5 am, November 2020: I brave the freezing harud pre-dawn on Dal Lake to climb into a lone shikara from our houseboat. My boatman serenades me, his mournful voice soaring over the endless waters as we glide onward. The sun has still not peeped out from behind the Zabarwans looming in the distance, but when it finally does, the first rays of light gently set the lake ablaze, dancing through misty backwaters as we reach the famous floating market. My romantic images of Kashmir ki Kali vanish, faced with numerous shikaras piled with the morning’s harvest, jostling for space, and much chaos. The bonhomie is undeniable.  Loud voices banter and noon chai is exchanged between boatmen, as deals are struck for the bounty.

I am entranced when my boatman whips out an unexpectedly fancy tea for me, silver salver and china cup and saucer, and a snowy white linen napkin. These balance precariously over my velvet razai. The sunrise over the mountains throws pale silvery warmth over canals of dried rushes and lotus stems, as we continue to glide among them.

There are barely any tourists. Everywhere, farmers in earthy, coarse woollen pherans wield their oars, slipping and sliding into any available space, teasing and competing with each other to sell and buy stems of freshly harvested lotus or nadru, bundles of viridian saag, white and purple hued shalgam, turnip, and what greens may grow. I love their sturdy bearded faces, their wide toothy grins, those handsome faces so elegant despite the hardships they have weathered. The Pandemic has brought tourism to a standstill and it is a particularly harsh winter they face.

These are farmers who grow things with their toil.

Much later we are back here as a film crew, with multiple boats and much equipment to shoot yet another sequence about Indian farmers and their lives, the real behind-the-plough deal. We film a young Kashmiri girl in her home, moving to the saffron fields of Pulwama, where we film her in the setting sun, backlit with a million delicate purple crocuses in the hard, barren earth.

The land tells tales of its people.

What are we doing here but telling yet another story of poetry and magic?

Behind all that magic lies reality: we march on our bellies too! Film crews are the hungriest, most gourmand lot in the world, with carte blanche to be fed regukarly, exploring local food at every exotic location.

In Kashmir we subsist on delightful winter dried veggies in various sauces, nadru (lotus stem) yakhni, shrugging off the more robust rogan josh and rista. Haaq (collard greens) has us spellbound with its delicacy but I am hooked on Nadru Yakhni with greedy delight. It is my Director, Bob Chaturvedi who insists I try it, and his choice of something so unusual and delicate explains where his film sensibilities originate from.  

The chilly autumn in Srinagar has us sipping yet another salted noon chai and nibbling on flat bread, appetites robust, every moment we get. We bond as a crew with the locals over stalls of kababs in the setting sun of the Dal, or roasted chestnuts in Ghanta Ghar.

We wait for plates of Harissa specially made overnight in enormous pots the traditional way. I visit a local harissa legend and am transported back in time in the kitchen where the fires never ebb and old pots bubble away for days. The harissa is slow cooked and incredibly hearty. There queues of fans outside every day for their share.

I spend one morning at a local market deep inside the old town of Srinagar, marveling at barrels of purple garlic, rhododendron, turnips and spices. The omniscient kesar strands entice me to hoard a stash.  Delicate pink local rajma beans beckon. There are sweet almonds, knobbly walnuts, gnarly apricots to feast on. The summer harvest has already been pickled or dried for the long winter months ahead. How do these people survive without hothouse tomatoes and fresh chillies, green vegetables and bhindis, unlike us?

Cut to Amritsar, a few days later: nippy but warmer than Srinagar. Aloo parathas, butter chicken and dal makhni- can there be anything more cliched in Punjab? Yet everything is tasiter, more earthy and real. I wander the gullies behind Harmandir Saheb, the famous Golden Temple, ethereal and serene in its very floating reflection. I am searching for my friend’s masalchi, highly recommended. I find his tiny stall which turns out to be Aladin’s cave, and I come away with local wariyan ( dried balls of ready masala pastes to add to oil and cook), authentic chole masala and the famed hing, asafoetida. I buy winter vegetable pickles for everyone on the crew as they recce wheatfields and audition the epitome of the Punjabi farmer: the real deal Sardar, earthy and magnificent in his avatar.

We are a small crew of barely 18, unheard of in this country where people outnumber everything else. We have been shooting for a film about the heart and soul of the Indian kisan across the most picturesque and remote farmlands in India. It is to be a long TV commercial. We willingly wake up before sunrise for the perfect shot and willingly wait to capture the mystical mountains under that glorious, glorious sunset.

 All this shoot across India, we have feasted like kings on local delicacies, from Bombay, the south, the north and the coast. We have been relishing fish and freshwater prawns, grass fed mutton, robust little ilchi bananas and fat grains of rice from our houseboat, our lodges.  We disparage room service and plastic meals on flights. Banana chips and local rum, whiskey and fried potatoes with curry leaves and hot red chillies compete humbly for our post-shoot happy hour. Every non-hotel meal is relished and our hearts ache for ghar ka khana after almost a month on the road, filming, filming and eating in between.

We crash a drone, we watch fishermen fling their nets against the setting sun, we film valleys of lush green coconut trees. We gaze at neon sunsets over the vast lake in Kerala, as it throws endless lotus blossoms into silhouette. We are adept at riding water taxis, shikaras, walking up and down slopes and even film with an elephant, feeding him bananas with joy.

The food is our obsession, keeping the Catering team challenged. Our bellies and minds must be fuelled to capture more magic every day.  We eat with our hands off banana leaves, local rotis and curries at humble establishments, tchot bread in Srinagar.  We dress up in lungis and dance, we chat for hours besides an ocean of lotus blossoms, we travel by snake boat to another undiscovered cove but above all, we dream about dinner.

That is what film crews do: we subsist from break to break, meal to meal.

Cut back to Amritsar and we are in a rambling farmhouse on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by miles of dusty roads and acres of wheat and mustard, their stalks nodding in the wind and bringing to mind every romantic notion of the great Punjab of yore. We are filming these beautiful young girls in turbans and kirpans, from a particularly sect of Sikhism, they are Amrit Khalsas. They pose prettily for us in an ocean of bright yellow mustard blossoms, smiles whiter than white, their countenance simple and real. I dream of my DDLJ moment and understand Yash Raj’s romantic sensibilities, selling visions of love here in the hinterland.

The farm is overrun by this adorable group of very young boys who decide to adopt me, obviously amused by my curiosity. I want to be shown around and soon I am trudging with them as they proudly drag me through every orchard and stable, barn and rivulet in my city sandals. We feed a calf from a large bottle before inspecting the cow dung preciously stored for use. I am given a crash course in growing brinjals and tomatoes. My feet and sandals are a mess of muck and they giggle and escort me to wash at the trough. I fall in love with them all, and the thought occurs to me that these are the real men of tomorrow.

The ladies of the house are hidden inside, except when they delightedly trail behind the camera crew to see what we are shooting. They are exceptionally tall and fair for the subcontinent and I learn more about the diversity of India.

We move on to film the farmer in his dhoti and turban, armed with his kada and scythe, in his wheat fields. The shots are magnificent: this tall, looming Atlas carries bushels of wheat he has harvested, threshing them by hand and wiping the sweat from his brow, backlit, yet again, by the setting Dogra sun.

So far, the women are still silent observers, demure and distant. Eventually they give in and cook us a meal, barely showing themselves as we gather around in the falling dusk, swooning over their delectable dal makhni and rotis, with kulhads of chaas. The rum is brought out and a fire is lit. It is all very merry. I spend my time with the dogs, who are chained and miserable, my heart breaking for them.

Lost in a reverie, I recall the juice I drank that morning in a crowded market street of Amritsar as I searched for woollens and dupattas and colourful souvenirs. Shopping is a treat in this Pandemic year and I am buzzed with exploring the bazaar. The juice was delicious and I relished every drop of the supersized tumbler, packed with apples, beet, ginger, greens and pineapple.

The evening before, I had dug into a steaming roasted sweet potato sprinkled with salt, served up in a dried leaf cup as I wandered the streets behind the Golden Temple. I never managed the famed langar or khada prasad of the Temple, but I spent hours gazing at the shining domes reflected in the water, watching the light around me change. Bhajans play loudly across the airwaves and people circumambulate the gleaming edifice floating its pool, pausing to immerse themselves in the holy waters. I dip my hands and feet in and pray.

Cut to the Konkan coast a few days later: We are excited to be in Goa, capturing this fort on the cliffs all for ourselves. We spend a day unwinding on the beach, sunning like lizards on sand after days of layers and jackets in the northen cold. We drink the little juice bar out of its hyper local coconuts and pineapples on a remote strip of sand. Lunch has been carefully curated from a nearby thali joint. It is as local as Goa can be and most certainly connected to the earth, the sky and the ocean before us. We dine on fried sea food, curry and rice, squished against each other on plastic benches with tiny tables, eating with our fingers. Here the harvest is seafood and coconut and local red rice. We are content and replete, eating locally all the way, as we continue to travel and film the next few days up the coast, along paths unknown.

We are now on single lane roads off the main coast, filming in small hamlets and pristine coves of emerald waters. We shoot fishing boats and coconut farmers. There is country chicken curry and rice bhakris served on the beach as the sun sets blazing orange on green. We are bathed in iridescent hues as we wrap the end of the shoot.

We are connected to this:

To the farms we have travelled, the food we have eaten, harvested by people who work with the earth to grow our food, people who have graciously agreed to be filmed doing what they do unflinchingly each day, come what may, to put food on our tables.

We do not know about the farmer’s rebellion that will take place barely a month later and shelve this beautiful film for years to come. We only believe in the idyll of the Indian farmer that brought us here from the rice fields and coconut plantations of Kerala and Tamil Nadu to the Himalayas and its foothills. We have followed the farmer over hills and valleys, across rivers and past fluorescent sunsets, searching for his soul to tell India about who really feeds us.

PS: all my thanks for this beautiful filn to Director Shashank Chaturvedi aka Bob. Your vision has always been my privilege to work for and with. Thank you for the most beautiful memories of this shoot ❤️ all for love

Featured Image credit: Sherry Andrabi