And so begins one of the most beautiful and haunting memoirs I've ever read:

We are all born with a weight. It holds us down like the grey morning rain, like a hook upon the wall on which we hang, and struggle to get off of. We spend our lives avoiding it, trying to face it, or off-loading it into the people we love, only to see them stagger under what is not their own. Not a physical weight, like the six pounds, three and a half ounces I weighed when I was born, but something heavier and yet more elusive. Mine held me to the train berth I was lying on, and I felt my body grow heavy as it sank into the cold blue plastic.

Devyani Saltzman is the daughter of Mehta and film producer, photographer and director Paul Saltzman. When Devyani was 11, the family flew to Cannes from their home in Toronto to celebrate the acceptance of Mehta's first film into the Critic's Week section of the festival. It was there that the couple had their final fight and announced to their stunned daughter that they would be getting a divorce. She had to choose - whom did she want to live with? Devyani chose her father, because "I felt safe with him, while my mother's pain and anger sometimes scared me." That choice would hang thereafter like a pall over mother and daughter.

In 2000, Devyani flew to Varanasi to join her mother and a small international crew to shoot Water, the final film of her mother's Elements trilogy. This project was as much about gaining film experience as it was about healing some of the wounds the past had left festering. Unfortunately, within a week of starting, the film's theme - the oppression on religious grounds of Hindu widows - came to the attention of local Hindu fundamentalists, and protesters razed the carefully constructed sets and threatened Mehta's life. This incident launched a five-year odyssey that would end in Salman Rushdie proclaiming Water a "magnificent film."

Throughout the book, whether describing the burgeoning attraction she feels for Vikram (one of the film crew) or reporting on the politics of the day, Devyani's voice retains a quiet intimacy. Her writing manages to be both profound and entertaining, vivid to the point of being cinematic. The pages are lightly peppered with Hindi words, but a translation always follows, so those who don't speak the language never feel as if they're missing anything.

The fact that she takes the trouble to make sure that her message is clear to all of her readers is part of what makes this book so special. The ultimate outsider herself, struggling to reconcile each of her identities - Hindu and Jewish, Indian and Canadian - Devyani doesn't assume either knowledge or ignorance on the part of her readers. Her eye is compassionate and she writes with a clarity and honesty that threatened to break my heart. Seldom have I read a memoir that manages to encompass so much pain and longing without being whiny and self-righteous.

Shooting Water is a love story - the love of a filmmaker for her film; a daughter for her mother - and the triumph of passion over oppression. Devyani quotes filmmaker John Boorman as saying, "Film is the art of converting money into light." The 25-year-old author of Shooting Water brings her own brand of alchemy to this book: converting water into hope.
A must-read.
Geeta Nadkarni is a Montreal writer.

GRAPHIC:
Photo: COURTESY OF KEY PORTER; DEVYANI SALTZMAN (LEFT) AND HER MOTHER, DEEPA MEHTA: Saltzman's parents, both filmmakers, split up when she was 11. She chose to live with her father, Paul Saltzman.

LOAD-DATE: October 22, 2005