accomplished professionals from a developed country who have come to observe and film the poor and morally compromised (there are, after all, many killers among them) residents of Ashwer. Yet, as the story progresses, these divisions become blurred. The villagers observe Serena spending nights with Nathan, and Ray’s drug-induced nocturnal romp on the riverbank. From their perspective, these foreigners appear to be the despicable degenerates.
In the end, our sympathies are with Nandini, who is imprisoned for having killed her mother-in-law in self defence. “Degenerate. Sick people, you are,” she lashes out at Ray, after an excruciatingly painful filming session. “All these drugs you smoke together. They say you all sleep in each other’s beds, roll around with each other on these riverbanks at night after getting intoxicated. It disgusts me how I listened to you, how you portrayed yourself as an ‘Indian girl’...How dare you treat us with such superiority?”
Disappointed at the end result of a filming session, “Waste of fifty quid, waste of time,” says Nathan, embodying the essentially venal and callous attitude of the filmmaking team. “I could have told you it would pan out like that.”
The narrative initially takes a while to gather momentum. The opening pages, particularly, are weighed down at times with long and tedious descriptive passages. But once the characters appear and begin interacting, we are drawn into the story. The interpersonal interactions, the dialogues, all work beautifully to convey a deep sense of helpless sadness; of wasted lives and hope and despair, which bind the residents of Ashwer and the foreign visitors as part of the greater human condition.
Ray sees everything through the camera lens, thereby adding beauty and strength to the imagery and narrative. When she sets out in the end, fired by the urge to improve herself, we emerge from a thought-provoking and deeply satisfying reading experience.