Maati-maay

I saw this Marathi film 'Maati-maay' starring Atul Kulkarni and Nandita Das. The movie took me to an unimaginable world where characters I cannot identify with are thrown into situations I could've never thought of. Such is the power of the film that despite all this, the film shook me completely. A very 'arty' film it is, complete with the 'brutal honesty' that the movies of this genre have. The strong human emotions touched me.

Here is my interpretation of a scene in the movie:

Disclaimer: Original work of expression. I describe, in my own words, a scene from a marathi movie 'Maati-maay'. Tried to cover the entire story of the movie through the description of this one scene.

She leant against the lake to drink water - she indeed looked like an animal. It was not just the way she was drinking water. There was something more that made her 'animalish'. Her distraught hair, her dirty brick-brown sari, her pale face - everything made her look so different from a human being. For the village where she lived earlier, she was in fact an animal - an animal who roamed around alone in the outskirts of the village, an animal who scared children away. A grave-keeper at one point of time, now she was allegedly a witch who killed children.

She saw the boy on the surface of the lake water. She knew he was standing behind her. Her body contracted. What would people say if they saw him with her? Would people outcast him too, she wondered?

The boy, all of ten, handed her a dry leaf that contained a piece of mutton that was cooked last night. She grabbed hold of it - it was after long that she was going to eat cooked food. She looked at it hungrily as a tear trickled down her cheek without her knowledge.

She stood up. The boy, in a white shirt and khaki shorts looked at this lady - this witch.

She was looking at him for the first time. Because she was told that she would kill any child she would look at.... She had begun to believe all the rumours that were spread about her....

Today, she was looking at him in the eye - with so much to say. The way he looked at her, she was scared. Did he get to know about her? Her eyes could not meet his. She stepped back. She walked away....

He stood there still. He felt proud. The mutton was cooked last night because he had done well at school. And he felt proud that he had shared it with his mother... The illiteracy of the village made the villagers see the 'witch' in her. It was his education that helped him see the person in the witch who was his mother.....