Director Shahi Kabir on Mental Health of Cops: 'There Is No Provision for Therapy in Police Force'

With Ronth, Shahi Kabir has completed his fifth film in the Malayalam industry. All these five films (Joseph, Nayattu, Elaveezha Poonjira and Officer On Duty) spoke about the life and the challenging predicament faced by a police officer as a particularly tough period in his career.

But with Ronth, Shahi feels he has made his most autobiographical film yet. It is about a junior officer, played by Roshan Mathew, working as a driver in the police force on one of his first nights on night patrol. Accompanying him is his senior, in a character played by Dileesh Pothan. In what promises to be one of Malayalam cinema’s first buddy cop thrillers, Shahi says that the dialogues and scenes from the film were taken directly from his previous career as a police officer. It is also Junglee Pictures’ first movie in Malayalam, a decision that was based on the director’s previous works, Nayattu and Elaveezha Poonjira.   

A dialogue in the film’s trailer goes, “For a policeman, the last corpse you see remains in your mind. And when you see another, the image of the new corpse replaces the old one.” 

He talks about the real incident that contributed to this dialogue. Speaking about the first time he had to deal with a corpse, he says, “It was the body of an 81-year-old woman; she died alone in her house located right at the middle of a large rubber estate. Her decomposed body was found six days after her death. This lean woman had become much bulkier as a result. As a part of the inquest, even though there were female officers, I had to help move of the body. It’s an image I could not shake off.” 

Shahi talks about the impact of this event on his mental health. “After this night, I couldn’t think of sex for months. Your mind keeps recalling the image of the naked corpse. No matter how often I bathed, I continued to feel the stench of that body on my uniform. When I asked a senior, he said this was common and that it would slowly change once a bigger event comes your way. This was the event that inspired the dialogue in Ronth."

He also explains how not much has changed for police officers working in the force today, especially when it comes to their mental health. He says, “There are no provisions in the police force, either in the form of counselling or therapy. You should first get the time for your daily duties, before we set aside time for mental health treatment.”