Pyre

Set in a picturesque yet increasingly desolate hamlet in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region, Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is a quietly devastating meditation on old age, abandonment, loneliness and the inexorable erosion of rural life. The two-hour Hindi-language film centres on Tulsi (Hira Devi) and Padam (Padam Singh), an elderly goat-herding couple who have been married for over six decades. Their only son, Harish, migrated to Mumbai many years ago and has never returned. As their neighbours gradually desert their crumbling ancestral homes, the couple find themselves among the last remaining inhabitants of what is fast becoming a ghost village.

High in the Himalayas, where the wind murmurs through timber and stone, sits a village that time forgot and the world walked away from. This is the stage for Vinod Kapri’s Pyre(Chita), an elegy carved in the lines of timeworn faces and the vast, aching silence of mountains. It is a story born of memories from Uttarakhand’s ghost villages, where the young have shifted to the heartless cities, leaving only the old to watch over a crumbling community. At its heart, Pyre is a poem to the endurance of love. It follows an elderly couple bound by shared devotion and bickering, and the tenuous hope of their son’s return. With the patience of a documentary and the soul of a tragedy, Kapri creates a meditative piece of minimalist cinema where soaring peaks serve as both a majestic sanctuary and an indifferent prison.

What does growing old look like when the world around you is slowly disappearing? When your children are too far away, your village is emptying out, and even visiting a doctor becomes a challenge? Vinod Kapri’s Pyre explores these realities through an elderly couple in the mountains of Uttarakhand. Beneath its story of loneliness, migration and old age lies a more intimate question: who will hold your hand when life gets difficult? If there is one thing this film makes you want, it is someone to grow old with.

पहाड़ों की खूबसूरती के कसीदे तो हम अक्सर पढ़ते हैं, पर क्या आपने कभी उसकी खामोशी सुनी है? उसका अकेलापन महसूस किया है? अगर नहीं, तो लेखक-निर्देशक विनोद कापड़ी की फिल्म ‘पायर’ देख लीजिए। Pyre का हिंदी अर्थ चिता है। यह फिल्म वीरान होते जा रहे पहाड़ों का वह रुदन है, जो आपका दिल चीरकर रख देगा। फिल्म का आगाज दूर तक फैले उत्तराखंड के उन्हीं खूबसूरत पहाड़ों से होता है, जहां एक 80 साल का बूढ़ा पदम सिंह (पदम सिंह कापड़ी) अपनी बूढ़ी बीवी तुलसी (हीरा देवी) को साथ लेकर कूदने जाता है। यह पहला सीन कहानी की मार्मिक विसंगति को स्थापित कर देता है। होता यूं है कि पलायन का दंश झेल रहे इस इलाके में उंगलियों पर गिनने लायक लोग ही बचे हैं। पदम सिंह का खुद का बेटा हरिया 28 साल पहले शहर कमाने गया था, जो दोबारा नहीं लौटा। बूढ़े पदम सिंह के लिए अपनी बीमार पत्नी तुलसी को ऊबड़-खाबड़ पहाड़ी रास्ते से शहर ले जाने के लिए लक्ष्मण (सुभाष चंद्रा) और जीवन (शुभम चौधरी) का ही आसरा है। अब इनमें से भी एक की नौकरी लग गई और दूसरे का परिवार गांव छोड़कर जाने वाला है। लिहाजा पदम सिंह को पत्नी समेत इन्हीं पहाड़ों से कूद जाने के अलावा कोई और रास्ता नहीं सूझता। हालांकि, कहानी आगे इससे भी कहीं ज्यादा दर्दनाक मोड़ लेती है, जो आपको झकझोर देता है।

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.

The hills are alive with the sound of music. Music as in the mumbling song of an old man, singing in Kumaoni to the gods of the mountains. He smokes beedis as he croons downhill, his ageing wife being carried by two villagers behind. She has to be taken down often for a checkup by the nearest town doctor. As they ride in a mountain taxi (often a Sumo car) to the clinic, the old man can’t help but look at a funeral pyre flaming at the banks of a river. Death, a universal impending fate.

Old age can be brutal, and we can never be prepared enough to face it. On one hand, we console ourselves with labels like ‘sixty is the new forty’. On the other, we’re constantly checking our health insurance coverage and retirement plans. Director Vinod Kapri’s Kumaoni film Pyre (Chita) is not about a generation that is ready to age. It is about an octogenarian shepherd couple, Padam Singh and Tulsi, living at the farthest reaches of civilisation, with their days numbered and no heir in sight. Pyre is a more difficult concept to digest than it is to understand as a film. Two lonely elders, with plenty of time to pass and precious little time left to live, find themselves surrounded by uncertainty in their dilapidated hilltop home. Medical care is a long trek away, and monetary transactions often take the form of goats. As much as the village admires the couple, the younger generation dreams of leaving for better prospects, while the elders wait for their turn to come.