Seeking the Beloved

Friday, January 28, 2011

the village by the river

the village at night and day

stormy river that sohini is swimming through

Mati kahe

Tulla’s is a mystical trade.

It evokes for us, in some ways the original

act of creation – making life from the five elements.

Taking Earth and Water he kneads vessels into shape.

Stoked with Air and baked in Fire and they turn out beautiful

like our body-selves – holding but often losing

the fifth element – Space or emptiness.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Sohini storyboard + keyframes part 1

Script part one -

The stories of star-crossed lovers speak to us in curious ways. In their agonies and ecstasies, frustrations and yearnings, we glimpse our own. In their transgressions perhaps, we glimpse the possibility of our own freedom.

For centuries the stories of Umar-Marui, Sohini-Mahiwal, Sassui-Punhoon and Moomal-Rano have flowed like rivers in the communities of Sindh... riding the waves of fact and fiction, history and legend, myth and lore… seizing and inhabiting the imagination of poets and singers, lovers and laymen.

They came to us thus. In conversation and encounters, in poetry and song, and carried us away into the stormy seas of our own experience, the wind-swept terrains of our own longings, the perilous journeys into our own sub-conscious.

This is the story of Sohini. The woman who took on the mighty river with a frail pitcher of unbaked clay. She began to speak to us. Today, this is how we choose to tell her story.

The time may have been the 16^th century.
The river may have been the Chenab.

In any case, our story begins here and now.

We are poised on the banks of a roaring river which has no beginning and no end.

And the river flows inside us.

A river carved tidal by moon, benevolent, ferocious.

Sometimes blue, other times white like a bone, becoming the spinal column of the land.