The air in Alappuzha was thick with the scent of rain-soaked earth and the distant, rhythmic thump of a chenda melam from the temple festival. Inside a dimly lit editing studio, however, the only sound was the whir of a Steenbeck flatbed editor and the anxious breathing of Sreekumar, a veteran film editor.
“Your father didn’t abandon the film,” Chacko continued. “The Yakshi trapped him. She entered his celluloid. The only way to free him was to never let anyone see it. But now…” Chacko pointed a trembling finger toward the tea shop’s TV, which was playing a news report about Sreekumar’s son’s film premiere. “The drone. It’s the same geometry as the ritual. You are going to finish the exorcism.”
He was splicing the climax of his son’s debut film, Kadamattathu Kathanar , a grand visual poem about a legendary sorcerer-priest. But the footage on the table was not the climax. It was an old, spool of 35mm celluloid—faded, vinegar-scented, and warped. It was a film his father, Madhavan Mash, had shot and abandoned in 1975. The label read: "Thegham" (The Body) . hot reshma mallu
“Moyi… kothipikkalle… (Boy… don’t tease me…)”
“Your father wasn’t acting, Sreekumar. He was documenting a dying truth. In 1975, the Kerala Land Reforms Act had just shattered the feudal joint family system . The great Tharavadus were crumbling. But one family, the Mangalathu clan, refused to sell. They were possessed by a Yakshi —a vengeful spirit of a woman who had been wronged by the Zamorin’s army three centuries ago. To break the curse, the clan’s eldest son had to act as the priest in a ritual film. The camera was the valkannadi (mirror of truth).” The air in Alappuzha was thick with the
That night, at the packed Sree Padmanabha Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram, a strange thing happened. As the climax of Kadamattathu Kathanar played—the drone spiraling into a digital vortex—Sreekumar snuck into the projection booth. He spliced a single frame of Thegham into the digital file.
Sreekumar ran out. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear. And standing under a lone, flickering petromax light near the old Kuthiravattam bus stop was his father. Still in his mundu . Still shirtless. But the tattoo of the nalukettu was gone from his back. “The Yakshi trapped him
Sreekumar felt a chill. In his son’s modern film, Kadamattathu Kathanar , the hero performed a Mantravada (exorcism) in the climax using a drone camera to trap a spirit.