excerpted from the print magazine…
My brother Raj, my filmmaking partner Tom
and I traverse a staircase that winds its way up seven hills, nine
miles and thousands of steps to the Tirupati Hill Shrine in Andhra
Pradesh, southern India.
The air thins and cools as we get higher and
higher into the mountains.The stairs are lined with small tea stalls
and soda vendors, spiced nuts at mile three. A sadhu is
standing in the shade, steely-eyed, staring at us as we pass. His
markings tell us his day began with prayer and the stillness of
his eyes tells me I have a lot to learn.
We keep climbing.
The mid-morning heat is beating down, sweat
pours and the stairs continue to unfold around every corner. With
every step, I reflect on the past six weeks, the past year and indeed
the past thirty years of my life. My mother was diagnosed with cancer
last year and since then my family’s world has changed. For
the first time in twenty-five years we find ourselves in India together.
As a family. And I find myself somewhere I've never dreamed of,
doing something I've never imagined.
* * *
In the northern reaches of Saskatchewan in
the boreal forest, the land of lakes, there exists a species indigenous
to the deep south of India. Traditionally a non-smoking, non-drinking
herbivore, upon migration the species has adopted North American
feeding patterns and a potentially lethal obsession with filmmaking.
This species is my father.
My name is Anand Ramayya, I am 100 percent
South Indian–blooded, but I know absolutely nothing about
what it means to be Indian. I was born and raised in Canada and
grew up in the rugged but beautiful little town of La Ronge, Saskatchewan.
Penumaka Dasarutha Ramayya and Jayalakshmi
Presuna are my parents, descendants of a long line of orthodox Hindus
with roots in southern India. My dad was a schoolteacher and my
mom was a small-town girl when they married in 1965. Soon after,
my brother Raj was born. The sixties was a time of opportunity for
the educated immigrant, so my father and mother moved to Canada
and re-invented themselves as Ray and Jaya Ramayya.
Ray has a Ph.D. in educational psychology
and Jaya works at a daycare centre and sells Avon on the weekends.
My father is obsessed with making films and my mother is equally
determined to maintain some sense of normalcy in the household.
She's stuck it out with him through three re-mortgages of the house
and many other high-risk film financing stunts. While my dad has
a knack for making things epic and complex, her strength is making
things simple.
Like a lot of families these days, we’ve
grown apart. My brother lives in Japan, I am constantly working
and it seems none of us has had the time to get to know each other
as adults.
Life has a way of taking us so far from ourselves
that everything gets blurry. This brush with mortality has focused
us back in on the things that should matter. Things change when
people get sick. I had originally planned to make a documentary
about my father going to India to make his next film, but in the
midst of it all my mother asked us to make a pilgrimage, as a family,
to a place called Tirupati.
She’s never asked us for anything.
Ever.
With this one request, she has become a new
person to me. A person with her own needs, with a past and a faith.
None of which, I’m realizing, I know anything about.
