‘Some teachers thought a girl wasn’t up to it,” says a veteran female teacher with a weary roll of the eye. It’s some time in the 1990s, and a posh boarding school in northern India has just appointed a girl as head prefect, its first ever. Her name is Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), and she’s a sensible, academically gifted 16-year-old, known as a bit of a stickler. But Mira’s term as head prefect happens to coincide with first love; she falls for Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a new boy with heavenly tousled hair and what looks like a well-practised sensitive smile.
So, this is the story of Mira’s teenage sexual awakening – a tale as old as the Himalayas, which poke into view whenever she leaves the school grounds. But there’s something new here: Mira is a teenage girl who feels plausible and behaves in ways that don’t play out like earlier coming-of-age movies. Take the way she approaches losing her virginity – like it’s science homework. Methodical Mira does her research, looking up the anatomy in the library, performing experiments at home: French kissing her arm and masturbating to work out what’s what and where. It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.
