The God Girl

Abstract

The God Girl Jacqueline Schaalje (bio) Keywords spirituality, fiction, Jacqueline Schaalje Her father handed her to us. "No kiss," he said, a few times. "No touch." The diminutive old man, bent from hard work, gave his daughter a stern look that I couldn't quite decipher except that it made me vaguely uncomfortable. However, the promise of no kissing was easy to give. "No kissing and no touching," I said solemnly. I gave the man a cash advance and said we'd start filming in another ten days. We would call on Laksmi on a Wednesday. The toothless mother kept out of the logrolling. She and her daughter were sitting on the porch, shelling peas on a sheet; a baby and a school notebook were lying abandoned on the other end. Laksmi bounded off the steps to accompany me to the car, where the driver was still listening to what sounded like weepy love songs. I had to be careful not to laugh at the girl's awkward way of walking, with her knees bent, and each time she put a step forward she would first lift her thigh and then put the leg forward. But if we didn't deviate from the script we would not film her walking. As my window was framing her and we said goodbye, I was all pleased with myself for finding such a beauty. Her long hennaed hair was combed back so her burning black eyes would shoot forward like a furious snake. Her face had stronger features than most Nepali beauties, with their bland round pouts. When we drove away, she threw her arms in the air, and in the falling dusk her silhouette turned black. I could still see her smile. It was gratifying, almost in a spiritual way, seeing someone so innocent and happy. Earlier that day we had run screen tests. While the camera circled her angled face in different kinds of light, we discovered she had just the right proud but not disdainful look that could easily be mistaken for old-fashioned ill comfort around Westerners. This was a look we needed for George Orwell's story "Shooting an Elephant" from 1936, which was set in colonial Burma, now Myanmar. Andy Gonzalez, our director, had decided he didn't want to film there because the locals there were already used to white people, and because prices had shot up. Nepal had [End Page 530] elephants, too, and was cheaper, not least because it was disaster-prone. Before we went to her house, I asked Laksmi whether her father was comfortable with her in a short movie. She nodded. Maybe he didn't like losing her out of sight for a few weeks, but they could use the money. I said she could invite him to the set whenever he wanted, if it was important to him. The parental permission was an essential element in a collaboration with a female actor, or any other kind of employee, as Nepali unmarried girls and women were the property of the father, and the fathers took this quite literally. I must add here that before we set up filming in Nepal, we had thoroughly informed ourselves about its pros and cons with Geraldine Bleeker, who had just finished shooting a documentary about female trafficking, albeit in the Kathmandu area (we were a little more to the south, in the wildlife park of Chitwan). And so we felt the local culture might hopefully hold fewer surprises for us. In the time I had left before filming began, and while the sets were prepared, I went on a relaxed trek around Dhulikhel, which seemed to be relatively risk-free. In the week since I had started working, in August, a landslide in another district had covered thirty-two people. Amazingly, the tiny mountain resort hadn't changed one bit since I was there in my twenties. I met the same stargazed hippies who rolled out of bed to meditate when the first sun rays kiss the Himalaya. The eateries and B and Bs were still primitive and dirt cheap, although one new luxury hotel had arisen and another one was on its way...