Justice died on the day your son died, says a woman standing outside the door of Prabha Mai’s little house. This seems like revenge, the woman adds. Mai, old and tired, looks at the woman, and says, “I don’t even know the difference anymore.”
It was on that day that Mai heard the judgement she has been waiting to hear for 13 years. The policemen responsible for the custodial death of her son had been sentenced to death by a special CBI court.
The scene described above is from a Marathi film called, Mai Ghat: Crime No 103/2005. It tells the story of Mai, and is directed by actor-director Ananth Mahadevan. Like his previous film, Gour Hari Dastaan: The Freedom File, this too is inspired from real life. The woman who inspired the story is 68-year-old Prabhavati Amma from Thiruvananthapuram, who came with him when the film was screened at the International Film Festival of Kerala.
It was only last year that Prabhavathi got the justice she had been fighting for, for over a decade: two policemen getting capital punishment for custodial murder – that of Prabhavathi Amma’s son in this case – is a first in the country. And hardly anyone expected such a long and determined fight from an elderly woman who made ends meet as a cleaning staff in a school in Thiruvananthapuram.
“Every mother would understand the pain that I went through. Only those who are pitiless would not understand. The film will touch the hearts of all, those with kids and those without them. My son was killed for Rs 4000. So many mothers prayed for my son and those prayers were heard. What happened to my son should never happen to anyone else’s children,” Prabhavati Amma tells TNM, after the screening.
Prabhavati Amma with her lawyer Siraj Karoli at the IFFK
The Rs 4000 she mentions is the amount her son Udayakumar was accused of stealing. He had it with him when the police picked up him, and his friend Suresh Kumar, from a park in Thiruvananthapuram.
In the film, Ananth made little changes to the story. The friend’s name remains the same. Udayakumar became Nitin. The money Nitin had in his pant pocket – Rs 4200 – was his mother’s savings from doing laundry.
Prabhavati Amma watched the movie in a language she didn’t understand. The subtitles too didn’t help. But she understood the emotions, she says. “I didn’t feel sad now, watching the film. But then, my grief for my son will never end, it will always be there,” she says, when Ananth asked her if the film has made her sad.
Ananth says he had to make the film in Marathi because it was hard to find producers for it in Malayalam. “Even for a film I planned to make on Nambi Narayanan, there were no producers. Then how could I find one for Prabhavati Amma?”
A newspaper editorial he read in September 2018 made him pick up the phone and reach out to Prabhavati Amma’s lawyer Siraj Karoli. He helped Ananth with the film. “When a person is tried once he cannot be tried again, that’s a legal principle. (The policemen were earlier granted bail when the witnesses had turned hostile). But this was an exception because there was an order for further investigation by the CBI to file a supplementary chargesheet. That’s why this case was important,” says advocate Siraj Karoli.
The convicted policemen are in prison, and appeals have gone to a higher court to challenge the death sentence.