Siddharth

Synopsis: Mahendra Saini (Rajesh Tailang) and his wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee), live in the slums of Delhi with their two young children, daughter Pinky and 12-year-old son, Siddharth. When Mahendra can’t make ends meet he agrees to a suggestion by his brother-in-law, Ranjit (Anurag Arora) to send Siddharth to a distant town to work in a factory. After a month away, when the lad fails to return on the agreed date, the worried father goes on the trail of his son ending up in Mumbai where he hears stories of child abduction for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

Siddharth is a trillion light years away from the India we see in Bollywood films and needless to say closer to the truth for so many of the common people in the impoverished parts of India’s teeming cities. Writer/director Mehta based his searingly poignant film upon a true experience, when an illiterate worker in Delhi asked for his help to find a place called Dongri, to where he believed his son had been taken. But when asked for a photo or the spelling of his son’s name the man could provide neither.

Having been to India and seen some of the seedy side first hand I was deeply impressed by the director’s authentic depiction of the poverty in parts of his country. The squalor is there but also the real attempts by a family to make a tolerable home in such an environment. Near slave labour is alive and well, not only in its exploitation of children but also in the pittance of a wage Mahendra receives for his work in a jeans factory, making it almost impossible for him to even afford a bus fare worth about AU$6 when he heads off to try to find his son. The necessary precocious maturing of children is apparent in the demeanour of a young chai-wallah (tea boy) on the street, who speaks with the world weariness of a much older person. The offhandedness of people in authority is evidenced and overall there is a sense that life is cheap, starkly contrasted to Mahendra’s devastation at Siddharth’s disappearance and his determination to find the boy.

Mahendra works a second job as a chain-wallah (a fixer of broken zips). Scenes of him and other Delhi workers going about their daily business amidst the human gridlock simply scream the poverty of these people and yet simply having a job is cause for joy. In certain scenes we see their daily grind set against some of Delhi’s iconic buildings, yet again a reminder of the anomaly and contrast that makes up India. The rumours that abound of sex trafficking, organ trade and slave labour all add to the sense of misery and despair. When Mahendra goes to Mumbai he visits the red light area of town, where one young street lad says to him “Maybe your son got lucky and left this world”.

Siddharth is, simply put, a disturbing yet beautiful film, a telling indictment of Indian society but with a continuous undercurrent of optimism for the future.

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