Silent Melodies

This is one of the rare times for me when I’m almost proud of the fact that I can be closed. I willingly disallow the possibility of wanting to touch someone, and more importantly, the possibility that someone could touch me.

After a gruelling time of constantly being emotional nurse/essential-decision maker/spineless near-daughter-in-law, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was to get into a position of looking after someone else, very simply because I was all dried up.

And I’m going quite good on this whole ‘closed’ business. Strangely enough it allows me to be more open in other ways. I can tell some people exactly what I think of them. I’m incredibly brash with dates, and I’m not bothered that they’re too insipid or too elusive. I even decide to experiment on certain things, as long as I ensure that I myself know exactly what I’m doing.

My environment, too, supports my closed stand – any movie you see, TV show you watch, music you hear, people you converse with – all suggest how this is a great thing – to seal yourself from within, amalgamate your soft tendrils and shove away all that was good about your past.

And then you commit the silliest, most trivial of mistakes – you watch a movie from your childhood.

Mouna Ragam ("Silent Melodies"), an early Mani Ratnam movie starring Revathi and Mohan, is one of those films that you shouldn’t see when you’re young, impressionable and learning concepts from everything you absorb. Because when you re-watch it as an adult, you don’t watch it with your head, but your heart.

The film plays with the concept of commitment, and love that is furthest from its physical aspects. Divya (Revathi) resists an arranged marriage with Chandrakumar (Mohan) but agrees when her father gets a heart attack. She moves to alien Delhi and desists all of CK’s post-marriage getting-to-know-you attempts, retorting with hurtful sentiments like “your touch is like that of a spider’s” ( ie its revolting) and requests a divorce within days. She explains a painful romantic past as the reason for not accepting CK. Forced by the law to remain together till the end of the year, they live under the same roof in separate bedrooms, and over time Divya starts to feel attached to CK, and comes to look upon him as her husband.

CK, though still fond of Divya, shows no sign of it after the application for divorce. He’s as distant as she’s trying to be intimate, and I have to say I felt bad for her as at every juncture, her attempts to get close to him is rebuffed by him spouting the very same lines she said at the beginning of their marriage. Yes the girl was nasty to an innocent man in the beginning, but she pays and pays and pays for it throughout the movie.

But it’s when Divya, in the beginning, tries to explain why she can’t accept CK as her husband, and it falls out of her being, almost by accident, that I felt the pang.

CK asks her why she can’t give the marriage a chance, and she replies she can’t accept him as a husband in her heart. CK again asks why, to which she answers suddenly “Yaenna en idhayam en kitta illai” ( Because my heart is not with me ).

That line’s haunted me for days. Be it when I’m doing something mundane like the cleaning and the laundry, or handling a million useless requests at work, or dealing with an elusive contact who’s fine with the rest of the world but totally ignores me, or even interacting with a casual guy that doesn’t really make sense to interact with. At some point in all this, if there’s even a slight pause, I feel those words cracking my inner scab, breaking open the surface, and I bleed and bleed.

Yes, there are some movies you shouldn't watch, because you watch them not with your head, but your heart.