Zoya

A quiet ten year old girl wandering around an old residential building in Dadar, not very far from where Phalke planted a pea and let his camera watch the sapling push its head out through the soil to claim its decreed space. The sapling saw the camera too and claimed more then, a place in cinema’s history.

But the young girl knows none of this yet.

A small film making workshop, quite in the tradition of summer vacation hobby classes, is on. And the teacher whom the physical signs of middle age are beginning to wash over like a wave that leaves sand wrinkled in its wake, has turned her mind to her childhood, to find games for the children. She still has a memory of being as young, or as old as this bunch. That time in her life does not seem as far away as it should seem. She tells the participants to quickly think of a lie each. Their lies are gathered on folded pieces of paper and put into a paper bag.The teacher does not know what to do with them yet.

Later in the day, when she lets the participants loose over the building to ‘explore it’, to think of stories that its space suggests, she also asks them to transform the single sentence of ‘lie’ that each of them has pulled out blindly from the bag, into a little narrative about the building. The children gone, she stretches out her legs to rest.

The girl looks at the small chit in her palm. Her shiny purple slippers look up at it, and how incongruous the untidy paper looks against their luxurious presence!

“ I climbed Mount Everest” is the lie that has fallen into her lot. She is a quiet girl who is walking into adolescence seemingly in the shadow of an older sister. But the shadow is large as the shade of the trees that make a canopy over the road, there is amplitude there and a mystery that seems at ease with children.

Zoya probably does not wander around too much, not being used to being away from air conditioning. She misses the cool air that she is so used to, she almost thinks is her natural environment.

This is her way, I imagine, to stand in a place and look. She memorizes the façade of the building when she stares at it, although I do not know if she stares very long. Then, climbing the wooden staircase perhaps, the ‘lie’ appears to her like a vision, and she knows what it means.

The building façade becomes a place of scaffoldings. Painters scale it walls. A painter goes up, slowly, his brush leaving a broad trail of white each time. . Each stroke flattens the previous one as it comes into relief, and then disappears, washed over by the new. The painter might be on a movable wooden seat suspended by ropes, he is going up slowly, painting a white wash over the building façade.

And watching this, ten year old Zoya, climbed Mount Everest.