The Worm Turns:
The title Vadh suggests a grand warrior-like act of slaying the enemy, but this debut feature by Jaspal Singh Sandhu and Rajeev Barnwal takes the story of a small personal battle to a dingy house in a nondescript lane in Gwalior.
Retired school teacher, Shambhunath Mishra (Sanjay Mishra) and his wife Manju (Neena Gupta), live alone, keeping in touch with their son (Diwakar Mishra) in the US, through video calls; taking a cycle rickshaw to a computer centre so that they can see him on a monitor has become a regular ritual that they look forward to. The ungrateful son, however, shows no reciprocal affection. They had mortgaged their home and taken a large sum of money from a loan shark, Prajapati Pandey (Saurabh Sachdeva), to fund the son’s foreign education and that act of parental folly threatens to upend their placid lives, marked only by the bickering that tends to replace conversation when there is not much left to say.
The vile loan shark uses their home for his drinking binges and sexual trysts with hookers and the old couple is helpless. Till one day, Pandey goes too far, and Mishra, humiliated into a blind rage, kills him. What he does next to cover up the murder seems far-fetched—the mild teacher goes about dealing with the aftermath—including visits by a scary cop Shakti Singh (Manav Vij)—with a cold-blooded, unflappable calm. Till then, his only encounter with crime has been the lurid pages of Manohar Kahaniyan, the popular magazine, that may give ideas for corpse disposal (inadvertently mirroring a recent sensational real-life case), but hardly for such superhuman mind control.
What Mishra had not bargained for is that Pandey was just a cog in a bigger wheel of organized crime, and the cops are on the take. In a plot vaguely reminiscent of Saaransh (Mahesh Bhatt, 1984) and Viruddh (Mahesh Manjrekar, 2005), which were also about angry old men fighting back when pushed against the wall, Sandhu and Barnwal do not question the moral grey area in which Mishra operates; he is, they seem to say, relatively harmless, in a corrupt system that is skewed against the law-abiding, middle-class. Even in a neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone and Mishra is hailed as “Masterji” and “Guruji” when he steps out, there is no help in such a crisis. The neighbours watch the spectacle of violence against the seniors, but nobody has the courage to come to their aid. If there is any goodness left in this world, it creeps out unexpectedly from the abyss of evil.
Sapan Narula’s camera stays with the forlorn darkness of the Mishras’ existence, sunshine hardly penetrates the grimy walls; even in this no-hope scenario, Manju climbs the stairs to the terrace with her painful arthritic knees, to water the tulsi plant, with a stoic devotion, even if their gods have forsaken them.
Vadh is not about whether Mishra is caught or not, it is not even about his redemption; there are unpredictable twists in the plot after a rather straightforward pre-intermission portion, that lifts it out of the mundane. Then, there are the performances—Sanjay Mishra continues to ace grim common man parts, which is what he is usually called upon to play in his non-mainstream movies; Neena Gupta wipes out all traces of glamour from her personality for the diffident Manju, who judges her husband but also supports him, and Manav Vij bringing ambiguity to his reluctantly thuggish cop.
If there are any takeaways from Vadh: never underestimate the meek, and never wipe out that bank account for the sake of an offspring.
(This piece first appeared in scroll.in)
