Karishma Attari

By Nikita Lalwani

Rs 399

Documentary makers may profess neutrality, but author Nikita Lalwani calls that bluff in her unsettling and acute novel about three British BBC filmmakers in an Indian open prison. The Village features a rarity in the penal system — a chance for convicted murderers to live with their families, work outside their quarters, and display civic responsibility.

Into this simmering, tenuously contained, loosely guarded village of violent offenders and their innocent families come the BBC crew to shoot the project for their viewers in the UK. Their mission: To show up the place as a successful experiment in tolerance and
reformation.
Ray Bhullar, the protagonist, is an ethnic Indian, British girl who gets her first shot at directing a documentary, and is naively enthusiastic about the project, unlike the other two members of her team who maintain a cynical detachment. The crew are guests of the governor, even if they stay on site in the same kind of shacks as the other villagers. Ray admires the success of the open prison at the governor’s garden party, “Virtually no one reoffending in over twenty-five years. That is one hell of
a statistic.”
Statistics aside, the bosses back in London know fully well that the show will only be interesting if there’s some drama to catch. Ray Bhullar’s boss reiterates her mission statement in an email, “Conflict, jeopardy, etc,. usual stuff. What do characters want? Why aren’t they getting it? Will they triumph over adversity? Are they compelling enough?” Soon, it isn’t enough to talk about the tension; the crew begins to cross the line into generating it.
Lalwani doesn’t run shy of depicting tension. She builds it up slowly, until the reader can hardly bear the collective march of stressors as they advance upon Ray. Ray is uncomfortable in her skin, doggedly watched by the securitymen, treated with contempt by her more senior producer and toyed with by her ex-jailbird anchor. There is the burden of her identity as both outsider and insider to the community of Indians whose trust she must win.
Ray attempts to capture story lines and take interviews with the villagers hoping to portray herself as a sympathetic friend, but screeches up short against the foreignness of her appearance to them, even though she insists, “I’m quite dark-skinned, wouldn’t you say?... No one can call me white.” Jyoti, the convict’s wife, is amused at Ray’s assumption that she can be considered one of them, “Calling herself dark like that with such ceremony, like its something to be proud of.” Her opinion is categorical, and she doesn’t mind sharing it with Nandini, the interpreter. “Not a white but she lives with whites, doesn’t she, Bhen-ji?” asks the convict’s wife, “When you’re around it long enough, then the colour sticks, doesn’t it? Tell me if I’m wrong.”
Lalwani writes effortlessly, weaving layer upon layer until Ray’s experience of shooting the documentary begins to spin out like a suffocating spider’s web. If it closes in on her at the end, it should come as no surprise. Ray’s consciousness is one with that of the documenter — she views life around her through an imaginary lens, even when hers is packed away. Yet, she is at odds with what it takes to make a successful documentary, to achieve a level of “good” commercial television. Lalwani situates the heart of the plot not in the action one might have expected in a village of murderers, but in the ethical nuances the BBC crew negotiate in their decisions as filmmakers.
Reality changes when there’s a camera pointed at it, more so when the people behind the camera aren’t observers, but facilitators of drama. Life at the village is fine-tuned to achieve the kind of highs and lows a fictitious melodrama about community life would display. Reality becomes Reality TV. Serena, the cynical 30- something producer, remarks about an ethically questionable, entirely engineered arrangement that hurt and humiliated Nandini, the character the crew is focusing on, “We get a sense of her disappointment, everything that she is carrying around with her. It’s still a powerful scene. You really feel for Nandini when you see it.”
Ray for all her squeamishness is also adept at practising the art of a good interview. She reminds herself that she knows exactly how to make a subject cry, with the semi-hypnotic repetition of key words that break down a person’s defences.
That she sees herself as different is part of the deep-running irony that rules The Village, for she tries too hard, or too ineptly, and merely comes across as a bungler, if not a hypocrite and a liar. Her position is that the hunger and “perverse curiosity” involved in making a documentary can somehow be negated by an undefined “greater good”. Lalwani uses The Village to refute Ray’s point of view.
One of the strengths of this novel is Lalwani’s ability to move seamlessly between a Western consciousness and an Indian setting — whilst belonging, as does her character Ray, to both. There is plenty of the exotic here, often seen through Ray’s “straight to the visual” perspective — the slicing of chillies, the empty charpoy, the ghungat of a sari — but none of this is treated in a way that detracts from the simple telling of a story. This is a dark book; it is about exploitation, falseness and the kind of vulture-like, voyeuristic culture that modern day television has spawned, but it is also about the insecurities of belonging, of truly owning a place or even a point of view.