Our Share of Sand Review: A Moral Reckoning Looms In Shalini Adnani’s Taut Debut

Maya (Maya Mehta) was never supposed to be privy to the risky work over which her industrialist father Rohan (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) presides. He has designed his well-settled life and sand mining work, involving day-labourers, to be separated by an inveterate distance. This breeds indifference, a stiffening up against the real dangers and worries of those having to take the plunge. In Shalini Adnani’s debut feature, Our Share of Sand, the 12-year-old British-Asian Maya returns with her mother Priti (Ellora Torchia) to stay with her father in India. Having been in the UK for years, the occasion marks Maya’s first encounter with her roots. However, it brings her up distressingly close against the deep-entrenched class inequality and densely hierarchical negotiations Indian life is riven with.

Screened in the Critics’ Week competition alongside the Venice Film Festival, Adnani’s film is bolstered in good stead by Mehta’s revelatory performance and a brilliantly perceptive mise-en-scène. Along with her terrific DP Adric Watson, Adnani trains us to sharpen the act of witnessing, taking in what’s thrown under the rug, elided and casually muffled with the strong-arm of privilege.

Maya nudges her father to let her join him on one of his late-night sand mining expeditions. He supervises a bunch of boys as they dive deep into the river’s depths, scouring for sand. Suddenly, fear spreads that one of them, Kiran (Krish Raj More), hasn’t surfaced. After a wave of alarm ratchets up, Kiran does emerge. But he dived too deep and has his eardrum damaged. Rohan swats away the protests of Kiran’s family, hiring him instead as a house help as a gesture of generosity. Priti, whose music career took a backseat in India, confesses she didn’t even know the diving was done manually. She’s startled by Rohan’s indifference to the whole episode. But her daughter is the one who pushes further, disturbed by her father’s smugness. A diamond, foisted as belonging to Maya’s grandfather and which purportedly helped the family get back on its feet after Partition, is situated between the two disparate socio-economic rungs.

When the cops prod around for safety regulations in Rohan’s operations, Maya notices her father not being honest. It chafes at Maya to catch her father lying through his teeth. Sensitive and quietly watchful, she sees through it all. Her gaze cuts through the façade of class-inflected gentility, which Rohan dons unhesitatingly. He has no qualms owning up to the comforts derived by virtue of his oppressive position. When both she and her mother start asking questions, digging around, the narrative of privilege comes undone. Adnani culls great dramatic power from a series of encounters that Maya has both with her father and Kiran. One genuflects and dresses up the truth with glib claims, the other is a blinding, uncomfortable, necessary reflection of sullied conscience.

Rohan is complacent in the wealth, the comfortable life he’s inherited and built further. At a dinner table scene, which otherwise is a tad too blunt, he proudly shrugs off the ethical, moral responsibility that redevelopment demands. He sees it as an inescapable, necessary driver of India’s growth. If the country doesn’t step up, it’ll have to keep being hit by the poverty question. So, in a way, Rohan considers his exploitative work as geared to the greater common good. He’s a polar opposite of his wife who professes everyone is equal. Ayyub aces the understated arrogance.

It takes his daughter to frankly point out the rot, his unembarrassed hubris, the trappings of a moral bargain that helps cement privilege. She attacks the very foundation of his enterprise, looking him in the eye with all the hard-nosed doubts. Only at a much later point does he realise the effects of the mining. He has only wilfully bent himself away from the weight and implications of his business. The cost confronts him directly as his boat passes by a sinking village whose people have evacuated. The mining forces the erosion of the riverbank, causing the water to crash through and make people abandon home.

Mehta’s curious gaze grows blistering in its indictment. Maya’s spanning, sobering stare casts her father under scrutiny. It’s she who forces consequences to come into play. At least, a recognition of its shape looms into view. Adric Watson’s camera hinges close to a bristling Mehta, tracing the ambit and the way the girl assesses and interrogates both her palpable situation and what is being stashed behind the veil.

Adnani’s screenplay could have done with more colouring, dimension and texture given lent to Kiran’s family, the villagers whom Rohan relies on but whose pleas he blithely ignores. I wished the story of the villagers found more space and nuance. But again, the tale is pitched from Maya’s perspective. To be in a country like India, you can only be deliberately apathetic. There’s no escape. We behold a young girl’s politicisation as she rebels and refuses to accept her father’s entitled stance. Anna Meller’s edit accentuates an escalating tension borne through lies, denial and defiance. Our Share of Sand acquires a potent propulsion as the fissures widen until there’s no more evasion.