A series of bizarre accidents on the sets of Owais Husain’s film

Everyone, including the director Owais Husain (son of renowned artist M.F. Husain) who shot in Chandigarh last week for his directorial debut, has come back shaken. If there was a survey of the most accident-prone film ever made in India, Owais’ film would qualify handsomely. ”You could say that again,” the director laughs mirthlessly, his fractured hand tucked away in a sling. ”I didn’t know I broke my wrist until it got swollen like a dolphin out of the water. I was painting on the brick walls of ruins in a broken-down home in Chandigarh when a wall caved in and I slipped to the ground. I continued working. But after a point the pain got to be too much.
 
So I asked someone from the unit to take me to a doctor. He informed me there were several hairline fractures on my hand.” Owais now moves around calling the shots with his right hand out of order and all wired from inside. ”For a painter, the worst fear is to realize his hand has been injured. My first thought after I hurt my hand was will be I be able to paint? Now a few days after the accident, I can move my fingers. So I guess in a couple of weeks my hand will be okay.” Bizarrely this was Owais’ second accident on location. The day before he fractured his hand, he bruised his back badly. Wincing in pain Owais laughs, ”That day when I expressed my fear to the doctor he laughed and told me not to worry. But the very next day I was back with a more serious injury and he looked more worried than me.” Owais’ lead pair has not been spared either. Sonal Chauhan burnt herself when she accidentally came too close to high-voltage arc lights in a crane shot. And her co-star Anurag Sinha fell off a horse and injured his back a couple of days before Owais’s twin accidents. Shudders Owais, ”I only hope there are no further calamities waiting for us in this schedule of my film. All the effort has finally been worth it. I wanted to shoot my film in Punjab because I wanted a certain feeling of the characters being close to the soil. And I got that. But the experience has been a mixture of exhilaration and fear. I could make a film on what we’ve gone through during the making of my film in Chandigarh.”