Back to the streets

Digitally restored 25 years after it was made, Salaam Bombay! is a poignant reminder of the time gone by

At the recently concluded Penguin Spring Fever 2013, film director Mira Nair spoke at length about her body of work, including the much celebrated Salaam Bombay!. To coincide with the film's completion of 25 years, Penguin also launched the book's reprint (1989), written by Nair and Sooni Taraporewala (the film's screenplay writer).

Last week, PVR Cinemas 're-released' the 1988 Oscar-nominated Salaam Bombay! under its 'Director's Rare' banner. Having swept a number of awards, Indian and international, the film's DVD should be out soon in a digitally restored print, courtesy National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC).

Watching Salaam Bombay! on big screen after so many years is an experience to relish and enjoy. You might wonder just why you should watch a film that you already know so much of. Plot? Check. Characters? Check. Music? Um, check. So, what more can Salaam Bombay! possibly offer after all these years?

The answer is simple and complex, all at once. At a fundamental level, Salaam Bombay! remains a celluloid experience worth cherishing even after two-and-a-half decades. It is a story told movingly, one that gently tugs at the heartstrings. Judge it, if you wish, for telling the time-tested 'poverty' tale to sell to a globalised world, but there is no denying that Salaam Bombay! is indeed a story with characters celebrating freedom, cherishing smiles, valuing friendships and fighting challenges.

A synopsis of Salaam Bombay!: it revolves around Krishna, a boy who longs to go back to his village near Bangalore. Having become a tea delivery boy in a brothel area of Bombay (no, not quite Mumbai then), Chai-pao, as he's called, has an ambition: to save Rs 500 and hand over to his mother to claim his innocence for a theft that he never committed. His own struggles and of people around him frame the storyline.

Sometimes, it is critical to revisit films for the sake of nostalgia. Dusted and cleaned to perfection (in high-definition, no less), Salaam Bombay! is not just high on its nostalgia quotient; it is also a reminder of the time gone by. So, sitting in a multiplex with melted butter popcorn and cappuccino, staring at much sharper colours and images of a 25-year-old film on the 70-mm screen, even as your smartphone vibrates with incessant calls and messages, you can't help but think of the gritty journeys of the film's characters then and now. Salaam Bombay!'s young protagonist, Shafiq Syed, barely in his teens then, is an auto rickshaw driver in - guess where? - Bangalore. Chirpy, yet, forlorn Manju (Hansa Vithal) is today a proud mother. Both Raghubir Yadav and Irffan Khan are seasoned actors with an impressive body of work. Why, one of the street kids in the film was adopted by the film's cinematographer and lives in the US.

Somehow, these nuggets of real life information that didn't, obviously, exist then make the experience of watching Salaam Bombay! charming. You also think of how some characters could have been more sinister: what if the relationship of Manju with her father (Nana Patekar) could be more incestuous, more abusive (like the child-abusing uncle in Nair's Monsoon Wedding) today than what is shown in the film originally? Then, watching a scene from the film, one where Chillum's namesake - a freshly scrubbed, young man - arrives after Chillum has succumbed to years of drug abuse, you think of how many street urchins keep emerging even as many get rescued through Salaam Balak Trust, the NGO started by the film's makers in the '80s.

Most of all, I think of how Nair is vocal in asking audiences to get as many people to watch the film in theatres. "If you do, PVR will extend the screening by another week," she says, a pointer to the fact that her own struggle - to complete the film, release it and now re-release it - continues. It's a bit like the last scene of Salaam Bombay! where Krishna, crying all alone, gradually gathers his senses and brings out his 'latoo' (spinning top) from the pocket, sniffling and winding a string around it. It could signify the tightening of the noose around the neck but eventually the aim is to spin freely.