Ink Drift - July

Issue 12 - Fear
The Banyan Tree of Deuli
The Banyan Tree of Deuli
Kumar Aditya
We started filming the scenes on a sweltering
summer morning, sweating in
the humidity of woods, in the pressing
silence disturbed only by the twitter of
birds and harsh cawing of crows—there
were a lot of them, roosting all over the
overhanging branches of the banyan.
From the very first take, things did not
appear normal but not for a moment it
occurred to us there was a specific chilling
reason for all that.
The lead actors fell ill, one with high fever,
and the other with a severe case of
throat infection. Our equipment began
to malfunction; cameras switched on
and off on their own accord, spotlights
flickering for no reason. Equipped even
with an arsenal of spare batteries and
a generator we could only shoot three
scenes with the junior artistes, minus
the lead pair.
“We wasted a day,” I exclaimed while
reviewing the footage at my home-stay
in Deuli. “ Just look at their expressions—it’s
as if I am looking at wood. I
cannot believe these are the same bright
actors who we screen-tested, just look
at them. My spot-boy can articulate the
dialogue better than this bunch!”
“Oh, come on, sir,” my Director of Photography
patted on my back, reviewing
the tape. “I think they’re doing fine. It’s
just they weren’t prepared to face the
camera before the lead pair. We still
have a week to go. We can shoot it again
tomorrow with a fresh mind.”
I went to check up on my lead actors
later, apprising them both of the situation.
The male lead was sallow and sick,
cooped up in his bed in the company of
medicines and high fever. The leading
lady was on her twentieth mug of some
steaming concoction—a grandma’s recipe
for sore-throat, which was prepared
by an elderly village woman. In any case,
they appeared far from ready to commence
shooting the next day or the next.
The next morning I woke up early, had
a sumptuous breakfast of tea and butter
toasts before setting out for the location,
all by myself. When it comes to
film-making I like to plan ahead, play
out the scenes in mind before the actual
filming. The woods were cool, the sun
still hugging close the eastern horizon
beyond the trees. There were signs of our
presence here the previous day—plastic-wrappings
of biscuits, cigarette stubs
and styrofoam platters and cups in the
bushes.
I lit up a cigarette and began to sift
through the scenes we were about to
re-shoot in a few hours. I’d reviewed the
scenes many times prior to that instance;
I had spent hours with the screenwriter
conceiving every single line of the script,
the very eerie setting for the story. Not
once had I or anyone else questioned the
ingenuity of the screenplay.
But there beneath the banyan tree, in
the wee hours of the morning, I began
to find inconsistencies in the script. The
dialogues sounded naïve and blunt as if a
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