Grief does not always arrive as a torrent. Sometimes, it seeps in ever so slowly, evoked by things which used to be mundane till a few days ago. In Prasanth Vijay’s film Daayam (Inheritance), being screened in the Malayalam Cinema Today section of the 28th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), an old voice note from her deceased mother about some daily chores brings 17-year old Kalyani (Aathira Rajeev) to tears.
Maybe it was something which elicited nothing more than passive attention from her when her mother was alive. In another scene, back from school, she stumbles upon a lizard and out of habit, calls out to her mother only to come to a painful realisation a moment later of her mother’s absence. In yet another scene, which is a more conventional cinematic representation of grief, she plays an old video clip of her with her parents, all of them joyously singing aloud lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali, in multiple languages.
In Prasanth’s filmography, grief and the coming to terms with it seems to be a continuum, with his 2017 debut Athishayangalude Venal also having a 8-year old child trying various ways to become invisible believing that his father, who has gone missing, has found a way to be invisible too. But, when it comes to Daayam, written by Indu Lakshmi, we are dealing with someone who is aware of reality, but still has some innocence left in her about the ways of the world.
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