Mani wonders what it must be like growing up in the big Badaga houses he saw today, where children sleep in different rooms, thick brick and cement walls separating them from their parents. “I can’t pay for the giant morsels you eat any more,” he had shouted as he thrashed Mani. He shifts on the floor his upper back hurts from being slammed against walls by his angry father when he had come back jobless from the Badaga village. Like most other children in Hulikkal, a small village in the Nilgiris, Mani lives in one-room mud hut, where pots and pans are pushed aside every night to make room for mats, where they can hear their parents make love, or whatever else it is, through the mosquito net that hangs between them. Each time his stepmother moaned, the dog yelped. A mongrel laid beside Mani’s feet, its ears pricked for the sound. His father stayed silent, though maybe his lips kept moving – he was always moving his lips as though he were talking to someone invisible. Moments ago, he had watched his father’s sweaty hips thrust up and down while his stepmother, Bindu, lay still beneath him, muffling her pain. Lying on the mattress, Mani follows the movement of his father’s breathing.

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Badaga film