It sounds so patently absurd it must be true. Om Singh Rathod died in a road accident in Rajasthan in the late 80s. His beloved motorcycle, a 350cc Royal Enfield Bullet, was impounded by the police and parked in the local station. But the next morning, the bike was back at the site of the accident. The cops, perplexed, doubled down on caution, draining its fuel tank and chaining its wheels with lock and key. And yet the next morning, the bike reappeared. This apparently happened a third time. In an India where families abandoned their living kin, then haggled over the inheritance, here was the world's most loyal motorcycle.
A miracle was pronounced, a shrine built. Devotees started gathering at the roadside memorial, bringing bottles of alcohol as offerings. Soon, something resembling a religion—complete with franchising—grew, and ‘Om Rathod’ became ‘Om Banna’.
"I was in 9th standard, travelling one day from Jodhpur city to Mehrangarh Fort with my family when we stopped our car and saw this shrine," recalls filmmaker Ritwik Pareek, whose debut feature, Dug Dug, is a loose adaptation of these curious events. The comic oddity of a beatified Bullet in the middle of nowhere stayed in his mind, later reappearing through mainstream depictions such as an episode of the horror TV series Mano Ya Na Mano. "By the time I grew up, quit my job and decided to make a film around my hometown, this is the story that came to me."
Dug Dug, colourfully shot by Aditya S Kumar, walks a razor's edge between comedy, satire and folk drama. Ritwik wasn't interested simply in mocking the strange beliefs of a wayfaring cult. He says he identifies as neither an atheist nor a religious person. "My intention was really to tell a story about how faith grows in an inherently capitalistic world, captured in the visual metaphor of an ever-expanding balloon." Out of respect to the source material, he changed all the names and references, including the motorcycle, which in Dug Dug is not a Bullet but a mousey Luna moped with a pink leather seat.
As Ritwik tells it, the shooting of Dug Dug was by no means a blessed affair. He auditioned 400-500 people—mostly local artists and first-timers—over the course of a month. A persistent headache was language. Ritwik had written his script in Hindi, but needed the actors to enunciate in Marwadi. Because of the surfeit of TV serials and OTT shows being shot in Rajasthan, the local actors speak in an exaggerated mix of Marwadi and Hindi that sounds hokey and unnatural. “I kept requesting them to speak normally." During one of the auditions, Durga Lal Saini, a seasoned casting coordinator, asked if he could try out for a part. He ended up with one of the three central roles—that of retiring policeman Manfool.
The film, Ritwik reveals, was shot in 2019, its primary location a deserted road near Ramgarh on the Delhi-Jaipur highway. His cinematographer fell sick on the first day and had to be hospitalised. A lighting operator had a centepede attack. Leopards and jackals roamed the Aravalli footfills, making night shoots dangerous. Twice, out of nowhere, there was hailstorm in the middle of the day. A planned schedule of 20-25 days thus dragged on to 42 days, with the production budget rising above one crore.
Initially, Ritwik had hired experienced HODs from the Mumbai film industry. But as he discovered on set, decades of grinding out in the system had dented their passion. A sense of arrogance, comingled with complacency, had set in. Instant payments were demanded for just turning up. "I had to make some hard choices and let them go."
There were also funny incidents of petty theft. "We had installed a giant billboard of a magician at the location. It had the visual of two voluptuous women on the flanks. For the first three days, people kept tearing parts of the poster and stealing them off. I found out someone had plastered it on their bathroom door."
The offering of alcohol at religious shrines is not an uncommon or impious practise in Rajasthan, or even the rest of India, Ritwik says, citing the famous Kaal Bhairav temple in Ujjain. For the film, they sourced real liquor bottles on a rental basis, hoping to return them on completion and recoup the money. "We got some 300 bottles. Although most of the ‘english’ liquor stayed intact, the local pauwas (country nips) were polished off by the actors on the first day. They had funny brand names like Bunty Babli and Murga Chaap." The solution, then, was to fill up the empty bottles with coloured water.
Late in the film, a central character, Pyare Lal (Gaurav Soni), visits a temple with frescos depicting the film's origin myth. A man on a winged bike makes his way to heaven. Mysterious golden doors beckon. The artwork, inspired by Rajasthani miniature paintings displayed at the City Palace museum in Jaipur, was crafted by hand over a nine-month period. Ritwik, a former graphic designer himself, collaborated with Jaipur's Rohini Art Studio for the paintings. "The final scene takes place at a temple and we were not allowed to install the paintings there. So we used a greenscreen and shot the paintings separately keeping the lenses and proportions in mind."
Dug Dug—with a leg up from Anurag Kashyap, Vikramaditya Motwane, Vasan Bala and Nikkhil Advani—is getting a modest theatrical release by Ranjan Singh's Flip Films across India on May 8, including in Ritwik's home state. He is hopeful the film translates to both the faithful and the faithless. "We have a screening for all the local actors who couldn't make it to the premiere in Mumbai. I am looking forward to how they feel."
One important member, however, will be missed. While submitting the film for the National Awards, Ritwik needed the address of Durga Lal Saini. He found out Saini passed away in his village of Dhoola Raoji near Jaipur, while the film was in the finishing stages. He will make a rare posthumous debut in Dug Dug, a film about living and dying, about drunks and deities, about motorcycles and the meaning of life.