A Drop of Life begins innocently enough. It opens with a mother and daughter fetching water from a well in Kutch, India.( See“ The‘ Dream’ of School for Impoverished Girls in Little Rann of Kutch, by Photojournalist Nikki Kahn”) The daughter, Devi, is late to school. She runs to a tree to join her classmates gathered around a schoolteacher named Mira telling a story about a greedy man who tears apart a chicken for its golden eggs. The scene is full of laughter and color and warmth.
Across the world in New York City we are introduced to Nia, an African-American corporate executive who is responsible for a prepaid water meter project that will be installed in the village where Devi and Mira live. Nia is exhausted and anxious; we quickly come to see why the project weighs on Nia’ s conscience.
Kantayya’ s choice of characters in A Drop of Life is deliberate. Again and again we hear how women of color all over the world are disproportionately affected by the global water crisis. In India alone, where water is celebrated and revered, a rural woman walks a staggering 14,000 km per year on average to collect water.
A Drop of Life forces us to confront what a statistic like this really means. Numbers are given a name, a history, a loss.
As the film continues, money on the meter runs out and the pump dries up. Sickness abounds. Nia travels to Kutch to check up
28 OF NOTE