Driving on a rough Indian road

Daniel Nelson

Driving With Selvi

Image by Driving With Selvi

Selvi is one of them.

After a desperately unhappy home life – a cold-hearted mother and a father she hardly saw: families aren’t always what they are cracked up to be – she was married off at 14: “My life was over.”

Her husband treated her so badly that she can scarcely speak about it.

So the documentary in which she stars ought to be tragic. The reason it isn’t lies in the title: Driving With Selvi.

After running away from family and husband, she landed in the Odanadi Girls Home in Mysore, where she recovered and was encouraged to learn to drive and get a taxi driver’s licence: “Selvi is a very powerful girl and we just helped her regain her strength.” 

This gentle, unassuming film doesn’t try to dramatise or squeeze every ounce of pathos: it lets the characters speak – or choose a painful silence – and quietly follows Selvi on her journey, on the way observing customs and attitudes that make India so puzzling and fascinating to foreigners (and often to other Indians).

But don’t be fooled by the film’s undemonstrativeness. Without underlining or exclamation marks, it reveals a lot about India and gender relations, and shows good people as well as bad – and the good, fortunately, include the men who run the girls’ refuge and Selvi’s second husband, Viji (“I used to think that all men are the same. I was disgusted by them. But Viji is different.”)

“For 15 years bad luck. After 15 years, no bad luck,” she says, summing up her life experience – which omits her courage, drive and intelligence.

“Some roads are not good. Some roads are very good. Life is like that.”