D Anup Singh wisdom tree was due to a moment of sentimentality, a nostalgia of warmth, and it had made him vulnerable. Never again! To have a room of his own to lock and keep locked against all, a room in which no mother, father, joint-family cousin, teacher or peer could transgress is to the student at this time a desperate need. In this room he begins to construct his first film, a short film known as a Continuity Exercise at the Institute. It is meant to put into praxis all the craft taught in the class about matching of action, tones and movements from shot to shot in a 23 seamless continuity to concretize a self-enclosed flow. It is a less-than-tcn-minute exercise in the denial of discontinuity. Such a continuity finds its only form in the solipsistic flow of a consciousness like that of a Hindi film, unstoppable, driving through appearances into pathetic fallacy, tainting the 'All' within the human — 'I'. The student's film is called Light In May, alluding to the blinding and burning light of Bombay in the month of May. The only escape is at a pool of water wombed in the dark, damp shadows of trees. Here, there is a confrontation, which demands release. The precariously attained sense of home threatened suddenly by this demand leads to a violation and murder. But the continuous flow of a film-consciousness allows this threat of the real to be appropriated within itself as no worse than a nightmare. A dismembered body in the pool is but a small sacrifice to the immaculate sanctity of belief. In this case, a belief in the infallibility of destiny, of course. For the boy, this cultivated indifference is finally the one which equals the indifference of nature. However, while watching the completed exercise a few weeks later, the nightmare suddenly becomes real. The sealed silence allowing the continuous flow is torn asunder by that very nature which the student thought he had constructed into stasis in the exercise. Rabat Yusufi, and Kumar Shahani — who during his brief, but blazing visits to the FTII as guest lecturer, seemed to have plumbed the obsessed inarticulacies of his student, as he seemed to be able to do with almost all students — both Rahat and he looked obviously glad about the student's failure. Failure splits the will and allows the sealed silence to spill out to form into that palpability of separation which, denied, atrophies into self-destructive isolation. It is the acceptance of the absent that allows the generative sentience of multiplicity. Kumar tries to show to the student broken by his failure the importance of that failure to any creator. The student is asked to study the light in his exercise. Light, and therefore, the blinding, burning bright to moist night tonalities that it adorns actions and forms with, sealed in any manner, no matter how systematic, arc metaphoric, and so can never be made to conform to any destiny of phenomena or any transcendental One Meaning. By overflowing out of any container, light and its tonal flux of identity, like nature's indifference (as Ghatak has shown in the work of his life), liberate themselves from narrative and, in fact, galvanize its straight line to move into swirls, discontinuities Numbers 20 -21