|
Huckleberry Finn
and The Ugly Duckling haven’t still faded out from his
mind’s eye and he adores kids or so we gather. He digs his
beer and like all diehard lovers of the tobacco stick, he lights
up at the very sight of it. He is crazy about cars, bikes,
anything that has a wheel. Memories are sacred to him — be
they of a little Amul dairy in India or of shooting drummer Max
Roach at a jazz concert years ago. He is among the first
Montessori children of the country and it shows.
Now the bad news.
Mr Contractor, people wouldn’t have demurred had you gone out
there and collected all the awards you wanted to from Michael
Angelo Antonioni and the rest for making the best film on China
in the eighties — which you did anyway! But if you thought you
would write a book on the making of Dreams of the Dragon’s
Children after two decades, write it the way you have and go
scot-free, you thought wrong.
Don’t you know
it is a sacrilege to write so beautifully, so simply and so
captivatingly and then to confess, "I am hardly a
writer"!
Who else but a
writer, blessed with a poetic sensibility and cameraman’s eye,
can say, "In the backdrop of people bidding farewell a
clear Stauss Waltz can bring a lump to your throat and make your
eyes water`85 In the fading light, the mountains of western
China turned into paintings, forever etched in our memory."
That’s the magic
of Navroze Contractor. He tells a story because he has a story
to tell. For then, he dispenses with the special effects. He
takes you by the hand, gets you to sit down like you did when
your granny regaled you with stories of fairies and faraway
trees.
Cut to life and
love in China before SARS. He begins by telling you that he was
warned that Chinese jails had rats in them. And then says,
"I wondered whether Indian jails had cute bunny
rabbits." Even though, this modern-day bearded fairy humbly
believes he isn’t much of a storyteller, you can already feel
the yarn gently netting around you. But if he does lose out on
the erudite, cultivated style of writing, he amply makes up for
it with his sheer joie de vivre, vivid descriptions and
amusing accounts.
With a near
reverential excitement of a child, he sets aside the warning ‘China
will eat you up’, and joins an international film crew to put
on tape the hopes and aspirations of its young people`85an
ardent Sinophile who manfully eats snakes and washes down such
stomach-turning memories with gallons of Tsing Tao beer. He
meets shepherds that would have been musicians, waitresses who
could have been doctors and cabbies whose idea of realistic
films is the American Zorro.
Chubby cherubs
from China kick him in the backside, "children spoilt all
out of shape`85 adored, cajoled, cuddled and loved like they
were going out fashion". Guards see his beard and ask him
if he is the one who bumped off Mrs Gandhi. Village elders in
remote Inner Mongolia hug him like he were a long-lost friend.
Workers, watchmakers, peasants, teachers, students, lovers and
businessmen...young dragons all, wring their hearts out and give
him more than a byte for the film. Some of them spit fire, and
some reel under the bite of the American bug. There are others
whose dreams have soured and still others whose most pertinent
desire is not Levis jeans or foreign condoms but to have a pair
of big eyes! But all of them in Redland are trying to
"philosophically accept that destiny was the task each one
was meant to do." He listens carefully and with compassion.
And in the
process, this bearded gentle man, with Zen-like insight, comes
dangerously close to the Big Brotherliness of China aspiring for
a shade paler than red!
To see this book
as "part travelogue, part cultural study and part film
history" as the back cover says, is to miss the point. Dreams
of the Dragon’s Children is all this. Yet it is not only
about China making its transition from Chiang Kai-Sheik to Deng
Xiao Ping, or switching slowly from hardbound communism to
kitschy capitalism.
Woven into the
larger matrix of Dreams`85is a huge amount of clip art
— stories of Life Magazine and its founder Henry Luce
who was inflicted by the China Syndrome, the Chinese Deng Feng
and Dong Hai, Che Guevera, the motorcycle freak, the ice between
Russia and China, the tale of an old house in Yenan where Mao
camped after the Long March`85the love songs of young Chinese
girls, the old women for whom feeding wan-tans to their brood is
really the only dream, Professor ET and the Cultural Revolution,
the legends of Judo and Kurosawa, The Art of War and Sun
Tzu, of petty crime and ruthless systems of punishment centuries
later`85
Dreams`85is
about a man who allows you a peep into his own life as he
recounts his mutinous days in Gujarat, his awe of the Fathers of
Communism and his ability to also take a dig at them, his spirit
of the adventurer and traveller for whom "thoughtful items
of clothing given by loved ones`85 don’t just keep you warm
and comfortable but the thought of well-being and luck come with
them. I believe in this firmly as did people like Thor
Heyardahl, Heinrich Herrerr and Edmund Hillary."
It is also about
little histories that are perhaps doomed to die a hundred deaths
if someone with the compassion of Contractor doesn’t recount
them occasionally. He does that with a childlike innocence that
nature seems to have granted to him and he has honed by
travelling so much that one suspects even his shoes would have
sprouted tongues!
`85And all these
he strings together using the thread of his photographic memory,
as they slow-dissolve one into the other, leaving you with
colours and scents, impressions and images, not so much the
dreary black and white of words. Now if only someone would do a
film on the book!
It would be as
perfect as the morning he describes in the village in Inner
Mongolia. "When children wake up, the sounds everywhere in
the world are the same." It seems, though, when a
cinematographer wakes up to writing, the sounds don’t get any
sweeter than the Dreams of the Dragon’s Children.
|
HE is an ace
shutterbug who rubs shoulders with camera greats such as Ryszard
Horowitz – one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz.
Federico Fellini fascinates him and Kurosawa is God. Given half a
chance, he will begin to tell you how Andre Wajda and Roman Polanski
stole issues of Life Magazine from the local American library
in Krakow.
