A day with Sohail and Mariyan
video duration: 17min.
single channel video with sound
This project has been realized during the Khoj Residency 2004

I met Sohail aged 17 and Mariyan aged 14 at the NDMC Community centre in Sarojini Nagar during their afternoon class organized by CHINTAN (an environmental research and action group, working with waste pickers in the city). I spent some time in the classroom talking to them and asking about their daily routine. They said they go every night to collect waste from near by places and work through the night till daybreak. They said that they preferred working at night because there isn’t too much traffic on the roads and because there are fewer policemen about and there is less harassment.

I told them that I would like to make a film on their work, their reactions were mixed, there was excitement at the possibility of being filmed but they were not very sure they wanted people to recognize them through the film. Sohail said so clearly, if this is going to be shown on TV I will have nothing to do with it. A sense of awareness of privacy and perhaps reluctance in being seen as a rag picker were evident in their reaction to my proposal. For them it is their work and they make a living out of it but they certainly didn’t want anybody prying in their life.

They invited me to the place where they live. An open piece of land, in the Diplomatic enclave, next to the American School but ironically held by the Iraqi Embassy, at least that is what I was told. 10 to 15 families live here under shelters/homes fashioned out of rags plastic sheets, pieces of plywood and packing materials. The shelters have a few household possessions and the area all around is filled with heaps of polythene, cans and drums of various sizes, rusted wire and what have you.

Sohail and Mariyan brought out worn-out chairs and we sat down, other kids gathered around us many even younger than my two friends. We discussed many things. They talked of daily harassment at the hands of the police, the indifferent even down right insulting behavior of the people. How tired to the bones they are when they get back home after tramping through the streets the whole night.

How much they earn depends entirely on the time spent in going from one rubbish dump to the other, the more useful trash they are able to collect and carry the more they earn. The daily pickings generally vary between Rs. 100/- to Rs. 200/-There are times they earn more, when a new movie is released, or a festival is organized or a big gathering takes place. Ultimately they live on the waste generated by this city. Can this be a defense of our wasteful ways? Are we saying that the more we consume the better they earn?

I spent almost a month visiting them regularly. We began with a general discussion, a chat really, on the idea of making the film, it gradually began to take shape and our discussions started becoming more concrete. Sohail was hesitant and unsure when I first broached the issue of acting out certain sequences or using specific dialogues. He said he is not capable of doing these things as he has had no formal schooling and won’t be able to deliver the dialogues because he cannot read or write. I insisted that he should make the effort because I was sure that he has to be the protagonist. Later on when he watched the movie he told me “I’ll do a much better job next time.”

Here was an interesting situation, a situation that could be interpreted in many different ways; there were two raw characters, street smart and game to try out new things. There was a great temptation to slip into fictionalizing the whole thing or to putting my own spin on the entire experiment. Had I fallen into this trap I could have ended up creating an exclusively “modern practice” where the artist dictates her/his terms to recreate the other’s life, the life which s/he is only familiar with as a spectator. Community projects often fall into the pit falls of artistic arrogance when the artist as an invader takes decisions on behalf of the community s/he works with. My involvement with the kids was very different from the beginning. The only thing that separated them and me was that highly professional equipment, the digital camera. Technology can create distance at times. Sohail asked me how much the camera costs, I said around 50 thousand. They were amazed.

Sohail and Mariyan quite liked the idea of me accompanying them one night and documenting their work on streets. Their relationship with the city and its public space is of a very different nature. They commute by cycle. A huge polythene bag, in the middle of the carrier placed in such a manner that it remains balanced on the carrier due to equal weight on both sides of the carrier. They start around midnight to collect the waste. They often follow a single route in which more than ten municipal waste bins are located. They collect almost anything that can be sold by weight. Some of the 5 Star hotels, on their beat, leave them with huge amount of leftovers in piles of polythene bags. They open the bags then segregate the material with a surgeon’s efficiency and unaffected mind. The plastic and paper goes into one pile and the food is gathered for their pet ducks. I opened the lens cover and switched on the camera. A gap is now created between them and I, but they felt comfortable, as they were completely involved in their work.

My concerns rotate around many aspects of the human conditions. This video has been made as a fictional documentary but not exactly following the documentary mode. While portraying a late night tour with Sohail and Mariyan my video tries to establish a relationship with a world that we are not normally familiar with. This tour also signifies a search of the back door of an established social order representing the world of consumption.
The route followed by Sohail and Mariyan from dustbin to dust bin draws a map of the city that essentially has no relationship with the updated cartographic calculations of the city. They try to locate themselves within the city map boundaries but fail to establish the link. The Video has also tried to portray a state of an ‘unknown migrant’ whose social functions are not yet decided. The space/location knowingly or unknowingly chosen for the movie largely represents the elite class and the political as well as the social hierarchy in the middle. A’ periphery’ within the’ centre’ is an interesting paradox to observe. The location, in the heart of the diplomatic enclave, adds another subtext.

An immediate reality we all live in has its divergent parallels. It is entirely up to each individual how one confronts these parallels. Parallels are forever in confrontation, whether in geometry, in art or in life. Ignorance of the every day life some how diminishes the parallel existence. Social boundaries never deal with parallels they rather categorizes them to leave no space for confrontation. My attempt is to confront the parallels and create a dialogue with their every day practice. Sohail and Mariyan’s Practice of Everyday life may leave empty space in our thought process; it also challenges our comfort at many levels.