Watching the wheels

In his first film as director, the 2011 Stanley ka Dabba, Amole Gupte cast himself as a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. Any child would have reason to feel scared of this big, overbearing man, and Gupte clearly relished playing him, but his own real-life empathy for the inner world of children has been evident throughout his body of work. Before Stanley ka Dabba, there was the acclaimed Taare Zameen Par, a film Gupte wrote and was going to direct before Aamir Khan took over and made it a more high-profile production. And now there is Hawaa Hawaai, which suffers from some of the cliches of the "triumph-of-the-underdog" story but is well paced and has emotional directness.

The screenplay of Hawaa Hawaai has a subtle, artistic quality that was also on view in Gupte's earlier film - it refrains from over-explaining things, and the engaged viewer is allowed to connect dots, fill in the gaps, or speculate about a character's back-story. This was more dramatically done in Stanley ka Dabba, which was a clever exercise in viewer manipulation - it had a twist in its tail, which pulled the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer. In Hawaa Hawaai too, snatches of information accumulate over the course of the story - but the show-don't-tell principle is used in a more understated way. Right from the start, we know that the central character, a little boy named Arjun (wonderfully played by Gupte's son Partho), is from a poor family and has to work at a chai-wallah's stall to help his family make ends meet. Working late at night, he sees rich kids being coached for a skating competition and is smitten by the shiny wheels - and thus the narrative kicks into high gear, as Arjun, with the help of some friends from the slum, sets about fashioning a makeshift pair of skates for himself.

"Inspirational" films can easily become trite, wringing gallons of fake emotion from the premise alone, and including stock scenes such as a climactic competition where flesh-and-blood opponents as well as private demons must be conquered at the same time. Hawaa Hawaai doesn't completely avoid those cliches, but it has restraint and interiority, and is less sentimental than it might have been - not least thanks to the excellent performances of the child actors. The understatement is also admirable given that this is a tale of contrasts between the privileged and the unprivileged. Images of pampered kids being chauffeured around in big cars are juxtaposed with shots of Arjun and his friends scavenging in garbage dumps. The line "lakh ki cheez hai" (a reference to the cost of an impossibly sleek pair of skates that Arjun has been admiring from a distance) is followed just a few seconds later by a shot of the boy getting his day's salary - a worn 20-rupee note, a couple of tens.

But importantly, the film has a sense of humour, which heightens the effect of the serious scenes. In his first appearance on the skating rink, Arjun is wearing a ludicrous robot outfit with blinking lights, his skates are covered with a carefully woven zari cloth in the fashion of a new bride, and the other kids understandably yelp and scatter as if an extraterrestrial has appeared in their midst - but surface comedy aside, this is a very important scene, in which a modern-day Ekalavya finds acceptance. Without the lightness of touch, it would probably not have worked.

Perhaps it is also notable that the plot MacGuffin - the thing that sets Arjun dreaming - is something as low-key as skating, as opposed to a mainstream sport. There is no pretence that his whole life can be magically transformed by his becoming a district champion - or that he will spend the next few years gliding from one international championship to another, earning lakhs along the way - and that isn't the point anyway. The point is that he has got the chance to do something on his own terms and to find a measure of success in it - which can perhaps be a stepping stone to self-sufficiency in other fields, and realising other sorts of dreams. No wonder the roller-skate scenes have the feel of rebirth about them. When Arjun puts them on and tries gingerly to move about on them, he is like a fawn taking its first baby steps.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer