My Time as a Human

One of the things I really liked about this project was that the approach was very much in line with my own evolving views on how to produce effective documentaries. Instead of bombarding the viewer with shocking statistics and images, the idea was to take them on a journey. We chose six families (fourteen children) who had been left behind by fathers or mothers who had committed suicide. We captured their stories, got a sense of where they were, and then taught them to be activists and took them to Delhi. We rounded out their journey by traveling to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple and there reflect on their experiences.

The Selection Process

Choosing which families and which children would end up part of the project was physically and emotionally taxing. The children were so appealing and their stories so intriguing, and yet each initial interview was over with so quickly. Worse yet, each was immediately followed by a hasty exodus to the little truck and another long, rough ride hunched over my gear in the back. I felt terrible about the people we left, tears in their eyes, vanishing behind us in the dust as we ran from village to village. Gina, our anthropologist, was particularly effected by this procedure and I tried to assure her that once we made our choices we would be able to invest real time.

Dharvinder

It was in one of these early interviews that I met Dharvinder. His father had committed suicide by drinking pesticide a mere month and a half before we walked through his door, cameras in hand. He was the oldest child, somewhere around fourteen to sixteen years old. Most of the people we met had no idea how old they were and birthdays were general markers like, “the mangos were ripe” or, “we were harvesting wheat”. He was quiet and polite during the interview but as we asked questions about his father he began struggling to maintain his composure. Something about the way he stood, trying so hard to be strong, and yet still very clearly a kid, really got to me. I could feel the weight of his new responsibility as he stood beside his mother, grandmother, and adopted sister. At last, against his will, tears made their way out into the open and, after turning away several times, he ran behind a wall to collect himself before returning to try to finish the interview. That image of him stays with me even now: his blue knit hat tight around his head and turned at a slight angle, his back straight, standing firm against the world with only his moist eyes to betray him.

Sher and Salma

In another house we met two children who’s mother had left them after their father had, I believe, hung himself. In this case the mother had not wanted to leave her children. She remarried and, as is the tradition there, went to live with her new family. The family did not want anything to do with her existing children and refused to allow her to see them. She called them on the sly for a while, even making a few trips to see them, but was discovered and stopped in some way that was unclear. This left Sher and Salma alone with their grandmother.

As it turns out, this was one hell of a grandmother. Beeji (grandma) as we called her, was feisty, upbeat and set a tone for these kids that beamed through their smiles and kept their heads high. Like so many of the others we met, they went hungry any number of times and had little more than their tiny two room brick and mud house, but they maintained excellent grades in school, worked hard, and Sher was one of the best English speakers in the group. (I say this because the focus of education there seems to be reading, writing, math, and English.)

This old woman walked a huge distance to the kids’ school every week to speak with their principal and spent her days spinning thread from cotton by hand. She was happy to try to teach me, despite my clumsy fingers, and only laughed at me when she couldn’t help it. I have rarely in my life met someone so truely and vibrantly alive. She said it was because she drank milk.

I want to talk about all of the families, my experiences meeting them and all of our interactions, but it dawns on me that at some point I’d be writing the documentary out shot by shot here in my blog. Suffice it to say that we heard a lot of difficult stories and met some amazing people in the search process alone.

Note: I am entering these lengthy posts unedited so as to assure that I produce them and don’t get caught up in an unending cycle of edits. Please read them with this in mind and I promise to apologize only this once.

Despite spending as much time as I have around my nephews and niece and the various Burner children that are flickering to light like tiny candle flames all across Austin, I still don’t seem to have as much of a grasp of how to interact with them as I did when I was a teenaged babysitter. Most of my discomfort comes with having to be a disciplinarian, or trying to understand the expectations of the adults watching me interact. Learning to not only deal with children, but love them, was one of the many transformative elements of this experience for me.

The Lens

Everything that’s been said about the safety of looking through a camera lens is true. A nice little filter, it serves both to make the image I am viewing more abstract, as well as take my focus from the subject being viewed and turn it towards how that subject is being framed or lit. Never was this distance more striking than in Punjab where I was looking through that filter at people fresh from extreme personal tragedy. After the first few interviews I forced myself to look up regularly and take a moment to soak in the reality of the situation, to feel the tears and the averted eyes. I was still new to the environment itself and had very little time to process my surroundings let alone the people standing before me.

The first few days of interviews were quick and intense. We captured the essence of the stories and then jumped quickly to the next location and began again. It was physically and emotionally challenging but, again, the camera helped give me some distance. Then came the first day of workshops.

Workshops

We brought 14 children from 6 different families who had lost a father to suicide to the estate where we had set up camp. The day was filled with new experiences for them. They played on swings and a slide, most for the first time in their lives. I had to stop the camera and show them how to use the teeter-totter before their butts turned blue from the alternating “wham! wham!” of the seats hitting the ground. I showed them how to use their legs like springs through a combination of miming and handwaving, much to their delight.

Of course the camera itself was a fascinating new experience, and they wanted to look through it and play with it. It was hard to convince them that I wasn’t there to be played with too, especially being a gorrah (white person) and having a strange little braid (ghuttini) coming out of the top of my head. I managed to keep them at bay for the most part, and they resorted to performing for the camera until I turned away enough that they gave up and became themselves.

That evening, after a long day, we were waiting for a driver to pick up the remaining kids. The sun had long departed and my camera was put away leaving me defenseless. We started having Jasbir and Gursev sing songs they knew and somehow, inexplicably, they managed to turn it into an excuse to teach me Punjabi. I’m not even sure how it happened, but suddenly I was surrounded by little kids sitting on my lap, wrapped around my shoulders, and peering at my notebook as I wrote out each number they taught me.

Ironically the group included two of the very boys, Gurpreet and Jagtar, I had thought would be the hardest to deal with. Outside they ignored adults and frequently ran off to find new ways to injure themselves. Now they were both intensely focused and very sincere as they repeated each number for me and gently corrected my pronunciation, nodding and grinning as I got it right. In that moment, due to some combination of feeling their physical affection, uninhibited trust, and sincerity, something inside me snapped and I saw them in an entirely new way.

Each time I went to see the families the familiarity and trust grew. The kids would shout, “Meester Kai!” until at last I responded with a sharp look or two, finally breaking out in a crazy gesture or wild dance move that brought waves of laughter. I would then return to what I was doing as though nothing had happened and they would eagerly try again.

On the bus ride into Delhi the bus, despite bouncing harshly over endless ruts and potholes and careening from left to right at the most inopportune moments, became an irresistible dance space. With Punjabi Bhungra music blasting from the speakers and the bus’s red, green and blue interior lights ablaze, the kids took turns spinning and bouncing in the aisles and, inevitably, dragging me from my seat to join them. Over time little Jagtar (the youngest boy) began singing quietly with me and the older Jagtar and his brother Gurpreet started cuddling up next to me as the night grew late and the bouncing bus lulled them into sleep.

When we reached our final destination, the golden temple in Amritsar, Gurpreet held my hand whenever I wasn’t holding the camera. This is a kid with no parents but for his 12 year old sister. Through some natural encoding in all of us he found me as a father figure and trusted me. He dragged me to see the giant goldfish. He babbled incoherently about everything around us. He insisted that he was, “the UNDERTAKER!”

There were definitely other kids that I connected with. We taught everyone to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in English and Sher insisted that I sit with him until he had it down perfectly. His sister Salma hassled me endlessly and was first to insist that I take the dance floor. Naresh was the oldest and experienced the biggest transformation. He came into his own as a leader for the children, slipping smoothly from comedian and playmate to confident speaker. I feel certain that he will become a powerful voice for and to his community.

Leaving

It was so difficult to leave, and harder to imagine that I might not see some of these kids again. Worse still, I can’t be there to protect them from what will inevitably confront them as they continue to fight their way through a world for which they are under-prepared and stripped of defenses. I think the confidence they gained from this trip has great potential to get them moving in the right direction to take control of their lives but the abysmal education available to them and the sheer difficulty of getting enough to eat will be hard to overcome. I will be sending support money through a local activist who has been working on these issues for many years. I will also be sending them letters that they may one day be able to read in their english classes, along with recordings of my children’s songs and photos of my life in Austin. I still have no interest in having children of my own, but maybe I just picked up a few more nieces and nephews.

As I was leaving work today my friend said to me, “you’ve always sort of reveled in Austin as this wonderful little playground. Has your experience in India changed how you see that? I guess what I’m asking is, are you experiencing white guilt?”

I think if anything I am re-affirmed in my belief that play is the highest form of human achievement. Play is all you have left when you are going hungry and everything’s been taken from you. It’s what gives us dignity, and hope, and makes life worth living.

My perspective shift has more to do with things that are not play. There are so many things that people take seriously, that cause them to worry, panic, or become irritated or furious, and none of them include having a roof, food, living parent or basic freedom. As a wise banner borne by clowns once read, “Life is too Important to be taken Seriously”.

Another South by Southwest comes to a close. Hearts pour out in unison from stages all over my city, covering the sweating exhausted audiences. Together they build to the 2:00 AM climax of last breath vocal screams, blurring drumsticks and guitar strings bent beyond their limits, diving down to hell and wailing up to heaven. With a roar the crowd gives what they have left in response, slapping their sore hands together one last time before stumbling out into the street to shout over the ringing in their ears and feel their way through the waves of humanity towards the smell of greasy pizza.

I stand leaning against a barricade, chewing on the last few slices of organic dried mango left in my pocket. I slap a few hands and feel the warmth of hugs as friends and new acquaintances pass. This is still my city after all these years and I feel like welcoming all of the lost outsiders who drift by or ask how far they are from a taxi.

Today I am guided from my bittersweet sleep by the melancholy but gentle hand of the piano outside my room. Outside I find that beloved housemates have produced the soup of re-animation and are ready for post sxsw analysis — the music, the films, the crushes — the magic moments that seemed fleeting cast forever in reality through the sharing.