Growing Pains

While Sarah’s been chasing childhood across Southeast Asia, I’ve been chasing children in the same subcontinent. After a week-long translation fest, I’m beginning to see how all these puzzle pieces will fit together to make a film, which now resembles more of a sandwich than a braid. The first half of the film will focus on the kindergarten worlds of Sarita, Rabinda, and Neha (the former two pictured above); the second half will center on two teenaged friends, Shyam and Sumit. When I started to follow these three little girls, I expected a real life Alice in Wonderland, but I’ve found that beneath their angelic smiles, these girls can be just as cruel as they are kind; even the dynamics of nap time can be surprisingly complex. My goal is to flesh out the friend-triangle, capturing them working and playing with one another, against one another, and under the guidance of a guru. Though there may be one or two scenes that include a teacher (a meditation lesson and an outdoor game resembling “duck duck goose”), this section had been shot primarily Peanuts-style—from the perspective of the five-year olds with the teacher “waaa-waaa-waaa”ing somewhere overhead.

Like Adam, there are so many times, especially during personal interactions, that I wish I had a hidden camera rolling, as so much seems to reveal itself only after the camera’s off. During a recent English lesson, for example, one of the boys asked me the American sign for “S-?-E.” He fingerspelled it over and over, but I insisted that “?” wasn’t part of the Latin alphabet. He whipped out his notebook and wrote something resembling: “S )( E”. Again, I told him I didn’t understand the second letter. He tried again, this time producing a legible “SXE.” I informed the exasperated boy that “sxe” was not an English word. With unfailing tenacity, he slammed his notebook shut and boldly fingerspelled, in front of the entire waiting class, “F-U-C-K”. Well! It had never occurred to me that in the deaf community of suburban Nepal (where arranged marriages are still common and dating is not), these guys are every bit as adolescent as their American counterparts. Though the teenaged boys are more calculated in front of the camera than the first-grade girls, I’ve retrospectively found key scenes rife with allusions to pubescent thoughts of girls, male dominance, and competition. The footage culminates in a 400m race between two close friends, Shyam and Sumit, whose desire to win overwhelms their desire to support each other: Shyam wants to win the heart of a girl by winning the race but doesn’t even cross the finish line, and the more confident, competetive Sumit runs his heart out (literally) to bring home the silver. In my most serendipitious moment (and I’ve been relying heavily on serendipity), linking our two cultures and incorporating an unexpected bit of pop culture, Shyam picks up a Nepali newspaper and calls over a few friends to report the death of Michael Jackson. I, of course, had no clue what they were talking about at the time, and didn’t find out myself for another week!

The golden thread is, very broadly, the “emotionality” of childhood and puberty within this deaf community. The peanut butter gluing together these two halves—the critical tent pole—is the school’s only deaf teacher, Sharmila, who will lead us from an outdoor game in the courtyard (an intentional departure from the first grade classroom) to the fifth grade classroom, after which point, the focus will shift primarily to Shyam. The film will be much more of a conventional documentary than originally planned, but it’s not entirely ethnographic, per se.

I’m open to surprises and expecting the unexpected in my final three weeks. I’m now shooting and reshooting the opening scene (the national anthem, signed on sporadic mornings), spending long days observing the girls, and searching for some way to close the film. (I want to return to the deaf school after the race, but what could possibly serve as a good resolution after the climactic race? And should I stick to the Shyam-Sumit thread or find some way to incorporate the whole school again?)

I’m sending you guys lots of positive energy, and wishing you many serendipitious moments over your finals weeks and days. As always, I’m stoked to read your updates and looking forward to finally matching names with faces in a few short weeks!