The moving film A Lullaby for Yellow Roses, which made a big splash at the Tasveer Film Festival, brought audiences to tears with its raw and emotional tale. It is a story which honestly philosophizes on sorrow, which takes us on a journey through the lives of Beena, a washerwoman, and Pankaj, a liftman, as they painfully grapple with the agony of an inordinately common custom, which has led to the death of their daughter. When they are ripped apart, and slowly build up a bond with each other by mourning.
The two of them, along with Pankaj’s old mother, live in a basement room that has no windows and is very small. In this little space where all of them live together, they had grown counterfeit visions of decayed aspirations to remember this alarming absurdity painfully. The haunting opening scene shows the couple laying their unborn girl to rest on a desolate dump-yard, a bereaving act that is painfully etched in disbelief on their faces. Beena goes home where Pankaj’s mother, a mother who lost three daughters even before Pankaj was born, comforts her.
They are separated by this thin piece of cloth, a curtain of layers and bed sheets, for they cannot share their grieving. This represents the huge distance between Beena and Pankaj as the two are conjoined by current, slow-paced grief in their otherwise fabulous love for each other. Pain strikes back on either side; with the pain there is hope that they will restart their erstwhile, long-lost proceedings of emotionally re-balancing each of their lives.
Though the great city doesn’t notice them but keeps going about its business, the friendship that sprouted on this piece of wasteland between Beena and Pankaj is not without hope. It is a story of bounce-back-ability, of how one’s loneliness can become another’s, and how devastating personal events, the terrible sibling wounding of parents separating that cripples kids, can bring strangers together and help them move on in directions they could not have conjured.