Bahul Ramesh Busts Myths About ‘Kishkindha Kaandam’, His Screenwriting Debut

Bahul Ramesh describes himself as an extrovert. He loves hanging out with friends, meeting new people, and talking for hours. But the last four years have pushed him into a shell, forcing him to reconsider his outgoing credentials. “What would I tell people if they asked me what I was doing with life?” That one question kept him isolated and restricted to himself. 

“Most people in the movie industry enter without any support from family, but that wasn’t my case. My parents never forced me to do anything since I said I wanted to be a part of movies back in the ninth grade. I haven’t even attended a single class of tuition,” he says. This further added to his pressure during these years when he had to prove to himself that he was cut out for a place in Malayalam cinema. 

“That validation has come now,” he says, four days after the release of Kishkindha Kaandam, a surprise that’s on its way to becoming the biggest hit of the year in Malayalam cinema, in terms of return on investment. His first work as a screenwriter has led to “relief and satisfaction. And the feeling that I didn’t go wrong as a ninth grader.” 

Amid theatre visits, house-full shows and phone calls of praise, the old extrovert comes alive again. Excerpts from an interview about the writing of Kishkindha Kaandam. Spoilers ahead. 

We’ve heard of many combinations among filmmakers, but it’s rare to find a writer who has also shot his film. Did you set any ground rules to separate the two? 

None at all. The idea was to just keep typing. But because I have worked on films before this, I guess there is a logistical side at the back of my mind. In Kishkindha, for instance, there’s a scene in which Appu Pillai (Vijayaraghavan) visits a hospital. When I first wrote it, I thought of how a day’s rent to shoot inside a hospital is ₹50,000. You would then need junior artistes as the crowd, making the costs much more than a regular day’s shoot. This would have been a lot for such a small scene, but this cost became justifiable when I added a second scene in the hospital in the second half. Not that I added a scene just to save money, but I guess I did consider the practical difficulties while writing. 

Did you think of specific shots while you were writing? 

Just two. I can think of that shot of the radio hanging from the tree, and that final back shot from Jagadish (who plays Appu Pillai’s friend Sumadathan) sir’s perspective, with Appu Pillai waving from afar in deep focus. I was not too conscious about the framing for most other shots.

One of the exciting bits for me was to figure out the blocking while being on set. I dislike forcing actors to stick to one spot just for composition. I wanted them to be free, and I generally prefer to mount the camera on my shoulder pad, rather than use tripods. Even when lighting up, I’m not trying to light for one frame. The final frame is what we arrive at after the actors reach. We have the freedom, then, to improvise without taking too much time.

A still from Kishkindha Kaandam.

I loved the way you began the movie. We’re in the middle of a marriage registration, but there’s hardly any mirth. When Ajayan gets a call, he stops the registration midway since he’s told it’s about his father and the police. His own life is second priority…

I wanted to get into the conflict as soon as possible. It’s a style I’ve enjoyed from the writings of (screenwriter and director) G.R. Indugopan. In my case, I wasn’t sure of where to take my story. I started writing because I thought I’d landed on an interesting character with Appu Pillai. But instead of starting with his introduction, I wanted to start by showing the government rule that all licensed gun owners had to surrender their weapons before elections. I found the process intriguing, and I thought others would, too. I connected this rule to Appu Pillai, who then became the only person who hadn’t surrendered his gun. “Why didn’t he?” became the starting point after that. 

Did you consciously want to avoid linearity? 

Yes. Instead of this information being revealed in a straightforward manner, why not make this a phone call to his son? And instead of making him attend that call as he’s doing something mundane, why not add a layer by doing so during his wedding? This creates a certain curiosity among viewers to start thinking about these characters. “Why didn’t Appu Pillai attend his own son’s wedding?”

So, what was your first one-liner for the Appu Pillai character? A strict father who now has memory issues?

Not exactly. It was more along the lines of a father with a memory problem, who begins to doubt if he has ever committed a crime. “What if I did something horribly wrong, and what if I forgot about it?” — that was the initial question that drove him. 

At what stage did you decide to make Aparna (Aparna Balamurali), the new bride, the audience’s perspective? 

In an early draft, I described how Aparna’s wedding day gets disturbed by this bit of negative news. At some point, the idea of a “Sherlock Holmes-like daughter-in-law” kept playing in my head. Her conflict with Appu Pillai also became interesting. 

For a while, I wondered why Ajayan hadn’t sat Aparna down before they married and explained all the issues at home. Isn’t it a bit like blindsiding her? 

I never thought of Ajayan getting remarried as something that was his choice. During the first Zoom call with his brother, I tried to subtly hint that it was upon his brother’s pressure that he considered it. He was perhaps not 100 per cent convinced, and his well-wishers may all have told him that his father was getting old and that he needed a partner. From a writer’s side, I never thought of Ajayan confessing to Aparna, because I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I did not have a flashback while writing, so this was the only progression. 

On a personal note, I based Ajayan’s character on a friend of my father’s. He’s an educated, well-travelled gentleman who had to return to his small town in Kerala to look after his bedridden mother. This happened right after a major tragedy in his personal life, so there were two events that changed who he was. He was a man with real charisma and an aura about him. But when we visited him, you could see he had lost that spirit. Even his posture reflected a personal defeat. A lot of what Ajayan’s brother tells him on that call was taken from the advice my father gave this gentleman on that day.

A still from Kishkindha Kaandam.

The broken door lock of Appu Pillai’s bedroom is a major plot point that changes everything. Was this an organic addition you wrote in your flow, or was it inserted in retrospect?

It wasn’t added on purpose; the broken door lock was a detail that shows the meticulous process Appu Pillai follows when he steps out of his room. The broken door lock showed his frustration, and it was also an opportunity for him to remind Ajayan to get it fixed. I later realised I could use this detail to move the plot ahead. Even the gun started off in the beginning as just a detail. I developed a sub-plot around it later. There were other strands, like Aparna finding a job at a school, that were later deleted from the final draft as well. 

That’s an unusual style of writing. Usually, screenwriters plan so far ahead that they’re unable to write this freely. 

I could afford to do that because I didn’t commit this script to anyone. I had no performance issues, in a sense, because I didn’t write to impress anyone. 

You’ve shown a radio hanging from the tree that was first stolen and then returned by monkeys. You also show broken toys lying outside the house. Does that mean that the gun found with the monkey could be one of Chachu’s (Ajayan’s son) toys? 

The toys are Chachu’s memoirs. The toys are what urge Aparna to go look at Ajayan’s pictures with Chachu and his mother. I, too, thought of the possibility of using the toy gun with the monkey, which originally belonged to Chachu. The ambiguity of the gun and the toys leads to that reading. I didn’t want to hinder that reading. On a comical side, a friend who had read a draft felt Chachu himself was taken away by these monkeys.

I have a far-fetched theory, too, and it has to do with the kind of person Ajayan is. We’re led to believe he’s the nicest son, but there are instances where he’s deceptive, including in that scene where he’s acting grief-stricken at the mortuary. Can you trust Ajayan’s narration of the flashback at all?

True! I had hoped that people would think of this, too, when it comes to Ajayan. I love that ambiguity and the notion of an unreliable narrator at the centre. I enjoy thinking about the movies that leave you hanging with open endings, and I wanted that with Kishkindha. Honestly, even I don’t have answers for this. I intended it to be vague. Because there were gaps between the writing and the shoot, I myself have read it again to find meanings I hadn’t originally thought of while writing. 

A still from Kishkindha Kaandam.

What if I were to say that Ajayan himself may have committed the murder and simply used Appu Pillai as a tool to hide it? Would that be too wild a reading? 

(Laughs) I hadn’t thought of it to that extent! But, as a character, I modelled Ajayan around Matthew McConaughey’s character from Interstellar, and took inspiration from a few scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception. In terms of the way he speaks, I wanted Ajayan to sound like Mammootty in Aalkkoottathil Thaniye. 

Finally, the most obvious question is: where is Chachu’s body hidden?

I was also asked this on my way out of a theatre in Thiruvananthapuram. I told them that only Appu Pillai knows the right answer to this. 

I think Chachu’s body was hidden under the corpse of the monkey. 

I have never tried to think of that. I guess a lot of people are thinking about burying, but is that the only way to hide a body? As a viewer, we know only as much as Ajayan knows; you need to ask Appu Pillai.