Reel World

You could almost smell the onions, even before the bend in the road. Bulbs the size of castor pods, pressed into pairs along crimson ridges of dirt. The sun still hadn't cleared the summit of the mountains to the east. Rivulets of water crept slowly through the hollows of the field, leaving behind maroon trails of soft, wet earth. One corner of the orchard field was still dry, and these new bulbs would lend their shoots only in exchange for water.

Logandurai had been out here all night, running the small motor that powered his pumpset. Far upland from the common well, water seeped through the pipes at a lazy pace. Sometime before dawn, the electricity suddenly went out, when there were still four beds of onions left to irrigate. And so the farmer waited, anxiously, for the power to return.

He thought back to what he'd already done for this crop: all the plowing with his bulls; the travel to a distant city to buy these bulbs; a night of watering that would not end. Then the motor started to thrum once more. Picking up his spade, Logandurai started to cut channels in the dirt walls dividing one bed of plants from another. And as he worked, he began to sing — "With all this desire, I raised a bed of soil, and planted a single shoot."

People sing all the time, to their plants, to themselves, to each other. But here's what struck me when I ran into Logandurai that morning, in a tract of orchards deep in the south of Tamil Nadu. He'd found a tune to match the rhythm of his spade. The lyrics gave him a voice to describe what was happening just then, expressing all the hope and desire of that moment. And what made this possible was the popular Tamil film that had somehow surfaced in his recollections.

Did Logandurai imagine himself as the young woman who sang these lines in the film, a bundle of green shoots in hand and her feet planted into the wet soil of a paddy field? Or did he imagine her, or someone like her, singing this song to someone like him? Grizzled, graying, with burnished skin and an easy smile, he was a handsome man. There was something about the build of his nose and jawline — when we first met, I thought immediately of Richard Gere.

But this middle-aged man in a fraying polyester shirt was not a Hollywood star. He was a farmer of modest means, eking out a living in an obscure village in south India. He worked with halters and plow blades, with paddy, bananas, and onions. He and his wife ate and slept on the floor of a room piled high with jute sacks of grain.

These were their conditions of life. And yet, despite its relentless difficulties, Logandurai could experience this life as a cinematic scene: not in a spirit of escape or denial but instead as the deepest expression of its hope.

What happened that morning in his orchard, over thirteen years ago, has been nagging at me ever since. How could something with such epic dimensions, cinema, slip into a space as intimate