Lisa Ray blooms in Water
Noreen Aslam

BOMBAY—Toronto’s film and corporate elite stood up to cheer Deepa Mehta’s drama Water when it made its world premiere at the Toronto film festival. At least one of the co-stars, Toronto-born Lisa Ray, was astonished with the reaction because Water is such a challenging story. Not only is it a tragedy about the impoverished residents of a widows home in the late 1930s in India, it plays here in Hindi with English subtitles.
“I mean,” Ray tells the Sun as Water is prepared for a Friday theatrical release in the city Mehta now makes home, “people don’t want to work so hard anymore and sometimes I don’t want to work so hard when I go see a movie. “But,” Ray says, “despite being so culturally specific, it is so universal. The empathy for these characters is incredible, because of the humanism.” That is what drew Ray, the Canadian daughter of a Bengali Indian father and a Polish mother, to the project.
“It has been my dream to be part of that kind of cinema.” Ray’s co-star and on-screen lover, Persian-Indian John Abraham, shared her career dream but with his own variations. “Having Deepa on my resume as an actor is a very prestigious name to have,” he tells the Sun. “So that was initially, and honestly, why I accepted the script. Then, when I read the script, I was pretty impressed.”
Abraham also knew, of course, about the film’s troubled history. Five years ago, Hindu fundamentalists stormed the film’s location, burned sets, threw them into the Ganges River and threatened violence against Mehta if she did not return to Canada. The film was delayed. It was supposed to be the completion of a trilogy that started with Fire (1996) and continued with Earth (1998). The disruption embittered Mehta, although she finally recast the film and shot it over the past year, in secret, in Sri Lanka.
“Coming down to brass tacks,” says Abraham, “in terms of commercial viability, it had a controversy behind it, so getting it noticed wouldn’t be a problem.” Since shooting Water, Abraham has rocketed to fame as a leather-clad, motorcycle-riding, Bollywood film star in a musical called Dhoom (slang for power and speed). But he still wants an international audience to know his very different appeal in a serious film such as Water, which raises a difficult socio-political topic in a very frank way.
Abraham says that some Indian people want to bury the issue of the plight of widows and the history of the abuse, especially of child brides who are widowed as young as seven. Others, like Abraham before he made this film, are not even aware of the history of widows houses, some of which still exist in deplorable conditions. “So, because it came as a shocker, the first thing I asked Deepa was: ‘Is this really true? Is this what happened, because this is my country and I didn’t really know.’ She said: ‘Yes, it is true.’ And it is still true but at a (lesser) extent compared to what it was.
“But I think Deepa addressed this issue with a lot of elan, with a lot of class, with a lot of cinematic beauty.” At a time of great political upheaval in then British-held India, Abraham’s character is an upper class liberal who falls in love with a destitute widow living in one home. What he doesn’t know is that she supports her entire ashram by working as a prostitute. Meanwhile, the arrival of a tempestuous child widow upsets the workings of the place. For her role, Ray worked with Mehta on a provocative image. She is the lotus flower blooming in dirty water, a symbol of purity surviving the worst conditions. “In the script, as is written, she’s beautiful and sensual, but unselfconscious and unaware of it and vulnerable and blah, blah, blah,” Ray says. “These are all words. But you can’t ‘act’ that, I think. It becomes an intellectual exercise.
“Deepa, and that is part of her brilliance, she knows exactly how to get what she wants from her actors, exactly how to trigger you. So she gave me this visual of the lotus flowers that was my driving image in this character. “And it can be extrapolated largely to the entire film (to other characters and political issues). “Because, what people are empathizing with is the trueness. And trueness is purity. It is very unblemished in this film. It is uncorrupted. “I’m so kicked,” Ray continues. “We somehow thought that no one would get it. That’s why I’m so happy.”