Like clockwork, Bahul Ramesh took out from his shelf every morning at nine, one of two favourite books – MP Narayana Pillai’s Parinamam or NN Pillai’s Njan – and read for an hour, while his thoughts came to a shape and the language sharpened. He’d sit down to write for the next seven hours and stop when the clock struck 5, turn off all thoughts of the story and devote himself to family time. He wrote Kishkindha Kaandam -- the new Malayalam film that everyone is raving about -- in this manner, when the world was in the grip of the COVID-19 fever. There was no skeleton of a story, no structured chapters, just the mad flow of words rushing out of him every day.
Bahul has been retelling his writing process since the film finally came out on the big screen and was immediately recognised for its extraordinary scripting. There is a lot of curiosity around the scriptwriter, who also cinematographed the film. This is Bahul's fifth film as a cinematographer but first as a writer. “Actually, this is the second film I wrote. I had written another during the early lockdown for COVID-19, but Dinjith (Kishkindha’s director) and I decided to do this one first,” he told TNM.
Kishkindha Kaandam had not quite fallen on the screens with a bang. Even with notable performers like Vijayaraghavan, Aparna Balamurali, and Asif Ali headlining it, the film had quietly slipped to screens across Kerala on September 12. But soon after the first show, word spread that ‘here was a movie of remarkable scripting, a humane story that thrilled and sparkled with brilliance’.
All Bahul had in mind when he began writing, he said, was the character of a peculiar old man and how the rest of the story should explain the peculiarities. That’s Vijayaraghavan’s character, one of the most appreciated in recent years, not least for the actor’s gripping performance. You take him – Appu Pillai – for granted when he makes his appearance in a grand old house tucked into the thick of a forest -- grumpy, irritable, and least inclined to talk. He doesn't so much as cast a glance toward his new daughter-in-law (Aparna) who steps into the house with his son (Asif), bewildered but easily soothed. Grumpy old men are a sort of norm, you don’t wonder about them, until their strangeness becomes too noticeable. Or like Aparna wonders, if the strangeness could have caused more trouble than you’d imagined. And that forms the core of this carefully knitted thriller.
“Thriller has always been my favourite genre. Whatever storyline I think of, it will be on those lines. But I didn't want another police story, another serial killer investigation, not the trope of CBI and forensics. I wanted a thriller without a villain, or in other words, a thriller without negative intentions,” Bahul said.
He does allow forest officials into the picture though. Asif is employed as one, Ashokan – playing another key character – too. Forests simply seeped into the picture as the chapters proceeded, he said. Even the monkeys that became so crucial to the story that the title became a reference to them, showed up only in chapter 6.
“I was writing a scene where Aparna steps out into the woods outside the house with a cup of black tea and takes a selfie, only to notice something strange hanging behind her in the picture. That’s when I stopped to wonder what could be so strange that should surprise her, it couldn't be something as natural in a forest as a pretty flower or a hive of bees. It had to be something unusual and I thought of a radio hanging down a tall branch. And what could take a radio that high – monkeys,” Bahul explained, sharing the thrills of creating worlds out of blank paper.
Even in his casual conversation, he has a way with words (“it had to be something unusual like laddu in a fish curry”) that easily ties him to the image of a man who can, at will, produce a brilliant script. Most of what we watch on the screen is from the first draft, with only a few changes made in production, he said. We asked him why he kept it all so minimal – the conversations between the characters, the conspicuous lack of expression, hardly a touch from one to another. “The expressions are less because of the situation that they are in, maybe, by the end of it, where the movie now stops, they will express more, knowing a lot more of each other. I have always liked literature where less is said and more is left for interpretation,” Bahul said. He names GR Indugopan, a Malayalam writer known for his thrillers, as a favourite for this reason.
He has been lucky, he said, to work with another favourite person – Asif Ali – in all his films. In his first four, including Kakshi Ammini Pillai and Innale Vare, Asif was either the hero or played a cameo. “Before all this, when I first did cinematography for a short film called Grace Villa, and Asif ikka came to our hometown – Payyannur – we went to ask him to launch our poster. He watched our film, hugged me and told me that we would see each other in cinema,” Bahul said. When Asif’s words became true more than once, he joked with Bahul, “I want to see you make a film without me!”
During the making of Kishkindha, it did not make a lot of difference to Bahul that this time he was working the camera of a film he scripted. “Perhaps,” he said, “I could gauge the visual importance for a particular character in a particular scene, or how much to pan in another, but mostly I focussed on just the cinematography because everyone on the set would look after the script,” he said.
Clearly, his methods, both before the filming and during it, have paid off. The film is all anyone could talk of, both people in the industry and the audiences lapping it up. Compliments found their way to Bahul’s inbox and his phone has never stopped ringing. “When Sathyan Anthikad sir (veteran filmmaker) called to say he felt the impact of watching a Bharathan or a Padmarajan movie – late legends of Malayalam cinema – I had to hold on to the fence so I wouldn’t pass out. Editor-director Mahesh Narayanan dropped the name of Christopher Nolan and I could not contain myself, I am a huge fan of the American filmmaker,” Bahul said, clearly on cloud nine, but still very much grounded.