Sometimes at night, my glass kitchen window goes tap-tap. I try to ignore and go on with my cooking. The sound recurs in a while, so I look up and smile towards the origin of the sound. It is probably the sea breeze saying hello to my window but I tell myself it is my late granny knocking at my window and trying to catch my attention. (When I confided my stupid theory to Ashwin yesterday, he asked, "but does granny know where you are living here?" "Yeah, the dead are omnipresent like God himself."
Watching Koode (With you/Together), the latest hit from Anjali Menon, I felt my theory isn't so weird after all. The dead might come to visit one person they liked the most, and just as Jenny kept asking before her death if her brother Joshua would come from the Gulf, granny kept asking if I would come (though it had been just two months after I had paid her a visit).
Koode, like the Marathi movie it is adapted from, explores the relationship between a brother and sister - a bond that develops after her passing away and helps him kill the demons in his mind and find meaning in a new life. She stays in his life until he reclaims love and forgives his parents for sending him away to work and robbing him of his childhood.
Koode may not be the kind of movie the pious would endorse - for it goes against the theory that the dead, the good 'uns, go to heaven while the bad uns rot in hell. Here we have a flesh and blood soul eating puttu and kadala or appam and stew and feeling ravenous all the time. Now, that interesting! Or one that uses the mobile phone to do some online shopping for her brother. And to be a little realistic, the dead girl stays inside the vintage van and in her night suit she must have worn at the time of her death.
There is often the temptation to consider death as a dead end and not one that will trigger a rebirth or a life in paradise. And I wonder if my predecessors were fooled by this paradise theory and if it is just a carrot and stick policy to make us behave on this planet.
When she disappears from his life in the end, we get a panoramic view of Ooty's hills in all its magnificence and we feel: Ah, this is indeed heaven.
Anjali Menon as usual explores familial ties, though none as poignant as in her first movie Manjadikkuru. The challenge here is conveying the pain and emotions through minimum verbal dialogue. Prithviraj has excelled at the craft and his silence convey his pain and turmoil effectively.
It is good to see the movie open with the UAE - an oil refinery in Sharjah to be precise. It brings a lump in the throat as you watch the workers' bus navigate a roundabout in the coppery red desert. After all, Anjali and Nazriya are UAE's own girls - born and brought up here, and bringing that sensitivity in movies like Koode and Manjadikkuru.
Verdict: The kids loved the movie - they are new gen and Anjali movies are meant for the new gen. The father thinks it is rubbish. The mother liked it but some doubts remain, including the relationships of the protagonists with their extended family sharing the same roof. Maybe it will become a little clearer when I watch it again - and that will have to wait until it is aired on television channels.
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