Maya comes to India to spend time with her father, and soon finds herself being asked to protect him. For a twelve-year-old who has lived in Britain, the reunion brings the promise of getting to know a parent from whom she has been separated. In Shalini Adnani’s debut feature, Our Share of Sand, that promise becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to as Maya discovers what supports the family’s comfortable life.
Played by Maya Mehta, she arrives with her mother Priti, played by Ellora Torchia, and befriends Kiran, a young worker employed in her father’s sand-mining business. An accident and the police investigation that follows make Maya a witness whose account could have consequences for her father. He needs her to help clear him, leaving her to work out what she owes him and what she owes the truth.
The situation places an adult burden on a child. Maya has come looking for closeness and her father’s need for her support makes that desire difficult to separate from the investigation. If she contradicts him, what happens to their relationship? If she accepts his account, what does that mean for the boy she has befriended? These are questions she should never have had to answer to earn a place beside him.
Adnani has explained that her own childhood visits to India helped inspire Maya. Born in Chile into a family of Indian origin, she spent those visits largely sheltered within the family home, understanding the world outside through what reached her there. That background gives a useful context to Maya’s position: she belongs to the family, but she has yet to learn all the rules by which it lives; her arrival makes room for questions that might otherwise go unasked.
There is a difficult contradiction in the idea of this homecoming; reconnecting with family is usually presented as a way of understanding yourself, yet Maya’s discoveries make belonging less comfortable. The people who can explain her history are also the people whose explanations she must examine, as she cannot assume that knowing where she comes from will tell her what she should do.
Her friendship with Kiran brings those questions much closer to home, because he belongs to the world of her father’s business and gives Maya a reason to look beyond what she has always been told at home. Once she knows him and begins to understand what is happening around him, accepting her father’s version of events is no longer simply a matter of trusting her family, as there is now another person involved whose life can be affected by decisions he had no part in making. Whatever Maya eventually chooses to believe, she has to confront the uncomfortable fact that loyalty to the people closest to her can come at a cost to those who have no voice in the family’s decisions.
Sand mining runs through all of this, not simply as the source of her father’s income but as something Maya begins to see very differently once she understands who is doing the work, what those people are living with and what has been taken from the land to create the comfortable life she has entered. As the story develops, the title Our Share of the Sand begins to make more sense: what exactly counts as somebody’s fair share when some people have the power to take what they want while others are left to live with the consequences? For Maya, this is no longer something she can look at from the outside, because it involves her father, the life his business provided and Kiran, whose friendship brings her face to face with the people who pay the price for the prosperity.
Adnani has spoken about her interest in the ways women can be silenced within their own homes, and placing a young girl at the centre of the story makes that uncomfortable. Maya has something important to say and her account matters to the investigation, yet her father expects her words to work in his favour, leaving her in the strange position of being asked to speak while someone else has already decided what she ought to say. She may have a voice, but that does not necessarily mean the adults around her are prepared to hear it when she says something they do not want to hear.
Perhaps the most painful part of Our Share of the Sand is the possibility that Maya can tell the truth and still be made to feel that she has done something wrong, because honesty towards others may be understood as betrayal by the father she has only just been given the chance to know. She wants a relationship with him, but the closer she gets, the more she sees that loving someone does not require her to agree with everything they have done. By the end, settling into an unfamiliar house seems almost simple compared with what Maya is really being asked to work out: how much of herself she can give away simply to keep the peace, and whether belonging there is worth it if staying means learning when not to speak.
Rating:
Written by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of BFI LFF
View of the Arts is an online publication dedicated to film, music, and the arts, with a strong focus on the Asian entertainment industry. As we continue to grow, we aim to deepen our coverage of Asian music while remaining committed to exploring and celebrating creativity across the global arts landscape.
