Small wonder

Cast: Shreyas Talpade, Amrita Rao

Showing At: City Pride Kothrud, City Pride Satara Road, E-Square, Fame Akurdi, Gold Adlabs, INOX , Mangala

Welcome to the return of Shyam Benegal. The director, who8217;s been meandering for some time with stodgy bio-pics, and moral science lessons, is back, doing what he is best at: creating life-like characters to tell life-like stories.

Sajjanpur is a modern-day, hovering-on-the-edge-of-prosperity Indian village where electricity and water have made inroads, as well as kutcha roads and rattling buses. But illiteracy is still rampant. Which is why Mahadev Shreyas Talpade, the village8217;s only 8216;padha likha8217; young fellow, hangs up a shingle under a bargad tree.

All kinds of people wash up under that tree: A loony aunt Ila Arun worrying about her manglik niece Divya Dutta, a love-lorn wife Amrita Rao, waiting to hear from her husband, away for four years in Bambai, a local neta Yashpal Sharma who can easily pass off as a goon, a compounder Ravi Kissen in love with a pretty widow Rajeshwari Sachdev.

Welcome to Sajjanpur stays quirky and engaging even when the pace flags, and the rural accents turns faux, because of the felt screenplay and superbly robust, earthy dialogues by Ashok Mishra this is a U/A film. That the village is really a set is evident too, but you overlook it all when you see how skillfully Benegal brings up the ills that beset us. If a girl is unlucky, marry her off to a dog. If a eunuch stands for election, get rid of her.

The film is saved from becoming the sort of dreaded preachy treatises that the director has been delivering of late. And a large part of that has to do with Talpade who wears his writer-of-letters-and-arbiter-of-lives role like second skin. But the real hero of the film is the village and the way it melds the past and the present: The profusion of all the Rams Ram Ashrey, Ram Khilavan, Ram Singh, the references to Sita, and Kalyug, as well as the acknowledgment that a cell phone text message is also a letter.

The village had all but disappeared from Hindi cinema. Welome to Sajjanpur.