Books: Shooting Water

Shooting Water

Author: Devyani Saltzman

Publisher: Penguin India

Price: Rs 295/-

Shooting Water is an emotional, even turbulent ride. Sure, you’ll probably start it with some amount of scepticism. I know I did - this is after all, a book written by the daughter of a huge director, Deepa Mehta. How could it not be overshadowed by the famous mother?

But it’s not Deepa Mehta’s book, it’s Devyani Saltzman’s. And she’s so unbelievably open about her feelings and her vulnerabilities, not to mention the journey she embarked upon with her mother, agreeing to work with her on a film, that it’s hard not to be impressed.

She talks of all kinds of things…like being asked to choose who to live with when her parents split up when she was 11, and how that choice essentially cast a shadow on all of them. She chose to live with her Canadian father, explaining that somehow it was safer, she felt safer. But the reverberations of that choice haunt them all, even years later.

As a 19-year-old, Saltzman joins her mother as third assistant cameraperson on the film Water. Of course, we all remember, the film was pretty violently shut down, just as they started shooting in Benares. She falls in love, the guy has a girlfriend, it’s all rather heart-breaking, but that’s first love for you, as she points out.

What truly makes the book stand out, in my opinion, is the clarity of narrative voice and the human-ness of emotions. She doesn’t look like she’s hiding anything, even when it “exposes” her. She writes frankly of an overwhelming need for her mother’s approval, that “old feeling”, the need for validation, even having a breakdown while at Oxford University.

But it’s not all guts and gore. She takes on the Hindu right, quoting Pavan Varma’s “All nations indulge in forms of myth-making”. Saltzman feels that the film Water was one of the casualties of that and she’s not wary of censorship so much as public censorship, or rather, public “pre-censorship”.

She says the controversy over Water had much more to do with Mehta’s previous film Fire, than anything else. After all, the story of Water is not some radical revolutionary tale, it’s a story of 4 widows in an ashram trying to survive, it’s essentially a love story. Not quite what you would expect a national government to get in a twist about.

The film was eventually made in Colombo, four years later. This time, Saltzman is a stills photographer…she’s over her first love, and things are looking up. It’s also a moment of closure. “When Water finished shooting in Colombo, it was beautiful…we could move on,” she says in an interview. A chapter had closed and there was remarkably, no bitterness.

It’s a rather beautiful story - of life and love and a journey, with a political current - and enchantingly written, too. The 26-year-old has no intentions of resting on her laurels.

She regularly writes feature articles for Canadian and Indian publications, favouring social issues, and is already at work on her next book. The pressure of living up to her parents was not something she struggled with, she says, but in many ways, she’s feeling the heat now - having emerged as a creative force. Here’s to raising the bar.