This is about my first feature, ‘The Great Indian Butterfly’.
It was around mid-2004. After many hopes of finding finance for the film and their subsequent dissolutions, disillusioned, I was thinking about giving up the search.
The idea to make a feature-length film had come from my cinematographer (now a celebrated director) friend, Shanker Raman. He had a PD150 camera, and he felt we should use it to make a feature film, as people in the US were doing it and breaking out of the celluloid arena. The idea was to write something that can be shot on the road (requiring less dependence on location and lights etc.), and we would form a small team of friends and go out, have fun and come back with a film. I wrote ‘The Great Indian Butterfly’ with that in mind.
However, after it got written, we figured, it was not that simple to run-gun the film. We needed funds. And as the search for that little fund went on, in my mind, the film grew bigger needing set-ups that required more money than we had thought we'd need.
But finally, when it ultimately drew a big zero, after about 1 and half years of chasing mirages, I was about to give up. Shanker had this idea. What if we go back to our old plan and make the film the way we had initially intended.
By then we knew our film very well. We both had lived the script a reasonably substantial amount of time. What we needed next was a Recce. Since the film was written as a road journey to Goa, one morning, we got in my car and headed out for Goa.
It is a Janmashtami day, and it rained throughout the way. I am driving, and at around 6 pm when we have crossed Sangameshwar, I find this traffic jam on the sparsely populated highway. Shanker is dozing next to me.
I see this truck parked oddly in the opposite direction blocking the traffic. As our car slowly reaches it, I suddenly see a man lying dead in front of the truck – head smashed - a terrible sight. I don’t wake Shanker up. As I cross, I see a bike under the truck. As I pass further, I see another man lying dead behind the truck! And that moment I suddenly see some men holding yet another someone in the bush looking around for help. I want to look away, but they make eye contact, and I see them trying to tell me something. I lower the glass, and then I see them holding a boy of around 8 years – bloodied and severely injured.
I nudge Shanker. He wakes up with a huff. The men, whose vehicles are all parked a little away, are all very rattled and they shout at me saying that the boy needs help and is still alive. One guy crosses the road and runs to me pleading that he has children in his Qualis and has no place to take this child in. We instinctively ask them if they know of any nearby hospital. They don’t.
But I remember, I had just crossed a police station a few kilometres back. Without thinking twice, we run out and lay one of our sleeping bags on the back seat as they carry the little boy and put him in. They say they’ll follow us, as we take a U-turn and speed towards the police station. That’s when we see the boy clearly. Breathing with a weird groan, the boy looked like he would die at any moment. His femur was broken and was in two pieces, his skull had a dent. We couldn't see more as the boy was completely covered in blood.
We reach the police station 17 km away. It was slightly uphill off the highway. As I drove up to the station, I kept honking brazenly to draw attention. A curious cop in a vest walks out, sees what’s inside the car and runs inside to get dressed. More cops run out. They ask us about the accident spot, and while a policeman is deputed to be with us, the rest of the guys jump into their parked vehicles and vanish in no time, wailing. The cop takes us to a village hospital 2 km further away.
The moment we enter the hospital, the lights go out. It is now getting dark. And there is only one doctor and one nurse in this two storey structure. Some 25 odd beds with just one patient at a corner on a bed. We put the boy in the stretcher and bring him to the hall. The nurse puts on a kerosene lamp, and the doctor begins to examine him. We ask him, what does he think. He asks us, “Do you want him to live?” Is that even question!? “Then you will have to immediately take him to the main general hospital in Ratnagiri, which is about 60 km from here!”, he says.
Suddenly the boy began to scream and ask for water. The doctor warned us that he should not be given any water. The nurse tried to connect a drip to the child but couldn't find a vein for the longest time. The doctor ran and got a stick from somewhere and tied the child’s broken thigh bone to it with a bandage. We watched everything in horror.
As they put the child back in our car, the drip suddenly comes off. It’s now really dark outside. The doctor says there is no time to redo it. We should leave immediately. He tells us to keep talking to the kid and not give him water at any cost. At the end he adds, if something happens on the way, please don’t come back.
“We don’t have a morgue in here!”
Completely freaked out, with the cop crouched in the gap of the back seat and with the boy lying behind, we begin our race against time. We cross the accident spot again. By now the bodies have been covered, and the cops recognise us and realise our mission. They quickly make way for us through the growing traffic blockage around the place.
60 km have never been so long for us.
The boy suddenly began moaning and talking. Shanker couldn’t speak Marathi. So I had to the talking in my broken Marathi. The policeman with us was too shocked to utter anything. I asked the boy his name. I asked him where he lived. I kept telling him, nothing will happen to him. I asked him if he could feel any pain. I would prompt him, “Shivaji Maharaj ki…?” And he would answer, “Jai!”. “Ganpati Bappa…?” … “Morya!...” Halfway through, the kid began demanding water again. Still can’t forget his simple question, “Why aren’t you giving me water, uncle? I’m so thirsty!” Shanker said, “Fuck it! I’m giving him water!” We negotiated and finally asked the cop seated behind to soak a tissue paper and squeeze drops of water on his lips.
At Ratnagiri, just 2 km away from the hospital, right on the middle of the road, at around 8 pm, we hit this vast ‘dahi handi’ ceremony that’s underway. Completely blocking the traffic from all sides! Unable to wait like that and watch the boy go, the cop finally got down and literally pushed everyone, making way for us. His uniform helped us through.
At the hospital’s casualty ward, as the doctors and paramedics swarmed on the boy from all sides, examining him, cutting his bloodied dress to make way, barking orders on each other, Shanker and I stood at a corner looking at the boy. The boy too just kept looking at us. We stood there for a long time. Then there was nothing more to do. I went up to the boy, crouched down very close to him and said to him, “Nothing will happen to you. See, you are in safe hands. Can we leave now?” the boy kind of nodded. We left.
We met a senior cop outside and gave him all our details, just in case they needed us to ever depose in a court…
We couldn’t have carried on that night. So we stopped at a hotel in Ratnagiri for the night. Next morning, I took the number of the hospital from the reception and enquired about the boy. He had died at 7 that morning after battling for 8 hours on an operation table!
On our way back after a few days, we stopped at the same old police station to get details of who the boy was. If they could reach the family. We learned, one of the men killed in that accident was his own father, a doctor. And the other man was a neighbour. They were returning from a satsang.
I went back and rewrote a part of the script where I brought in a small boy character in the film, whom my protagonists meet and have a minor episode of magic realism. My small way to remember and immortalise the little chap. I wrote the character filling water from a street side pipe. The dead boy's cries for water had haunted me for a long time. Incidentally we even found a boy who looked exactly like the dead child.
Shanker and I never spoke to each other about this incident ever. It was too painful for both of us to go back, that route. But somewhere we both felt, this film had begun to live its own life.
Within a few weeks, I got a call from a friend, Parth Arora. He said he had some money and wanted to produce ‘The Great Indian Butterfly’.
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