With a torch and a lathi

A documentary on Mumbai?s rat killers is now being screened in multiplexes

When Miriam Chandy Menacherry visited the famous Karni Mata temple on a road trip to Rajasthan, the temple where rats are revered, she could not bring herself to step inside, that was how scared she was of rodents. But in the kind of twist fate loves, Menacherry ended up making a documentary on the rat killers of Mumbai, The Rat Race, which meant one-and-a-half years of shooting among rats, both dead and living. “I’m not over my phobia yet,” says the 37-year-old filmmaker with a laugh, “but I had to make the film anyway.”

The film, which explores the story of the rat killers appointed by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, won the Co-production Challenge at Cannes in 2010. It is also one of the rare documentaries to have secured a theatrical release, with PVR and Big Cinemas screening it in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore last week. Prabhakar Joshi, the head of programming at PVR, admits this is the first Indian documentary they are releasing but adds “If we feel there will be a good audience for it, we will release more documentaries.” The response in Bangalore, he says, has been “encouraging”, while it has been muted in Mumbai and Delhi. “Documentaries, like world cinema, has a niche audience and intermittent screenings should not be judged on the basis of numbers,” says Jeewan Joshi, the head of programming at Big Cinemas, which released Leaving Home, a documentary on folk band Indian Ocean, in 2010.

Menacherry stumbled on the idea after seeing a newspaper article that 2,000 people auditioned for 30 vacancies for rat killers in Mumbai. But it was after she met Behram Harda, the supervisor of the rat killers who believes the only difference between them and James Bond is that the latter has the licence to kill humans while they have the right to kill rats, that she realised that here was a story worth telling. Harda had tried to get a break in films but his family had insisted he get a government job. “Harda epitomised Mumbai: where people come to chase their dreams but end up having to balance that with reality. To me, the film was a way to tell the larger story of the city,” she says.

All this makes for a grim story but Menacherry has chosen to make the film with wry humour. (Harda, in one scene, says that while BMC has to use cheap spices to make poison appeal to rats, authorities in London use Cadbury cocoa)

Menacherry says Cannes was crucial to get the film on the international radar, even though it did not result in funding. The film, with a budget of Rs 30 lakh, was eventually made with contributions from friends and family.

The journalist-turned-filmmaker adds that the film felt incomplete because she did not get permission to shoot the disposal of the dead rats at the notorious Deonar dumping grounds. But for anyone watching The Rat Race, with its mix of humour and pathos, it is a tale well told.