Aasha : The Butterfly, the Cockroach and the Mirror

There are peak performances, and then there are performances that transcend the film itself. Urvashi’s was one such — so utterly commanding that the subtler nuances the director worked so painstakingly to put across were almost lost in its wake. Perhaps that is also why the ambiguity of the ending left many unconvinced. We were so completely inside Aasha’s world that we missed the clues the director had quietly planted in the script. Those clues become interesting only a week later — when the trance loosened its hold and you began to look at the film as a whole — the prologue, the story, the ending and finally, the epilogue.

Prologue

The director piques our curiosity upfront with a Nietzschean warning about our skewed moralities: “If you kill a cockroach, you are a hero. If you kill a butterfly, you are evil. Morals have aesthetic criteria.” Why does society allow visuals to override our moral reactions? Why does the way something looks influence our judgement of what is right and wrong?

Point of View — The Story

The narrative is a tense review of our own biases. For that, we are purposefully let only into the butterfly’s life — her pain, her struggle to raise her children in an indifferent world, and a past she fiercely guards her children from. An accidental encounter with a cockroach then sets off a series of events and acts that are anything but stereotypical. At no instance are we shown anything particularly supportive of the cockroach. So much so that when the cockroach finally gets a chance to speak about his family and children while in captivity, and later confesses that he was “lying”, we are quick to reset our sympathies towards him. And yet, even though we recognize the increasingly un-butterfly-like acts all along, we keep seeking a change of heart from her. Finally, we normalize her behaviour, attribute it to paranoia, and distance ourselves from it. For, we are not her. We cannot be her. Because for many of us, this very condition of a modern mother, precariously balancing her own fears, her children and a bad partner in the past, feels eerily close to home. The realization of what a wrong partner can do to us, our children and even to other people’s lives is hard to stomach.

And hence, the impatience to know what happened to our butterfly. Because in real life, if there are no good butterflies and bad cockroaches, how will we easily orient our children towards values.

Ending
Most people felt robbed of a proper closure. We see the cameras zoom out and switch off. You feel the rug being pulled from under your feet and are rudely forced to confront yourself. Welcome to Mollywood coming of age. In 1997, Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, with its legendary ending being one of the many things that made the film so memorable. The ending here similarly refuses to give us the comfort of resolution.
For me, the ending was evenly poised. The director invited us to consider both possibilities.

One, the easy conclusion is that, consistent with Aasha’s character, she did poison Jeemon. She could have done it earlier, but disposing of the body, especially with each passing day, was becoming increasingly difficult. Hence, she sets up the van and tells Jeemon that he has been poisoned, expecting him to panic and save himself by escaping — only to meet his death on the way. Nobody can pin it on her, as he would appear to have died from food poisoning after eating somewhere outside.

Or… Did Aasha have a change of heart? Because ever since she realized her mistake, the guilt had been lingering. She had continued to make amends, catering to all his needs, including spirits. She was appreciative of the fact that he did not try to attract attention when he could have. Perhaps, somewhere along the way, a kind of Stockholm-syndrome-like relationship had evolved. Yes, she was aware of the risks. If she was to poison, there was no guarantee that she could ensure that he would die before reaching a hospital. And he had survived, he would make sure she ended up behind bars. So, maybe she did decide not to poison and take a leap of faith. After freeing him, perhaps she had decided to scare him so that he would leave immediately. In fact, she even planned and expected him to finally realize that he had not been poisoned when the doctor said so — and perhaps forgive her eventually and stand by her….So what if she did take that step in good faith?

And that possibility, for me, is what made the ending interesting.

Epilogue

“It is in just such stupid things clever people are most easily caught. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. The meaning is simple enough: highly intelligent people often overthink. They expect complex traps and elaborate consequences, and in doing so, fail to protect themselves against the basic mistake that finally trips them up. Why Dostoevsky? Well, the movie itself deeply mirrors the psychological, guilt and trauma themes that we find in Dostoevsky — ordinary people torn apart by moral dilemmas, guilt and anguish.

The final aerial shot, for me, prods us to take a detached view of the human condition and realize that sometimes even our most brilliant plans can end up looking rather silly. For, we see that Jeemon does die — against all of Aasha’s calculations. And that now should definitely open up investigations.

But the reason for our anger is perhaps this: the writer refuses to give us a glimpse of Aasha’s fate and thereby refuses to share the moral position he had finally taken. Honestly, we would have desperately welcomed any conclusion — positive or negative — because it would have allowed us to use our own (deep-rooted and biased) positions on morality to either agree or disagree and close the matter for good.

But sadly, the cameras switched off!

And now, without that glimpse, those open wounds continue to fester, forcing us to confront even uglier questions about ourselves. Can ordinary people, like us, be driven to do extraordinary things when placed in similar circumstances?

But to be honest, I am disappointed with the director for having taken a stance and, in the process, spoiling what could have been a genuinely great ambiguous ending. For, he confessed in an interview that Aasha decided to be selfish in the end.