He drinks, she smokes. He sings, she heckles. He eats, she cooks. He calls her a mad woman, she calls him a wastrel. He criticises her food, she whines about being stuck with him. Bickering is not only their only means of communication, it is also their love language. Or whatever you call “love” after 65 years of marriage. They don’t speak, they mutter to themselves so that the other can hear. Padam and Tulsi are rusty habits to each other. They may sound like a crowd-pleasing romcom tale, but they’re actually life companions browbeaten by time and tide. Misery loves company, but their company is fuelled by misery; he enjoys winding her up, she is affectionate in her meanness.
But the old Kumaoni couple aren’t living anymore, they’re existing. They’re surviving, by the skin of their stained teeth. Their remote mountain village is thinning; only a couple of young neighbours remain. When Tulsi’s health takes a dire turn, Padam needs these neighbours to help them reach a hospital every week. He senses that she’s reaching the end of the road. He begs the men not to migrate to the cities like the rest: who will keep an eye on them? As Tulsi’s will to live fades, a letter from their Mumbai-based son Hariya arrives: a visit is imminent after 28 years. It’s a minor miracle. The couple’s sagging spirits soar. They wait. And they wait. In sickness and in health.
Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is the kind of meditative tragedy most of us don’t have the courage to imagine. The story of Padam and Tulsi levitates between all the uncomfortable themes that confirm our worst fears: mortality, abandonment, cultural erasure, dependence, longing, and most of all, the indignities of aging. We often turn caregivers for parents and relatives because this is exactly the picture that terrifies us — and them. The couple could just as well be the symbols of urban isolation: pensioners withering away in an empty tower block, distant strangers to families and memories alike.
But Padam and Tulsi are rural recluses that have been left behind by a world that mistakes development for evolution. The older villagers have sons and daughters who migrate and eventually take them along. These residents leave reluctantly, but they leave to pursue the final flame of belonging. Padam and Tulsi have no such privilege; their fate is so mythical that folk-songs might be written about them. They are forced to ‘prepare’ for death on their own, and it’s not as lyrical. This couple has been sonless for so long that their bloodline was never their crutch.
They’ve relied on the humanity of those who can afford to see them as cranky old characters in the vicinity. Padam has no choice but to rely on their sense of community. He looks at the friendly postman with hope, and almost ‘bribes’ next-door youngsters like Laxman and Jeevan to stay longer and postpone their own dreams to look after them. Every time someone helps the couple, Padam gives them one of his goats; it’s a mix of social desperation and emotional manipulation. Despite the son’s letter, he remains persistent: he can’t handle the idea of having to survive without his better and bitter half. Her suffering — and her failure to engage in their banter — makes him unravel. He’s so needy that it’s almost a horror film disguised as a romance.
Pyre is shot with a distinct awareness of how we tend to perceive such movies. The misty hills and the cloudy skies and the atmospheric long shots supply our romanticisation of such settings. But this is laced with the repetitions of routine and weather patterns and the scar-coded creases on their faces. The melancholic score sounds like it’s haunted by Padam and Tulsi’s cracked voices. One visual style feeds our aesthetic of living alone; the other reveals the reality of dying alone. Some of the details suggest that they’ve lost track of time itself: Padam mentions “Nehru” when he hears of a Prime Minister and some news on the radio. When asked how old he is in jest, he mentions being born when World War 2 started, and Tulsi being born when Japan was bombed. Even if it’s a joke, it speaks volumes about humans who tether themselves to history as last-ditch markers of their identity. Perhaps their journey has been so insignificant that this is the only way to be remembered.
Pyre does behave like a movie every now and then. There are Gulzar-penned montage songs, and the score (partly credited to Oscar-winning composer Mychael Danna) swells at opportune moments. The decision to be a Hindi-language story is understandable, but you can tell that it isn’t the protagonists’ mother tongue; their well-worn familiarity keeps getting punctured by phrases and gestures of newness. It sounds a bit unnatural when they resort to dialogue: including lines like “once the doors of these houses close, they never open,” “we have one month to live and two to die,” and the climactic exchange that features a predictable but evocative twist. But another way of looking at this creative license is that the couple sounds like they’re crossing more than one hurdle to communicate with each other. At some level, the language allows them to seem like they’re telling stories to stay alive. They may think and fret in Kumaoni, but the anticipatory grief of losing each other — and themselves — is universal. Their little mental games bring to mind Ajitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains, a title that’s essentially ‘Pyre’ in more words.
The physicality of the lead performances defines the film. The two (non-professional) actors are people first, so their ‘chemistry’ is really an expression of curiosity; they’re discovering the medium and one another while their characters inch towards the summit of no return. The body language is full of lived-in tics and repressed turmoil, so the clumsiness of dialogue rarely registers. Padam Singh Kapri, in particular, plays Padam as someone who’s using his personality to persuade others. It seems like he’s entertaining them and playing to the gallery for them so that they see a reason to stay; he strives to make their roots worth holding onto. It’s a complicated and moving turn — one that lights up Pyre across the mundanity of its darkness. It’s also a strangely potent portrait of patriarchy: the husband is so consumed by the threat of self-sufficiency and widowhood that he reframes loneliness as a space where solitude waits to die. In his hands, Pyre unfolds like a funeral sustained by the ashes of everyday dread.