Runjhun, an eleven year old girl, the only child of working parents, comes home everyday after school to an empty house. And lets her imagination take over.
A face in the window of an abandoned house sets her off on her own exploration and leads her to a journey of discovery where she encounters a girl her own age, and receives broken fragments of the violence she has been through. At the end, we do not know whether it was her imagination or a reality of a different kind. And there is no way of knowing.
Runjhun is not unfamiliar to urban India. More and more single children are finding themselves alone at home in the afternoons, their homework and exam preparations monitored by regular phone calls from the parents. But it is only children who have stayed alone in their childhood who know how much time they actually spent in their homework and how much in storybooks, in daydreaming and in television.Not that I do not see the positives in a situation like this. A free rein on your imagination, a sense of independence found early in life and the infinite possibilities of an unsupervised house all to yourself.
But like it cannot be all bad, it surely cannot be all good.
Is letting a child be alone at home for an extended period an act of violence, however minor? Is pressurizing a child to do well in class, to the exclusion of other forms of 'useless' explorations also an act of violence?
And does the child repress this 'violence' within her own psyche, refusing to acknowledge it, possibly never even knowing that it was committed against her?
Would such a child ever imagine another girl, trapped in a huge house, as a victim of violence that she is unaware of in her own life? If she would, then that is how Runjhun meets Nazia. If she wouldn'nt, then perhaps there is another story.
A story set in a city which has a recent past of Hindu Muslim violence, and an abandoned house which belonged to a Muslim doctor. When Runjhun steps into that house, perhaps she leaves the safe boundaries of her own imagination behind and enters anothers. Another's memory, another's fantasy, whether the other is even a flesh and blood human being, or a memory that the house remembers, I do not know. Runjun does not know. And her parents will not tell, choosing instead to ask her if her tuition teacher had come.
A face in the window of an abandoned house sets her off on her own exploration and leads her to a journey of discovery where she encounters a girl her own age, and receives broken fragments of the violence she has been through. At the end, we do not know whether it was her imagination or a reality of a different kind. And there is no way of knowing.
Runjhun is not unfamiliar to urban India. More and more single children are finding themselves alone at home in the afternoons, their homework and exam preparations monitored by regular phone calls from the parents. But it is only children who have stayed alone in their childhood who know how much time they actually spent in their homework and how much in storybooks, in daydreaming and in television.Not that I do not see the positives in a situation like this. A free rein on your imagination, a sense of independence found early in life and the infinite possibilities of an unsupervised house all to yourself.
But like it cannot be all bad, it surely cannot be all good.
Is letting a child be alone at home for an extended period an act of violence, however minor? Is pressurizing a child to do well in class, to the exclusion of other forms of 'useless' explorations also an act of violence?
And does the child repress this 'violence' within her own psyche, refusing to acknowledge it, possibly never even knowing that it was committed against her?
Would such a child ever imagine another girl, trapped in a huge house, as a victim of violence that she is unaware of in her own life? If she would, then that is how Runjhun meets Nazia. If she wouldn'nt, then perhaps there is another story.
A story set in a city which has a recent past of Hindu Muslim violence, and an abandoned house which belonged to a Muslim doctor. When Runjhun steps into that house, perhaps she leaves the safe boundaries of her own imagination behind and enters anothers. Another's memory, another's fantasy, whether the other is even a flesh and blood human being, or a memory that the house remembers, I do not know. Runjun does not know. And her parents will not tell, choosing instead to ask her if her tuition teacher had come.
Role: Writer, Director, Editor
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