Veham (hallucination)

Illustration/Uday Mohite

It was a year ago, that my mother gifted my friend and creative partner Bugs Bhargava Krishna, a first edition copy of her 1992 novel Old Cypress - something she only did with people she was fond of. Bugs read the title story, and said to my mother, "Nisha, Rahul and I wish to make your story into a film."

My mother asked us "Does Old Cypress lend itself to film?"

The question of adaptation, is a complicated one (original content is perhaps the easiest, as there is no source material, you begin from scratch).

Plays are a tad easier, the dialogue is in-built, the drama often has to be brought from off stage into the present-but the action moves at a linear pace.

Books make for complex conversions to film - the story is more lyrical, the conflict spreads itself over the length of the paperback. Dialogue by and large is scarce. How to convert a leisurely read into a two-hour cinematic experience, becomes the challenge.

And so Bugs "screenplayed" my mother's short story, breaking the book into scenes, little nuggets of action - often converting an unsettling uneasy moment into a spooky scene. The question at all times is, what does the audience see, as opposed what do they read.

Old Cypress is about a woman, Radha, and her husband of 25 years, who take early retirement to the Munnar hills, to Old Cypress, a beautiful house. How she deals with her fears and phobias, and are these fears real or imagined - what's in the house and what's in her head. As Bugs puts, "we're making an emotional horror story".

My mother asked, "Is the movie going to be in English?"

"Hindi probably, mom."

"Then how will the audience get a sense of my writing?'

"Mom in any case, most of your prose will be conveyed visually, your words will be captured cinematically."

What books don't usually have is dialogue, and so Bugs and I decided that I would write it, well certainly the English first draft. But screen dialogue differs greatly from stage, brevity, half sentences, pauses, silences that fulfill the axiom that "silence is dialogue without words". And for me, to dive into my mother's head and emerge with dialogue that sounded like she'd written them was as unsettling as it was fulfilling.

I'd read to my mother, dialogue I'd written, and she'd listen fascinated. Our respective styles differed greatly, her's drawing upon literature and all the great books she'd read and taught, mine from years of stage, and trying to write how people speak,

Bugs had wanted to present to her a rough cut of the film, next March on her birthday

Sadly she passed on August 11. Her last words to me, "make the film you and Bugs want to make, I'm happy".

We begin our first shooting schedule tomorrow at a sprawling studio in Versova, attempting to create a cottage in Munnar.

We've set our actors, a cinematic challenge, one that most actors can either embrace or be panicked about - shoot the climax first. There is no scope to build yourself to that climactic moment over the three month shooting schedule, virtually no rehearsal, no preparation, sink or swim, baptism with fire, one chance at it, one day, sure multiple re-takes, many angles, different lensing, but one day, the actor has just that one day, and it's captured on celluloid, for eternity.

"Do you have a title, will you be retaining Old Cypress," my mother had asked.

"Probably not, we live in an age where a title like that may suggest it's an English film, titles are game changers, they have to give the viewer a sense of genre, from the hundreds of choices available on the streaming channels, in the multiplexes, why should I watch your offering."

"So what's the title then?" she asked.

"Veham," Bugs and I said.

"What does Veham mean?"

"Hallucination… Illusion"

"Hmmm, good title. Best of luck to the two of you," she said.

And so to tomorrow, when the cameras roll, Veham, Scene 178… take one… action.

Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, filmmaker and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com