11-yr-old’s leap of faith in ‘The Story of Lala’ by Sergio Scapagnini

We all love underdog stories, be it on screen or off screen. When Sergio Scapagnini puts his pen to paper to tell the tale of an 11-year-old Indian boy, you can only root for this protagonist with all your heart. As the back cover tells us how it is a rags-to-riches saga, you know beforehand that like typical Indian films, it will climax on an ‘all is well that ends well’ note. Interestingly, the connect between cinema and the book is not a mere analogy. Italian author Sergio’s book has inspired renowned filmmaker Goutam Ghose to adapt it as a film, ‘Parikrama’, starring Chitrangada Singh.

Though it’s a story told simply, you realise why Lala’s leap of faith into the unknown may have fired Ghose’s imagination. Sergio’s writing, with phrases like ‘nimble as monkey,’ ‘wet as drowned kitten’, is indeed visual wordplay at work. In this imagery-rich language, the author narrates the journey of a village boy, Lala, who runs away from his home riddled with poverty. It’s not just his impoverished condition that makes him flee the comfort of his mother’s lap, but a fierce desire to change his agrarian family’s unenviable circumstances.

Indeed, the voyage of a young boy can’t be easy, and we don’t just read about his ordeals, but feel them too. As we witness this ‘symphony of thrill and peril’, the book holds your attention just as a well-made film would. The trials and tribulations of Lala might have fascinated a foreign eye, but are not hard to find for Indian readers too. From a village in Raipur to his arrival in Bombay, it’s indeed the kind of stuff that dreams are made of. There is enough drama in his odyssey, but not in a screechy, melodramatic fashion. Among his travails, Lala’s encounters with a dacoit, Sultana, especially their second meeting, take a flight of fiction. But doesn’t serendipity play a part in our lives and fortune favour the brave?

Indeed, Lala, whose account it is from start to finish, is heroic, but not as larger than life as characters from our cinema. Here is a little boy who refuses to beg for a living and would rather work himself to death, first in the unsympathetic city and later on the tempestuous seas of a fishing village near Bombay, where he finds a benefactor in an old fisherman, and love too.

Clearly, heroes and villains are not tropes of Hindi films but a fact of life. A true story it is, but one can’t say how much of it is fictionalised, first by the person at the heart of the book and the author and later by the filmmaker. But fact or fiction, the beauty of the award-winning book lies in its crystal clear approach.

An Indo-Italian production, ‘Parikrama’, which premiered at the Giffoni Film Festival, uses the device of intercutting the two parallel lives of Lala and the director of environmental films to make a larger statement.

As a book, however, it stays with this young boy, who starts with a purpose and finds himself in an alien city. Unlike many biographical dramas, it may not be a story waiting to be told, for, there are Lalas in every nook and corner of India. However, a life-affirming story always has the power to reinforce your faith in the indomitable human spirit. And that is the biggest triumph of this story.

It sustains your interest with its beguiling charm and touching innocence, a hallmark of childhood. This is the case with the book too, as it celebrates humanity and the inherent goodness of mankind, even if in the classic romantic fashion.