laughing water

On Friday night we watched Deepa Mehta's Water. I cannot shake from my head the scene of Chuyia and Kalyani laughing together, playing pattycake (what else would you call it?) while it is raining outside. Chuyia's face and body are absorbed in the rhythms of joy: they are joy. She moves back and forth smiling and her eyes open and close and she laughs and giggles and is lost to it or, perhaps better, is it.

And so what happens later -- when Gulabi brings her back from across the river, her stilled and folded into herself down in the bottom of the little boat -- is more abhorrent, of course, than if there hadn't been that earlier scene.

Chuyia's ability to be joy in a physical game is the high moment of her being a child in the movie, there in the middle between the opening and closing where, in both, she is carried and what we see of her are her dangling feet.

Why is such release into the joy that comes of having a body that moves -- and moves well with others -- usually restricted to childish things? Or am I wrong?

The physicality allowed adults is so often constrained: trained athletics, social dance... Where is play?

Chuyia's joy comes out of the rhythms of pattycake, of being able to move quickly and in rhythm with someone else. The rhythms have to be learned, and the pleasure comes from being able to be just on the edge of rhythmic harmony with someone else, of moving quickly, of having a body that can do this, of being in that body. (That the rain -- the release of the monsoon -- is there all around them: that's a part of it, too, in the movie.)

I'm going skate skiing this afternoon.