By Vincent Canby

Krishna, a small. spindly-legged ten-year-old country boy, is kicked out of the house by his mother and told not to return until he has 500 rupees, to pay for a scooter he has mined. Krishna drifts to the nearest big city where, without effort, he is absorbed into Bombay’s proliftrating population of homeless street-kids.

A concerned documentary would probably treat Krishna as one of the faceless mob, important mostly as a representation of a human condition. The film, that contained him would be a general statement, and Krishna himself, old beyond his years, would remain unknowable, forever lost. How sail, we would be asked to say, and then, but that’s India. The achievement of Salaam Bombay! Mira Nair’s remarkably good first fiction feature. is that Krishna has his own identity. He’s an utterly specific character. Krishna may be naive, but he quickly learns how to get along in a world of beggars; prostitutes, drug pushers and vicious rip-off artists, some-of whom are quite respectable.

For a film about such hopelessness, Salaam Bombay! is surprisingly cheering, not because Ms. Nair has sentimentalized the scene but because, being Indian herself, she understands the particular reality of who appears, to as tourists, to be hopelessness. Seen close-up, rather dun from the window of a taxi-cab, despair a not so easily recognized. Life, lived always on the edge of disaster, is coped with, if not always with success. Salaam Bombay! isn’t exactly
an upper, but neither is it a predigested social treatise.That the film is less, nightmarish than Hector Babenco’s riveting Pixote may have something to do with its being set in India rather than Brazil. There’s a kind of ancient sophistication about the Bombay demimonde that is different from life in Sao Paulo, where widespread poverty and rootlessness are: only a little older than the glass-and-steel highrises of the very rich.

Ms. Nair, thirty-one, who was born and brought up in India and studied at Harvard as an undergraduate, has made four documentaries, all in India, which obviously helped prepare her for this work of fiction. One doesn’t necessarily feed the other. however. Salaam Bombay! demonstrates this young diector’s extraordinary selfcontrol when faced with fiction’s manifold possibilities. The movie possesses a free-flowing exuberance not often associated with die documentary form. Even more unusual is the director’s success- with her actors. Without the film’s program notes, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the professionals from the non-professionals. The children. all non-professionals, are splendid. especially Shafiq Syed, the little boy who plays Krishna, and Hansa Vithal, as the tiny daughter of a Bombay prostitute and her pimp. The exceptionally good pro-actors include Aneeta Kanwar as the prostitute, Nana Patekar, as the pimp and Raghubir Yadav as a God-forasken drug-addict who, early on befriends Krishna. Salaam Bombay! which was written by Sooni Taraporevala from a story by bar and Ms. Nair, is rich with self-explanatory incident. Action is character. Dialogue is spare. Even the camera is laconic.

Ms. Nair sees Bombay less as a recognizable-city than as the ever-present chaos surrounding Krishna and the people who move in and out of his life. Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsoever. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus-accommodated. Ms, Nair does not share this fatal minus, but in Salaam Bombay! she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. , She is a new film-maker to watch.