Hum log: why a peepal tree in our park has a dog spirit in it

(June 16 marked ten years since my Foxie died. Here is my latest Economic Times column)
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If you’re a dog person but feel daunted by the nearly-three-hour running time of the new Kannada film 777 Charlie (I haven’t yet taken time off to watch it), you could prep yourself with a 60-minute Tamil film instead. Produced by and starring Vijay Sethupathi, the 2021 Mughizh is about a young girl drawn out of her shell through the arrival of a family pet, but then traumatised when the dog dies in an accident – whereupon her parents try to help her heal.

It’s a sweet film, full of likable people (including Sethupathi’s real-life daughter as the girl, Kavya, and Regina Cassandra as her mother), and it’s good to see a big star get behind a project like this. I had minor reservations about the story’s use of the animal as a Macguffin, a cipher for the playing out of human emotions and relationships (which are presumably the important things). But one scene that resonated with me involved a dhobi, given the task of burying the dog, trying to comfort Kavya by saying the body would be a good fertilizer for a nearby tree: “Just wait and see, the leaves will bloom soon.” Faced with a disapproving stare from Kavya’s dad, he sheepishly adds, his voice trailing off, “The dog has not died, it will always be with us… in the form of a tree.”

Of course, this provides no solace to the girl; such grand-sounding big-picture narratives – with the implication that the deceased pet will in a sense “live on” – mean little during an intense grieving process.

In a month that marks ten years since the darkest day I have known – the sudden and untimely death of my canine child Foxie, aged just four, in June 2012 – I can relate with both Kavya’s refusal to be consoled and the grave-digger’s big-picture wisdom. In the immediate aftermath of Foxie’s death, I would have bristled if someone had offered me such platitudes. And yet, as time went by, I found comfort in two peepal trees that were linked to her.

One of those trees was the one we planted just behind Foxie’s grave at the animal shelter where she was buried; I only see that tree once a year or so, when I visit the place. But the other tree is one that I walk beneath every day. It has no connection with Fox’s mortal remains, it certainly isn’t being “fertilized” by her, but it grows in the middle of our colony park where she spent many of her happiest moments.

“I began planting saplings to mark births and beginnings,” writes Sumana Roy in her extraordinary book How I Became a Tree, a series of unusual, interlinked reflections on (among many other things) the differences between tree time and human time. The peepal tree in our park was planted just a few months before Foxie died; by the time she left, it had grown to around six feet. Today it is gigantic. In a few old photos I have of Fox sitting in our DDA flat balcony overlooking the park, a barren spot with a bench is visible in the middle distance. This was where the sapling would be planted; it still takes my breath away to look at those photos and then to look at the huge tree occupying the same space today.

On the pace at which plants go about their lives in contrast to the frenetic, deadline-driven world of humans, Roy writes: “I began envying the tree, its disobedience to human time […] It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to ‘hurry up’.” This reminds me that the day after Foxie’s death, when time had seemingly come to a standstill, I saw an urgent, threateningly worded letter from the electricity office about an unpaid bill, with a last-date deadline for that very day, which had me scrambling to find my chequebook and get the cheque delivered to the office on time – on a day when I hadn’t expected to be preoccupied with such matters.

In the long run, of course, tree time seems very languid compared to ours (“Here I was born, there I died,” says Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, tracing her lifetime on the cross-section of a tree that had lived for a thousand years, “It was only a moment for you, you took no notice”) – but saplings can seem in an awful hurry to grow up. I can never forget the day when Foxie and I came across the young peepal tree after the removal of the protective wire mesh that had been placed around it for its first few months. Freed of its cage, it was suddenly more visible and had personality; we noticed it as if for the first time. She circled it hesitantly, got up on her weak hind legs to get a closer look; she opened and closed her mouth in that goldfish-like way that always seemed like she was muttering to herself; she took the end of her leash in her mouth like she did when she was nervous around someone new. Finally, after a few soft growls, she decided the tree could stay.

A couple of weeks later, she was gone, and in my more sentimental moments I feel like that encounter, and the attentiveness she showed the tree, was a way of passing some of her feeble spirit into it – as if to say, I’ll still be around here in this park in some form. As Roy writes, “turning into a tree seems a safe enough shelter for the dead who want to remain alive in some way”. It’s reassuring to think that the life of this majestic presence, which will probably be around for many decades to come, intersected momentarily with my Foxie’s brief stint at the crease.

[Related post: in memory of a beautiful child]

P.S. pleasing that the Economic Times page carried this picture of Foxie with the column...

 

"Johnny Johnny. Yes papa? Serial killer. Ha ha ha." On the new film Forensic

(Did this review for Money Control)

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There has been a tradition, in modern crime fiction in the West – going back at least to the novels of Thomas Harris – of the brilliant investigator who is nearly as unstable as the killers he is pursuing: the powers of immersion or empathy that enable him to understand the psychopathic mind keep him teetering along the sanity-insanity divide himself. This trope has long become a cliché, with very few interesting variants now, but watching the opening scenes of the new thriller Forensic I wondered if it was being taken to comical new heights.

Here is forensic genius Johnny Khanna (Vikrant Massey), sauntering into a room where a woman has recently died. Clearly full of morbid happiness at being alone with the body, he performs a little moonwalk in his scrubs, then warbles “Johnny Johnny” to himself in a child-voice. “Yes, darling?” he replies with a change of tone, and the paraphrased rhyme continues – “Khoon hua kya? Yes darling” – all the way to “Open your mouth” (as he examines the corpse’s teeth) and the gleeful “Ha ha ha” when he figures out what happened. For good measure he then recites a short couplet, in Hindi.

One reason why this sequence is jarring (matters of good taste apart) is that Vikrant Massey, fine actor though he is, suffers from what might be called too much likability. Massey emits such a strong Decency Vibe that you feel like pinching his cheeks and offering him a cream biscuit even when he’s stabbing a dummy with a knife while shrieking “I will kill you!” (in an energetic but unconvincing effort to get inside a serial killer’s mind).

However, there’s a bigger problem with the early scenes depicting Johnny as a creepy, possibly unbalanced fellow who may have his own split-personality issues: they lead to nothing at all. The film had begun with a short prologue, set in an indeterminate past, where a disturbed little boy apparently murders his father and sister. When the story moves to the present day, the first person we meet is the weird “Johnny Johnny”, and there is room for the possibility that this is the grown-up version of that little boy – that Johnny might be as much criminal as crime-fighter, a Dexter in Dehradun. But as the narrative continues, it becomes clear not just that this isn’t the case, but also that those tics we saw in Johnny’s first scenes were nothing more than a way of giving him a flashy introduction – making him seem cooler, edgier than he actually is. Or maybe just providing some meat for the trailer.

At any rate, by the halfway mark, Forensic has settled into a more conventional murder procedural – and Johnny, though still smart-alecky at times, is now behaving more or less like a regular person. Maybe it’s the change in climate that makes him more poised and sensitive and a little less prone to reciting nursery rhymes: he has been called to Mussoorie to assist an investigation into the kidnapping and subsequent murder of a little girl on her birthday. Complicating matters is the fact that he and the cop leading the investigation, Megha (Radhika Apte), used to be romantically involved and things have soured between them. Further tension comes from Megha’s family situation: her young niece Aanya now lives with her after a tragedy a few years ago, but misses her father (played by Rohit Roy), from whom she has been separated. And Aanya is around the same age as the girls who are now going missing and turning up dead after a run-in with the “Birthday Killer”.

This is the set-up for a story that involves the emergence of many suspects and red herrings, including a dwarf and another child with a history of psychological problems. But despite the many things that are simultaneously going on here, Forensic is inert in the telling. Even in dramatically charged moments where revelations are made and crucial information (or a new danger) comes to light, the writing is so bland that everyone sounds like they are reading passages from a school textbook. An urgent scene between Megha and Aanya’s father is shot like a standard-issue soap opera confrontation with hackneyed dialogue; lines like “The killer won’t do anything to her for another three days – because her birthday is only after three days” are delivered lethargically.

Neither Apte nor Massey does anything too wrong (her performance mainly consists of looking either surprised or annoyed as if she were a stand-in for the viewer), but they needed a better script, and a film with a sharper sense of pace and rhythm. There are a couple of serviceable supporting performances by Vindu Dara Singh as a helpful cop (much like his father, Singh seems to be a version of a benevolent Hanuman in everything he does), and by Prachi Desai as a psychiatrist, but in the end nothing can save Forensic from its lack of conviction.

Also, no spoiler here, but I figured out the “who” in this whodunnit quite early (not having watched the identically titled Malayalam film that this is a remake of) – it’s simple enough if you go with the tenet that the murderer will be the most innocent-seeming character who doesn’t seem directly linked to the crimes. There is some fun to be had in watching the protagonists figure out the complicated details of the “why” and the “how”, and the back-story involved (who does that boy in the prologue turn out to be?), but I spent much of the film’s overwrought climax giggling to myself, much as Johnny does in his opening scene. “Open your mouth / Hee hee hee” probably wasn’t the desired audience response to a crime story about grisly child-murders.

[My earlier Money Control piece are here]

Celebrating Judy Garland: A Star is Born, Meet Me in St Louis

It was the great Judy Garland’s birth centenary earlier this month, so I thought I’d schedule a film-club chat around some of her notable films (this can also be a stepping stone to a discussion about the Hollywood musical).

 

The two films I have shared with my group so far:

 

A Star is Born (1954): this is the second version (or the third if you count the 1932 What Price Hollywood?) of one of the most popular and timeless Hollywood stories: the fraught marital relationship between one movie star who is on his way down and another who is on her way up. Super performances by Garland and James Mason in the lead roles, and with a number of musical setpieces that make this film arguably THE Judy Garland movie, allowing her to showcase the full range of her dramatic and singing talent. 

 

Meet Me in St Louis (1944): this musical, about a year in the life of a family in St Louis early in the 20th century, is somewhat under the radar today – but it was one of the definitive musicals of the 1940s, and a key early work in the career of director Vincente Minnelli. (He and Judy Garland got married shortly after this film was made; Liza Minnelli is their daughter. Incidentally, the Martin Scorsese film New York, New York, which stars Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro, makes for an interesting mother/daughter double bill with A Star is Born.)

 

Meet Me in St Louis is a great way to get into the spirit of the Hollywood musical of a certain time, building up to more famous films such as An American in Paris, The Band Wagon and of course Singin in the Rain. I re-watched it yesterday and was just as stirred by “The Trolley Song”, and by Garland’s performance in it, as I had been years ago. (Also, a special shout-out to Renee Zellweger for performing that number so well in her own voice when she played Garland in the 2019 film Judy.)

 

Anyone else who wants prints of these films, let me know. Also, any other suggestions for Garland films – or related works or discussion points – are welcome. (A few people have expressed their fondness for Easter Parade, The Pirate, and The Clock.) 

 

P.S. I am also trying to get a good downloadable print of Judgement at Nuremberg, which isn’t exactly a “Judy Garland film” but features one of her best dramatic performances, in a short role. The film was a great favourite of mine a long time ago, even though it is often bloated and pedantic and appallingly virtuous. (The director, Stanley Kramer, being a proto-Madhur Bhandarkar in some ways. But he got the 60-plus Marlene Dietrich and Spencer Tracy together on screen for the first time, so all is forgiven. Here's an old post about that film.)