Marma Desam: Now as a Podcast on Spotify!

Back during the early 2000s, I used to listen to a Tamil radio programme on THR Raaga called 'Marma Desam'. It was hosted by popular deejay Geetha. People would call in every week to share their own personal experiences with the supernatural or the paranormal. Some of the stories really spooked me and the background sound effects did not help. I am not sure when they discontinued it, or if they even discontinued it at all, but I eventually stopped listening to the radio. Very recently, I rediscovered the show and it is now available as a weekly podcast on Spotify. I binged through all the episodes and here are the top 10 scariest stories from the programme: 

1. The strange family who appeared twice along the highway

This is not the most uncommon story but nevertheless, the way it was narrated gave me the chills. When Raja was 15, he would take turns with his older brother to accompany their father, who was a lorry driver, on his travels. One evening, Raja and his father came across a couple and their child whose white Nissan had broken down by the highway. Raja's father stopped his lorry to help the family fix their car. While his father was helping the husband, the caller was playing with the little child. Once the car was fixed, Raja and his father got into their lorry. Before parting ways, the husband warned Raja's father not to stop to help anyone along the way on that particular evening. The father got upset seeing as he just helped the man do that very thing. They then left and continued their journey.

Around two and a half hours later, Raja and his father witnessed the most terrifying scene in their lives. They saw that exact same family with that exact white Nissan trying to stop them. Raja's father was so horrified he let out a gut-wrenching scream as he sped through the highway. Throughout the journey, Raja's father was crying profusely as he could not digest what he had just seen. Fearing that something malevolent might be following them, Raja and his father went to a temple to pray before going home that day. A few years later, Raja's father passed away but Raja never clarified if it had anything to do with that incident. He speculates that the earlier family could be heavenly creatures sent by God to warn them against what they might encounter later, but till this day, he is not sure of what really happened that day. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7MemDcZSiING0aAzbhHnKH?si=utfArzhfRraWcQ7dfRfZog&dl_branch=1

2. The friendly child ghost that protected the pregnant woman from a not-so-friendly entity

Suha and her husband moved into a home after getting married. Before settling in, they were told by a local priest that the spirit of a little girl lives there. However, this little girl bears no ill will towards anyone and the priest advices them to simply leave some of their food aside for the little spirit as an offering whenever they can. Although the young couple was a little taken aback by this, the spirit never revealed itself to them and they continued to live happily in the house. As months went by, the couple had to leave for Sabah for work. While there, they had the opportunity to go fishing, which they enjoy doing. When they came back, they were visited by some relatives who stayed with them for a few days. One day, Suha noticed her sister-in-law talking to someone. When Suha approached her, the sister-in-law was shocked as she claimed she had been talking to Suha all this time. Thinking that the spirit of the little girl did not like visitors and was trying to spook her relatives, she let the incident go. After the relatives left, both husband and wife started fighting a lot, which they normally never did. Suha also started noticing a dark figure wondering around their house late at night. Nonetheless, Suha became pregnant, and his brought great joy to the young couple amidst all the problems they were facing. 

One evening, Suha was walking up the stairs when she felt something grip her leg and drag her down. She almost hit her head on the ground had it not been for something that gently held her head. Following the incident, Suha suffered a miscarriage but she recovered. Her husband took her to the local priest. After visiting their home, the priest reinsured them that it was not the spirit of the little girl who had pulled Suha's leg. On the contrary, it was the girl who had saved her. At that point, Suha remembered the gentle little hands that held her head from hitting the floor. The husband then recalled that while they were in Sabah, they had gone fishing in a remote area which locals had warned them to be mindful of while visiting. The priest confirmed that there was a second entity in the house now, one that had followed them home from the fishing trip and this one wanted to harm them. The priest then perform some prayers to get rid of the entity. Nevertheless, the couple moved out from the house. The spirit of the child never manifested itself before Suha, but she still misses the child and is thankful for saving her life that day. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wx7xHhWK8zUMjxwtC2Krv?si=GlZ8A0asQjOCu9Fu_x2Hew&dl_branch=1

3. The overly sensitive girl who cursed her landlady 

Four years ago, Sasha rented out her home to two young ladies. Apart from keeping the place neat and tidy, Sasha made the girls promise to never bring any boys home. The girls agreed to the terms, but one day, one of the girls asked if her guy friend could stay with them for awhile as he was new in town and had not found a house to rent. Sasha agreed since this won't be a permanent arrangement. The boy was made to sleep in the living area. During weekends, Sasha would visit her mother's home, leaving the girls alone. On one such weekend, Sasha's husband came home unexpectedly and saw this girl in her room with the boy. When Sasha found out about this, she was very upset and she confronted the girl. The girl was so hurt that she attempted suicide. The girl's mother was particularly angered by the way Sasha handled the situation and called Sasha up to question her about driving her daughter to suicide, which Sasha never intended to happen. 

A few days later, Sasha was having coffee with her husband at their verandah when she accidentally stepped on something that was left on her doorstep. She was unsure of what it was and just threw it away. Little did she know that her life would change after that. While driving with her mother and husband one day, she suddenly had a panic attack for no apparent reason and had to stop their car in the middle of the busy road. Several other similar incidents would ensue. Furthermore, people around her started noticing how she wasn't eating well. Whenever she was alone, she felt as if little children were whispering into her ear, urging her to take her own life. Once, these spirits manifested themselves before her very eyes while she was in the toilet. Without even pulling up her skirt, she rushed out of the toilet but thankfully nobody was around. 

While visiting her grandparents' home, Sasha's grandmother noticed that there was a mark on her face, as if someone had spanked her across the face. Sasha's family finally took her to a Malay shaman. The shaman identified that Sasha was cursed by someone who had sent the spirit of young children to not only drive her insane, but to make her take her own life. Although the shaman did his best to rid Sasha off the spirits, she was told this curse was particularly strong and can only be undone through its victim's own self-determination. It took Sasha over two years to finally come out of this situation. Recently, Sasha came into contact with one of the girl's colleagues who confirmed that it was that girl's mother who had arranged for the curse since the girl was bragging about it at their workplace. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4xmpi0Z7946hiKwNFVSz4J?si=xGXtHDBXTt-QlCYd7jLgGg&dl_branch=1

4. The mysterious bus that took a little girl on the ride of her life

Meera was the head prefect during primary school. She has to be at school early each morning to start her duties, which is why she goes to sleep early every night. One morning, she woke up and realized all the clocks at her house showed it was already six o'clock. She woke up her grandfather and told him she had to get ready for school. The bus that arrived that morning to take her to school was strange to say the least. There was nobody inside; not even a driver. Nevertheless, Meera seemed overwhelmed that she did not have to pay for her ticket that day and just got in; so overwhelmed that she did not seem to care that there was no driver as well. The bus took her to school. 

Since the gate was still locked, she sat by the guardhouse while daydreaming. Then, she felt someone calling her name. When she turned around, she felt a strange energy take over her body. Not too long after that, the security guard came and asked her why she was at school so early. Meera was finally awoken from her trance and she checked her watch - it was only 10 minutes pass midnight. Nevertheless, Meera was feeling unusually brave that night and she decided to stay at school until the next morning. After that incident, apart from her odd boldness, Meera did not feel any changes in her body. Even at the age when her body should have changed, she remained the same and did not reach puberty while her younger sisters did. One day, her uncle suddenly went into a trance and instructed their family to take her to the Angalamman temple for healing. During the ritual, Meera could feel the entity inside her speak. The entity claimed that she had been inside Meera for years and the only way they could make it leave is if Meera dies. As Meera felt the arrogant entity speak through her tongue, she also witnessed the idol of the guardian deity inside the temple come to life. The deity walked towards Meera and threatens to kills the entity unless it leaves Meera's body. While nobody around her could see the deity, they did see Meera fall to the ground in penance while pleading for forgiveness from something or someone. After that, the entity seemingly left Meera's body and just a few hours later, she finally came of age. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/24EXId97s4jhi0xrHszfF9?si=8o6K0InxTRqCJtejWvmCrg&dl_branch=1

5. The shaman who came to exorcise a house... or did he? 

Jeevan Raj lived with a group of friends in a rental apartment. The apartment had been locked and unoccupied for over six years. They soon came to realize that the place was haunted. It all started with a rack falling apart and then things just got from bad to worse. One of Jeevan's friends got possessed and almost jumped off the building. Realizing that they are dealing with something supernatural, they approached a shaman who often prayed at the mosque opposite their apartment building. The shaman was dressed in black robes and was heavily bearded. For some reason, the shaman could not enter their apartment and so he conducted a ritual from the outside. He then left after telling the boys that he had done his best. However, the haunting did not stop. Desperate for help, Jeevan and his friends tried to get in touch with the shaman again but nobody at the mosque had seen such a man. They then approached the security team at the apartment building to get a recording of the shaman through the security cameras. 

To their surprise, the shaman never appears in any of the security recordings. All the recordings merely show Jeevan and one of his friends walking to into their apartment building and towards their apartment with an empty space where the shaman was supposed to be. Jeevan then approached their landlord to explain what had been happening at the apartment. The landlord finally revealed that six years ago, around seven to eight girls used to live in the same apartment. One of the girls got pregnant and hung herself in one of the rooms there. Nobody knows why and the landlord had kept this a secret. Finally, Jeevan took his friends to a priest in his hometown who conducted some prayers and concealed all the apartment's negative energy in an object. He then instructed Jeevan to burry the object in a nearby cemetery. Now, getting to the cemetery itself proved to be quite a challenge, almost as if something was stopping them. First, their car could not start up. So, one of his roommates who has a motorcycle took the object by motorcycle to the river. On his way, he met with an accident but fortunately, he was fine. Jeevan called up the priest and explained what had happened. The priest told him to bring the object over and they finally threw it into a river. Till this day, Jeevan is not sure who was it who came as a shaman to their apartment that day. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1jPYKHx2QrsBFOvCpq2WfS?si=pyYRY04UTDGqwMDdqztZ2g&dl_branch=1

6. The man who entered the spirit world and got out thanks to...

Sara was traveling home one night. Since he was rushing home, he beat a red light and was pursued by a traffic patrol car. In order to avoid the police, he decided to take a shortcut home. To do so, he had to pass by a Chinese cemetery which he has passed by countless time during the day. As this was nighttime, the entire place seemed different. However, as time passed by, he realized he was driving in circles and he could not leave the cemetery area. He started to panic. At that point, a white figure appeared before his car. The figure made a hand gesture that seemed to suggest that it wanted Sara to follow it. Sara did not seem to have a choice as there was only one road in front of him. He followed the floating figure as it guided him through the road. Throughout the way, Sara was unsure if the figure was guiding him out of this mysterious pathway or if it was guiding him deeper into it. 

After what seemed forever, Sara finally saw some road lights and he had finally reached the main road. He looked around for the mysterious figure but it was nowhere to be seen. As Sara made the turn to enter the main road, he noticed an elderly man walking by the roadside. Thinking this poor man must be lost to, Sara stopped his car and asked the man if he needed a ride. The man angrily told him, "You're found your way out of there, right? Just mind your own business and go home safely." The man's words brought chills down Sara's spine. How did this man know that Sara had been lost for the last few hours? Sara was so terrified he sped home. Till this day, he is not sure what that mysterious figure at the Chinese cemetery was or who that angry old man was. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6KFPoBMk3zP27c9jojgwol?si=JGNL4-BdTvys7lrc0zkF_Q&dl_branch=1

7. The spirit who wanted a little baby

Suren was a young boy when his baby brother was born. One night, when the little brother was around one and a half years old, their parents took them to a night market near a Chinese cemetery in Seremban. On their way home, the brother appeared to be communicating with something none of them could see. Thinking that he was playing around like all toddlers do, Suren and his parents ignored it and went to sleep. However, the brother kept crying all through the night as if he was in great pain. Their grandmother tried to bless the little boy with some holy fire but he knocked the prayer tray onto the floor. Realizing that something strange is happening, Suren's parents took his little brother to a local shaman. The shaman claimed that the little boy was being followed by the spirit of a lady who seems to think this little boy looks a lot like her own son when she was still alive. 

The shaman then claimed that the lady spirit wants the little boy and she is willing to help the parents win lots of money through gambling. All the parents had to do is leave the boy deep inside the jungle near the rubber plantation they lived in and the spirit promised to help them make lots of money. Naturally, the parents refused the offer and they continuously took their little boy to the shaman for over a fortnight. During that time, the boy constantly had stomach aches and cried non-stop. Eventually, the boy was cured but the spirit seemingly refused to give up. For the next two to three months, there were constant knocks on their door and strange sounds around their house. The shaman then blessed their house and warned the parents against taking the little boy outside at night ever again. Slowly, the disturbances lessened and Suren's little brother is now a healthy eight-year old boy. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/62nRbXMUsrKIPna64krbaJ?si=VKps9Uu-RBmt9bZ08AwM_A&dl_branch=1

8. The entity that almost destroyed an entire family

Shan's wife grew up in Quakane Quarters, a large government-owned residential area that was built by the British before independence. Recently, while consulting a numerologist, Shan and his wife were told that a dark spirit that had haunted the wife's family since she was a little girl was still following her around. Way back in 1977 when her parents were newly married, they moved into Quakane Quarters. Behind their two-storey house was a huge tree that many believe was never supposed to be there as it was the type of three that is usually found deep in the jungle and not in an area like this. Within the house compound itself was a mango tree that never bore any fruit for over ten years they lived there. 

While the wife and her brother were both ages three and seven respectively, they saw a mysterious dark figure inside the store room of their two-storey house. This was only the first time. Following this, there were a few more similar sightings inside the house, and most of them time, it appeared as if this figure seemed to be targeting the mother. One such time, the frying pan that the mother was using to cook food seemingly toppled itself onto her. Fortunately, she was not badly hurt, but it was enough to reassure the entire family that something otherworldly wanted to harm her. The parents invited a man who was knowledgeable in the supernatural. He confirmed the family's doubts that there is indeed something evil in their home, but it is not a normal ghost or spirit. This entity has been here for generations and it cannot be simply chased away through any ritual since its presence is rooted in this very house. Although this revelation terrified the parents, nothing could have prepared them for what the man had to say next. Apparently, the entity was lusting for the father and this was why it was seeking to eliminate the mother, which it saw as an obstacle. Unfortunately, they could not afford to move out immediately. So, they had no choice but to be more careful and remain in that house. 

As the haunting got from bad to worse, the family's relatives arranged for a famous priest from the 1980s to visit the house. The entity's presence was so strong that the priest started to pant and sweat profusely. He then identified the storeroom as the entity's nest. However, the entity's actual home is the strangely huge tree behind the quarters, which the priest advised they get rid off as quickly as possible. The father arranged for a few Malay men to get rid of the tree. However, after spending some time around the tree, they decided to leave, claiming this was no usual tree and whoever who chopped it down might be in grave danger themselves. The family had no choice but to put up with all the entity's atrocities for the next few years. In 1991, the mother died. Mysteriously, the mango tree that never bore any fruits started to flower just a couple of months after the funeral. 

By now, the father feared that something bad might happen to his children too. So, they shifted to his sister's home in Selayang. Initially, things were going fine in their new home. One afternoon, the father came home earlier than usual. Their pet dog turned unusually violent and started attacking him, forcing him to leave. A couple of hours later, the father returned and the dog seemed normal around him. When questioned why he left so abruptly earlier, the father was perplexed as he was working overtime that day, which means there was no way he could have been home so early. Now, the family realized that the entity might have tracked them down to their new home, and their pet dog had just saved their lives. A few years later, the father finally moved into a permanent home in Ampang, and in 2013, the father also passed away. Thinking that their lives is now back to normal, Shan's wife married him and moved on in life. After recently learning that the entity was still haunting her, it brought back dark memories from her pass which she had been trying to forget. The numerologist had advised her to do two ritual to rid herself off the entity. The couple had already done one. They are still waiting for the right time to complete the second one. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1jRNEJm2uWcrCjxbZk6RHF?si=YlT1KKnGTtGLhjgxa0r8zw&dl_branch=1

9. The tenant from hell

Before Jai Prakash was born, his parents used to live in a neighbourhood called Kampung Lindungan. Today, the place is called Desa Mentari. They decided to rent out one of the rooms in their house. A friend of Jay's maternal uncle decided to rent the room. He mostly kept to himself and did not talk much. However, after he moved in, Jai's parents started having lots of problems and they even started fighting a lot. Jai's mother noticed how these problems only started after the tenant moved in. One day, while the tenant was out, Jai's mother went into the rental room and found all kinds of strange things that people would normally not keep inside a home. Jai's mother immediately realized that these things were used for black magic rituals. When the tenant came home, Jai's parents confronted him about these things. A big fight ensued and the tenant was kicked out of the house. Before leaving, the young man stood outside the gate and cursed the family. 

Many days later, the area was flooded. During this time, the family saw a snake attack one of their chickens and leaving it to die at the front of their home. This was only the beginning. After that, Jai's mother became very ill and no doctor in town could seem to cure her. She became very thin. Jai's father asked his co-workers for advice, and one of them suggested that this could be something supernatural. The co-worker came to their home, and without even stepping inside, he could sense a curse inside. He then left and later called Jai's father, asking him to bring the mother to a temple. The priest there instructed the father to go home and check their garden for anything unusual. Jai's father did as he was told and true enough, he found a strange doll wrapped with a chicken's head and saffron powder. Under the priest's instructions, Jai's father burned all of it with petrol. They then realized that Jai's mother was the one who ousted the tenant for his ungodly practices, he had planted this curse in their home for her. Unfortunately, this curse is very strong, and the only way to end it is if its victim dies. So, they arranged for a fake funeral for the mother while she was still unconscious because of the curse. Their plan worked, and after the fake funeral was over, Jai's mother was back to normal. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3PhIEuex8Lghyp9rFZbTA8?si=3BAPOkDORMK1Ceiqb9MCSA&dl_branch=1

10. The 'thing' at the cubicle

Sharon has lots of paperwork to complete and she needed to deal with one of her heavily pregnant co-workers. One morning, she arrives at work and sees the co-worker at her cubicle. Sharon puts her stuff on her table before going to the cubicle with all the paperwork. However, the co-worker was no longer there. Sharon asked the co-worker's partner where she was, to which the partner responds that the co-worker had not even come into work that day. Sharon thought the partner, who is mildly autistic, was teasing her based on her facial expression. Angered, Sharon stormed off back to her own table while grumbling to anyone who cared to listen. She then texted the co-worker to ask her where she was. Much to Sharon's surprise, the co-worker responded that she had not clocked in yet that morning since she was at the doctor's office. However, Sharon swore she saw the co-worker at her cubicle when she came into work earlier that morning and even described the clothes she was wearing - a red headscarf, a black blouse, and a red skirt. By lunchtime, the entire office had heard about Sharon's tantrums but they were not prepared for what was about to happen in the afternoon. 

Later that day, the co-worker came into the office. Much to everyone's surprise, she was wearing the exact clothes Sharon had seen her wearing earlier. Unknown to Sharon, everyone else at the office told the co-worker Sharon saw earlier that morning. Even their boss teased Sharon for having seen something paranormal. Sharon was so disturbed by what happened that day at the office that she felt physically pain on her shoulders. Back at home, she told this to her mother and husband. Her mother advised Sharon to contact the co-worker and apologize for calling her up so many times at the doctor's office. Sharon did as her mother advised. Turns out the co-worker was furious at Sharon because her story had led everyone to assume she was rearing some kind of  dark entity to do her bidding. Regardless, the co-worker forgave her and at that very moment, Sharon felt the physical pain leave her body, almost as if something had literally been lifted of her shoulders. 

A few months later, the co-worker had given birth to a baby and was back at the office after her maternity leave. While they were having lunch at the pantry, the co-worker told Sharon a story. At her home in Banting, her son would always sense something otherworldly there and this started to affect his health. She then turned to a shaman who she suspects sent some kind of spirit to protect her and her family. Probably Sharon had seen that spirit at her cubicle that day and since the co-worker was so upset at her, the spirit had followed her home and only left after she forgave Sharon. 

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1YMUMufiFOnBss8nBThqpo

11. The haunted cookery classroom

In 2014, Malar was transferred to a secondary school in Ipoh. She opened a cookery club at her new school. For five years, the home sciences classroom was closed but Malar convinced the school admins to reopen it for her club. The security guards warned Malar that something otherworldly resides in that block and that she should be careful. After having cleaned up the entire classroom, Malar let her students go home as she locked the place up. However, one of the fans refused to turn itself off even though Malar had turned the switch off. Malar warned the entity to leave her alone and the fan, ignoring all laws of physics, immediately stopped - no inertia. Later that night, as Malar was going to bed, a spirit that resembled a Chinese young lady in a skirt tried to attack her. It only vanished after Malar started praying to God for help. The next morning at school, Malar told one of the security guards what had happened, and he advised her to apologize to the entity. Malar did as she was told and the spirit never revealed itself to her again, but the haunting continued...

Not too long after that, Malar and her students were preparing cookies for a bake sale. However, they soon realized that the classroom was infested with monitor lizards and so they started storing the cookie jars in sealed boxes. However, one evening, Malar had to stay back after asking her afternoon session students to go home for the day because she had to wait for the cookies to cool down. As she was placing them in the cookie jars, she had an eerie feeling as if she was being watched. She quickly rushed home after placing all the cookies into the jars. Only later that night did she realize that she had forgotten to place all the jars into a box and seal it. However, the following day, when she came to the cookery classroom, all the cookie jars were neatly placed into a carefully sealed box. Not only that, even her scissors and cellophane tape were nicely arranged in her drawer. Once the bake sale was done, Malar told her principal what had happened. The administration then organized a prayer ceremony and assured Malar that there will no longer be any haunting. However, this was not the last of it...

More recently, Malar was having a class at the cookery classroom. One of her female students asked if she could use the ladies' room and Malar allowed it. However, the student returned to class unusually early despite the nearest bathroom being at another block. When asked which bathroom she had used, the girl replied she had used the one on their floor. This shocked Malar because that bathroom has been locked for ages. She and her students then went to check the bathroom and it was indeed locked. The poor girl was spooked beyond words. Malar calmed her down by assuring her that maybe a good spirit was just helping her and there was nothing to be afraid of.

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7HYXpKX0HB3tI7mZcJ1eMD

Top 10 Tamil Films of 2020

Like every other year, I must remind everyone this list is subjective. Also, I did not get to watch every film that was released this year because, first, not every theatrical release is screened at my local film theatres. Second, not all streaming services are available in my region. Third, I have a full-time day job that keeps me occupied most of the time and thus, I choose to only watch films that I am confident will truly work for me. So, if one of your favourites is not here, please forgive me and read on. 

12. Gypsy

The film starts out as a road film but midway through, it changes into an epic love story where our two leads must overcome different obstacles, both figurative and literal, to unite once again. As a result, the film falls somewhere in between a love epic and a political commentary but does not really deliver in both fronts. At times, it seems as if the filmmaker is trying to make social point at every turn, whether it is beef issue, communal riot, communism and many more. Ultimately, some of it feels contrived. Although the film is rather draggy at times, the film's strong central story is backed by powerhouse performances, cinematography and music. 

Source: Google Images

11. Mafia: Chapter 1

For a relatively low-budget film set in Chennai that revolves around Narcotics officers, the film is definitely overly stylized. Not to mention the scope of the story is screaming for a grander setting. Nevertheless, the great performances and the interesting twists keep the story engaging for the most part. 

Source: Google Images

10. Putham Pudhu Kaalai

Indian filmmakers often rave about how streaming platforms have provided them with an avenue to express their creativity and capability to the fullest without any need to satisfy the masses. In that sense, this film works to an extent. All the short films that make up this larger film have a very feel-good, positive vibe to them. However, the fact that the only short film that revolves around the lower middle class features them as petty criminals makes the film somewhat problematic. 

Source: Google Images

9. Oru Pakka Kathai

A final year college girl mysteriously gets pregnant even though she has never had intercourse with her boyfriend. The news makes headlines and it changes the young couple's life forever. There is also a subplot of a neighbour boy who comes to believe he is the avatar of God. Despite being delayed for over half a decade, the theme of science versus superstition is very timely. All credit goes to the director/writer, who can create the most outlandish premise while still grounding it in the real world. 

Source: Google Images

   

8. Kannum Kannum Kollaiyadithaal

When was the last time you watch a Tamil romantic-comedy that had enough brains to keep you guessing until the very end? This film is also a thrilling crime caper with an intense cat-and-mouse game between the charming main leads that will keep you at the edge of your seats throughout the ride. While the film's lack of a moral compass and any consequences for its leads' wrongdoings might make the film less palatable to some, its positives surely outweigh its negatives. 

Source: Google Images

7. Vaanum Kottatum

With good writing and excellent performances, this moving family drama is best described as Mani Ratnam lite. If only the film focused more on the elderly couple instead of their children's love lives, the film would have been higher up in this list. Nevertheless, we rarely get any films that revolve around a brother-sister duo that is not melodramatic and mushy. Regardless, this is a family entertainer with a lot of heart. 

Source: Google Images

6. Andhaghaaram

Imagine Denis Villeneuve directing a supernatural thriller scripted by Jonathan Nolan that is set in Chennai with Tamil characters and dialogues. But its Indian producer insists on a final scene where everything is spelt out for the audiences. That's this film in a nutshell. Every scene is engineered with such precision and it shows. Although the details take sometime to unravel, it is overall a satisfying watch. 

Source: Google Images

5. Kae Pae Ranasingam

Many Tamil films have shown us the pain the average Indian has to go through when dealing with the cruelty of bureaucratic red tape and abuse of power. But no other film has shown it with as much depth as this one. The film is rather long and draggy, but that is only because its main lead's quest for justice is such. Although the film is about a female lead, she is still very much in the male lead's shadow. Regardless, she is not is funny, strong and bold, a far cry from the usual Tamil film heroine. 

Source: Google Images

5. Kavalthurai Ungal Nanban

Tamil cinema has never shied away from depicting police brutality. But unlike most older films where the hero saves the day, this film plays out like 'Visaranai' from a different perspective. Apart from that film, this film is one of the few to show the Tamil Nadu police in such an unfavourable light that it is difficult to sit through the scenes where the main antagonist appears. And that is a compliment. To some audiences, the film might come across as a cautionary tale to the middle-class to suck it and accept the status quo, instead of standing up against police injustice. 

Source: Google Images

4. Paava Kadhaigal 

Netflix’s first Tamil venture holds a mirror onto the audiences and makes them questions their perception on honour, pride, dignity and morality. Each of the four hard-hitting short films that make up this anthology are both raw and ruthless in unveiling certain brutal ideologies that are still practiced by some pockets of Indian society. Whether it is how we treat trans-people, inter-religious relationships, victims of sexual assault, vigilante justice, LGBTs or inter-caste marriages, these four filmmakers do not shy away from provoking uncomfortable sentiments.  

Source: Google Images

3. Baaram

This hard-hitting social film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil for 2019 but was only released this year. The film is best enjoyed by avoiding any reviews or interviews as it reveals the social issue it revolves around and this ultimately spoils the suspense. It is best understood as a murder-mystery that might not necessarily keep you guessing, but it will keep you engaged. The art house filmmaking approach gives the film a docu-drama feel, which is a rarity in Indian cinema. 

Source: Google Images

2. Psycho

Although the film is mainly a serial killer film, it is also a Mysskin film. This is the man who wrote and directed Pisasu, a horror film that made you sympathize with the ghost's plight instead of the main lead's. This film is not for the faint hearted as there is sex, violence, gore and many things we rarely see in mainstream Tamil films. While the overall story is rather far-fetched, it is thoroughly suspenseful and engaging from start to finish. 

Source: Google Images

1. Soorarai Pottru

Loosely based on Captain G. R. Gopinath's life, this is an inspiring biopic that will make you want to go out and chase your dreams. If you have missed the Suriya of the GVM universe, he is back with a bang. Perhaps because the film was made for a theatrical release, it is by far the best Tamil language film made available first on streaming as of 2020. Despite starring a big star with emotionally charged melodrama and fan-pleasing goosebumps moments, the film does not compromise its main story. 

Source: Google Images

Top films from previous years: 

1. Best Tamil films of 2014

2. Best Tamil films of 2015

3. Best Tamil films of 2016

4. Best Tamil films of 2017

5. Best Tamil films of 2018

6. Best Tamil films of 2019

Our House Stands in a City of Flowers by Preeta Samarasan

On the day my aunt dropped Mariamma’s baby, the man from Batu Pahat had arrived on one of his visits. He’d been sitting in his usual seat when the baby had squirmed out of my aunt’s arms and plummeted headfirst towards the pale blue tiles.

I watched the baby blink while he fell, first two slow, surprised blinks, and then a flurry of quick ones, as if invisible fingers were brushing against his eyelids.

I heard his breath, calm and steady as a yogi’s.

Six inches above the floor he smiled, and his soft belly shook with unlaughed laughter.

Upside down, his smile was a sad clown mouth with only three teeth in it.

Just before he hit the tiles his sister began to scream.

“Amma, pullai!” my aunt gasped at the moment he landed with that nameless sound—not a splat, not a crack, but something in between.

My aunt put both her hands to her mouth but did not close her eyes. “Amma, pullai,” she repeated over and over again, rocking softly back and forth. Oh mother, the child; oh mother, the child; oh mother, the child. But the baby’s mother was not there to hear her, and would not be until the next morning, because she was in town working the streets and alleys, picking up a lorry driver here and a ditch digger there, adjusting her caked makeup and her red nylon saree in the windows of closed shops between clients.

In my aunt’s house the baby lay still on the blue floor, his eyes half closed, his unnaturally long eyelashes still fluttering like butterflies. He didn’t cry. He didn’t even whimper. Inside his slightly open mouth we could just see his fat pink tongue, wet and already as loose as it would be for the rest of his long, unencumbered life.

I felt myself sink slowly down onto my knees; I feared my breath would catch fire in my throat. Come back, come back, I thought. Come back into your head, look out through your eyes, pull your tongue in, for without you my aunt is nothing.

But then the man from Batu Pahat nodded, as if he’d come today just to witness this moment. “God works in mysterious ways,” he said. “God knows everything.” My aunt looked sharply up at him, and he did not avoid her eyes. He nodded and smiled a tired smile. Then he swirled his glass of coconut water so that all the translucent slivers of young coconut rose from the bottom, and leaning his head back, he downed the whole glassful in one noisy gulp.

* * *

Eight years before my aunt dropped Mariamma’s son on her unforgiving kitchen tiles, Mariamma’s husband, Ponniah, had built the hut at the end of the compound out of discarded plywood planks and dried nipah fronds. I had been living with my uncle and aunt for just a few months when he came to ask my uncle’s permission to build the hut. My uncle recognized him from his Sunday morning walks to the coffee shop to buy roti canai for our breakfast: Mariamma and her husband were among the ragged crowd of thirty or so squatters in the lane beside the coffee shop. On clear nights, they slept on flattened cardboard boxes in the lane; when it rained they huddled in the five-foot-ways of the shops. Even to me, a child of six, it was clear from the women’s makeup and dress that they were different from my mother and my aunt. Their voices were coarse, their mouths large and bright. They wore their hair loose and walked up and down in front of the toddy shop and the Chinese roadside stalls all day, swinging their hips and casting coy glances at the raddled men drooping in front of their drinks. These were the external differences: what they added up to, I had no words to explain until Ponniah had come and gone that day.

“How can you let him build his hut inside our gate?” my aunt said to my uncle, shaking her head in disbelief. “Don’t you have any common sense? And here we’ve just taken Nirmala into our household. What kind of environment will this be for a young girl to grow up in?”

“They’ll be all the way down there, just next to the gate,” my uncle said, sitting down at the kitchen table and unfolding his newspaper. “There’s no reason she should even have to see them. And it’ll be a good arrangement for us. All the gardening and outside work all he’s agreed to do for us in return for building his hut there only. No need to pay him, nothing.”

“Don’t you know,” my aunt said then, “what filthy people they are? The men are all drunkards and the women sell their bodies to the highest bidder on the roadside. This type of people you have let into our compound!”

So that was it: the women sold their bodies to the men in the toddy shop and the roadside stalls. When I lay down to imagine this transaction, I saw sequined vamps from the Hindi films my uncle watched late at night after I was supposed to have gone to bed. I saw them in conical bras and knee-high boots, supine and heavy-lidded under drooling, mustachioed men. I felt unprotected and alone then, as if the thin walls of my uncle’s house could not keep out the sordid world much longer. I wanted to pack my little suitcase and take the next bus home to my parents’ house in the village, but I didn’t have enough money for the bus ticket and I knew my mother would be furious to find me at her doorstep. I was lucky to be here in my uncle’s house, lucky to have my school uniform and books paid for and to be driven to school every morning in my uncle’s air-conditioned Ford Escort.

My aunt was still young when they adopted me, and blindingly beautiful. She’d been Miss India before my uncle had met her on a business trip in Bangalore, and whenever her name came up in a gathering of our relatives, her looks were the first thing people mentioned. “Like an actress,” they said. “Like an English painting.” “And her eyes!” someone would always remark, for my aunt’s hazel eyes were a wonder among all our black and brown ones; she was the only light-eyed person most of us had ever seen in real life. “Wah wah, like a tiger’s eyes only, makes you want to look and look at her. Must be some Kashmiri blood in her family.” But eventually the gathering would come around, in quieter tones, to her failure to produce a child. “Such a pity ...” they would begin, and then their voices would trail off, and after a few moments of silence someone else would sigh and conclude, “Even that kind of beauty also cannot bring you happiness in the end.” Rumor grew lush around her barrenness: some said that she had had cancer as a teenager; others that she had had an abortion during her dissolute beauty-queen days in Bombay; or that her mother had broken a vow to the Mother Goddess and been repaid for it with the withering of her beautiful daughter’s womb. Whatever the truth, my uncle had convinced her to adopt me as a last resort, after seven childless years of marriage had left her pale and silent and unable to drag herself out of bed in the mornings. I knew that if my parents had had two sons, my aunt would have taken the second instead of me; I knew that whenever her eyes fell on me she was reminded that any child of her own would have been fairer and prettier, would perhaps have inherited her dimples, her hazel eyes, her fine, high nose. But still, like my parents, I was grateful. I was all the more grateful because I knew how different things could have been, how random and precarious my good fortune.

I must have been better than nothing, after all, because before long, even my dark-skinned, black-eyed presence began to have the desired effect on my aunt’s spirits. The clothes I’d brought from the village were still creased from my suitcase when she began to get out of bed and bathe and dress herself in the mornings. One May afternoon I came home from school to discover that she’d sent Cook out to run errands so that she could make our lunch herself. The meal was waiting on the dining table, in a cluster of covered eversilver dishes. My aunt served us both, and we ate together while Lata Mangeshkar sang a love song on the kitchen radio:

Kitna haseen hai yeh ek sapna

(How beautiful this dream is)

Phoolon ke shaher mein hai ghar apna

(In a city of flowers stands our house)

Kya sama hai, tu kahan hai?

(What a world, where are you?)

My aunt was restless and fidgety as a child with a secret, and her eyes were pure gold in the sunlight. “Take another piece of chicken,” she urged me. “Look,” she cried a few minutes later, lifting a whole fish roe out of a dish of curry with the serving spoon, “I saved the roe for you!” It was all a game, of course, because in my uncle’s house there was never any want, and no treat was so rare that it had to be saved for someone. But I was quick, and I learned to play it. It put the dimples back in my aunt’s cheeks. It dulled the sharp tin edges of my homesickness.

After a few months my aunt took to brushing my hair before bed and tucking me in. When she’d turned the lights out she sat on the edge of my bed and made up elaborate shadow plays, her hands as silvery in the moonlight as the shadows they cast were black.

Look, she’d say, here’s the frightened rabbit.

And here comes the wolf to gobble him up—

—but the rabbit runs away, just in time, hooray!

The bat swoops down from the sky.

The moths fly up towards the moon.

Look, here is Hanuman the Monkey God.

Here is Yama the Demon.

Here is handsome Krishna with his flute.

She left my bedroom only when I’d fallen asleep watching her hands, and sometimes not even then; on some nights she fell asleep next to me, and I woke in the middle of the night to see her lying straight as a fairy-tale princess next to me, her hands folded neatly on her stomach, her mouth turned faintly upwards. In the mornings, she and my uncle no longer spoke to each other, but only to me. “Your Periamma asked Cook to put an extra egg in your appam,” he’d say without looking at her, “so eat up.” “Faster-faster drink your Ovaltine,” she’d say. “Your Periappa is waiting to drive you to school.”

“Your aunt,” my uncle would say almost every morning as he drove me to school, “is so happy to have you. It is a wonderful thing you have done for her, to come here and be like her daughter.”

And so the weeks passed, and each day we were a little happier, until the day Mariamma moved into the hut her husband had built at the bottom of the garden.

The minute my aunt laid eyes on Mariamma in the distance, she stuck her jaw out and began to chew on the inside of her cheek. “Hmm,” she said, “even in a heap of rubbish sometimes you can find a diamond.” What she meant was that despite her gaudy lipstick and her vermillion fingernails Mariamma was beautiful, so beautiful that she glowed, and seemed to mock the squalor of her surroundings, and looked like an angel that someone had plucked out of heaven and dressed like a whore for a cruel prank. Her features were as fine as my aunt’s; her skin was even purer, white and delicate as the skin that forms on fresh cow’s milk. Her hair was as thick and glossy as if she had been fed on meat and butter all her life, and not on the cheapest rice the shops sold. Between her choli and her saree her waist was as narrow and supple as a rope. But most unusual of all were Mariamma’s eyes, which were a clear, light green, wide and wary as a stray cat’s, almost emerald in the sunlight. The first time she came to the back door to ask if my aunt had an old pail to give her for her washing, we all caught our breath: how strange it was to have two light-eyed women on the same street! After she left my aunt picked a crumb from her sarong, plucked a loose thread from her sleeve, and murmured, “Who knows which English soldier the woman’s grandmother banged in India? You know what, this type of people. One thing you can be sure is that she comes from a nice long line of loose women.”

My tender heart, still racing for Mariamma with her milk skin and her green eyes, lurched and tumbled through me, falling faster and faster and growing older as it fell, until, when it hit the bottom, it cracked open like an old coconut. My aunt, my dimpled aunt who saved me ripe mangoes and fish roe, was only human.

Like a tiny, sharp-toothed fish, reality began to nibble at the edges of my fairy-tale world. My uncle began to come home later and later at night. Sometimes I heard his car on the gravel in the middle of the night; more often I heard nothing at all, but he was there in the morning, shaved, showered, his hair slicked flat on his head, when I went downstairs for breakfast. Neither he nor my aunt said a word about where he’d been; they only pressed me to eat more. But when we were alone in the Ford Escort he no longer told me how happy I’d made my aunt, and as the car moved down the driveway I could only look at the hut Ponniah had built and wonder which lay waiting at the bottom of the garden: good or evil, or both?

That year the rainy season was long and fierce. At four o’clock every afternoon the black sky burst open like a wound, and the water drummed so hard on the metal awnings over the porch that we could not hear each other’s voices inside the house. Only the whistle of the afternoon teakettle pierced the rain’s roar, but though Cook put tea and biscuits on the table at half past four, regular as clockwork, my aunt stood transfixed at the sitting room window, squinting into the storm.

“Don’t know where your Periappa is,” she said to me every day. “He’s going to get trapped in this rain. He’s going to get wet and fall sick.”

After the rain cleared she stayed at the window through dusk, watching Ponniah return from the toddy shop and Mariamma set out for her evening’s work.

“Lucky woman actually,” she said one day. “Free as a bird. She can come and go as she chooses, like a man.” A small puff of laughter escaped through her nose. “It’s her husband’s job to sit at home and wonder who she’s lying with. What woman could be luckier than that?”

It was during that rainy season I met the man from Batu Pahat for the first time. He turned up at the back door one afternoon in the perfect stillness before the four o’clock storm. His black umbrella hung from the crook of his elbow by its wooden handle.

“Oh, it’s you,” my aunt said when she saw him. “He’s gone out, I don’t know where. I don’t know what time he’ll be back. You can sit and wait with me if you like.”

“So sure you are,” he said, sliding his feet out of his worn leather sandals and taking a seat in the red armchair by the kitchen window, “that I’ve come to see him only and no one else. What if it’s you I want to talk to? And who is this young lady?”

“Surely you’ve heard,” said my aunt, “this is his brother’s daughter from the village. We’ve taken her in as our own daughter. She’s a good girl. Studies hard and always obeys. Nirmala, say hello to Batu Pahat Uncle.”

I smiled shyly at him.

“Ohoho,” he said, and his eyes latched narrowly onto mine. “Very good, very good. It is a great thing to bring a child into one’s house.”

At four thirty Cook put the tea and biscuits on the table, and Batu Pahat Uncle, who had sat with his eyes closed in the red armchair all that time, opened his eyes and said to my aunt: “Come away from the window for a few minutes and sit and drink your tea. What is so interesting outside in this rain?”

My aunt did not answer, but she sat down and took three sips of her tea. When she went upstairs to take her afternoon bath Batu Pahat Uncle shuffled over to the window. No one was about in the garden. Mariamma’s hut looked small and brown in the storm, like a farm animal left outside.

“Eh Nirmala,” Batu Pahat Uncle said, “whose hut is that? Your Periappa built it for Watchman, is it?”

“No. Some people live there.”

“People? Which people?”

“They are not good people.”

Batu Pahat Uncle laughed a wide, toothless laugh. “Are you a parrot or a girl-child?” he said. “So nicely you repeat what you hear, instead of a nose you should have a beak! Instead of arms you should have wings!” Then he dragged the red armchair over to the window and sat there looking out for the rest of the evening, until dinner was served.

* * *

Batu Pahat Uncle returned to my uncle’s house many times that year, always showing up in the afternoon, always with his black umbrella hanging from his elbow. My uncle soon learned to sense his arrivals from a distance, for on those days his car often pulled into the driveway at six o’clock sharp, as it used to when I’d first come to live in his house. And for as long as Batu Pahat Uncle sat in our kitchen, he consumed all our attention, so that it seemed only natural that my aunt and uncle should not speak to each other, so busy were they trying to serve their guest, so commanding was his presence.

No one remembered exactly how Batu Pahat Uncle was related to us; the adults referred to him simply as the Batu Pahat chap. The objectives of his visits were not always clear. Usually he was on his way somewhere else, happy just to sit down under the ceiling fan and drink a tall glass of coconut water. When my aunt pressed him to stay for lunch or tea, he’d pull himself to his feet, sling over his shoulder the Good Morning towel he brought everywhere with him, and make his excuses. My uncle would help him into the yellow Ford Escort and drive him to the bus station to continue his meandering journey up and down the west coast.

But at other times, Batu Pahat Uncle came to share with us his latest philosophical and theological insights. Then he’d stay for hours, gulping down food and drink in between bouts of wild, impassioned talk. If people would only stop eating eggs, he said once, there would be no more wars. Eating eggs was worse than eating meat, because an egg was the essential germ of life, and in it lay all the promise of the universe. To commit an act of violence against such a thing—to crack it, cook it, shove it down one’s gullet—was to sully mankind’s collective karma. “Violence is like gas,” he said. “It builds up. It doesn’t just stop there. It has to go somewhere. All these wars. India-Pakistan, Iran-Iraq, Lebanon. All because of egg-eating.”

Another time he advised my uncle to erect a large brass statue of a rat outside the front gate to keep rats away from the house. “Daily-daily you must garland the statue with jasmine and marigolds,” he pronounced in between mouthfuls of curd rice. “Polishing all two-three times weekly will be sufficient. If you respect the rats, the rats also will respect you.”

But each time we were all ready to dismiss him as a madman, he startled us with flashes of wisdom. In August he correctly predicted that the Sikhs would kill Indira Gandhi before the end of the year: “She is a foolish woman,” he said. “This side she puts guns in the hands of the Bhaiyis, that side she spits in their faces. This year itself what has to come to her will come.”

* * *

When Batu Pahat Uncle was not there, my aunt stirred less and less from the kitchen window. She spoke only to report on Mariamma’s activities now: “Oh looklooklook,” she said one evening, clapping her hands, “a new saree she has. Bright green to match her eyes. Before she only had red sarees. Someone must have paid her in kind instead of cash. Good for her.” And another time: “Look, she has brought home a live chicken, man. Must be doing quite well these days. Building the family fortune. Maybe she got a few extra clients last night. She and her husband can celebrate with chicken briyani.”

Then one day my aunt noticed something that seized her voice and crumpled her face. She turned from the window and sat down at the kitchen table. She ran her hands up and down her thighs, and for a few moments the only sound in the universe was the rasping of her palms against her cotton sarong, the sound of something old and dry and ready to shed its tired skin.

“More tea, Maddam?” asked Cook at last. My aunt did not answer. Cook hovered close over her, as if she were waiting to clear her plate or wipe her mouth.

Finally my aunt looked up at her with a strange, swollen smile. Her eyes were huge and glassy. “Have you noticed, Cook?” she said. She turned to me. “Nirmala? Our neighbor-lady is expecting a baby. Hmm. Who knows, Nirmala, maybe it’s your own cousin sister. You can sew the baby a nightie. You can buy it booties.”

Cook scurried wordlessly away to the kitchen to busy herself with the dinner preparations, but my aunt was undeterred. “After all,” she continued, “this side that woman comes home, that side your Periappa comes home, no? Who is to say he wasn’t the one who bought her the green saree? Why not? Why should he look further, when right here in his own compound is a woman who’ll spread her legs for a few dollars?”

I ate a stale Nestle biscuit, and another, and another, and said nothing.

For nine months I watched Mariamma’s belly grow with a sick feeling in my stomach. At night I lay awake thinking of it. My aunt no longer came in to make shadows on my bedroom wall.

On the morning Mariamma’s oldest daughter was born, Batu Pahat Uncle turned up at the back door. I was having breakfast with my uncle and aunt.

“I think so I heard a baby crying in that hut,” he said, looking at Cook. “Please put extra milk in my coffee. Acid problems I am having these days.”

“Acid problems?” my uncle said. “You should eat more regular meals. A man your age should not be eating a whole goat one day for lunch and then nothing for three days.”

Batu Pahat Uncle took a sip of his milky coffee and sloshed it around in his toothless mouth before replying. “That is not the thing,” he finally said, “These acid problems are all caused by other people’s jealousy, I tell you. They cannot see what they’ve got; they only see what I have. People are like that. What I always say is, if people are jealous of you, drink warm milk and eat three bananas for breakfast. Four is too many; four will give you diarrhoea. But three will nicely subdue the burning-churning caused by other people’s jealousy. You all have any bananas in the house?”

Cook brought three rastali bananas and placed them before him, and he ate them one after the other, peeling each one completely before breaking it into bite-sized chunks.

In the years that followed it seemed that Mariamma was always pregnant. Her belly swelled and shrank and swelled again under her saree; she stayed home at night for months at a time. As soon as her oldest daughter was comfortable on her feet, Mariamma sent her to our back door to ask if she could gather the half-rotten mangoes that had fallen under the tree.

“Veedula thapaadu illai,” the girl lisped. There’s no food at home.

“Sure,” my aunt said, her eyes running up and down the length of the child, taking in her matted hair, her wide, crusty eyes, the thin lips that struggled to cover her overbite. “Collect all the mangoes you want, just don’t touch the tree with your dirty hands.” The girl thanked her and ran off, but the second time she came my aunt interrupted her greeting with a question.

“Wonh appa yaru?” Who’s your father?

I was sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, and I saw the child pause and blink slowly at my aunt, as if she knew, young and innocent as she was, that the question was not what it appeared to be. As if the smell of my aunt’s breath, the way she’d leaned forward eagerly, or the crispness of her voice had warned her to raise her defenses. But she didn’t falter, or pout, or draw back from the heat of the question; instead her face settled into a purposeful obtuseness. She stood stubbornly straight and held my aunt’s gaze.

“What’s the matter?” my aunt persisted. “Why are you looking at me like that? I asked you a simple question, isn’t it? Such a big girl, can’t you answer?”

“My father lives in that hut only,” the girl said, pointing at the nipah roof in the distance. Her face was blunt and brutish as a calf’s.

“Oho,” my aunt said, unsatisfied. For a moment she eyed the child silently, her nostrils flared, and I knew that she was rolling around in her mouth words that might bring tears to the girl’s eyes or send her running home to her mother. It was a childish cruelty, the ugly thrill the playground bully feels as he tightens his grip around his victim’s arm, and it hung in the stuffy kitchen air like a mosquito’s song. Then my aunt sighed and shook her head and said, “Okay then, what do you want?”

As their bellies grew and roared, Mariamma’s children came to ask for summary concessions and kindnesses: for fifty cents in exchange for sweeping the porch; for the feet and necks of the chickens Cook slaughtered in the backyard; for permission to shoot down bats with their catapults in my uncle’s garden. Their father skinned the bats and boiled them in a large iron pot outside the doorway of their hut, and the smell of these stews blew hot and thick through our open back door.

“Chhi,” my aunt would say, pressing a scented tissue to her nose, “these people will eat anything also. No better than the Chinese.”

My aunt’s one consolation seemed to be that Mariamma’s children were all girls. That Mariamma’s womb was so flagrantly fertile was bad enough; to have watched her produce a son would have been intolerable. And so each time one of Mariamma’s daughters came to the back door or was seen gathering fallen mangoes or catapulting bats in the garden, my aunt savored this small comfort.

“Too-too bad that the woman can only bear one daughter after another,” she would say. “For now she can still be proud of producing one child a year, but when it comes time to marry them off then we’ll see. Where are they going to get dowries for all those girls?”

But at other times she proposed her own smirking solutions to the problem. “Wah wah, quite wealthy this family is going to be in a few years,” she said. “One after the other those girls can all follow their mother into the family business. Can pay for their own dowries that way.”

When they came to the door she teased them with her questions, like a cat worrying a mouse it had no intention of eating.

Which one is your father? she’d ask each girl.

Where has your mother gone today? To work? Does she work in an office, then?

If your mother loves you why does she go away every night?

Though I turned away and pretended not to hear her, though Cook shook her head and bustled out of the kitchen, she cast us both sidelong glances after every question. Whenever Batu Pahat Uncle arrived to watch her from his red armchair, she spoke to the girls in a shimmering stage voice, her words turning colorful cartwheels around them. She clapped and hooted like the village clown in a Tamil film; she wrinkled her nose and laughed at her own jokes. Is your father a doctor, lawyer or engineer? she would ask, one hand on a playfully thrust-out hip. What, you don’t know? Oh, that’s a good one! You don’t know!

Tell your mother you shouldn’t have to collect rotten mangoes to eat when your father has three cars and sits in an air-conditioned office all day.

Let me look at you, girls, she’d say when she managed to corner all of them together. No, no, not one of you looks like your mother or the man in the hut. But you don’t look like each other, either. Whom do you look like? Hmm? Run and ask your mother, go!

Batu Pahat Uncle said nothing through these displays, but swirled his coconut water around and around in its glass. When Mariamma’s children had left and my aunt had returned to her sentry post by the window, he spoke as if nothing had happened.

“Kandiah’s son is doing well after his motorcycle accident,” he might murmur. Or standing creakily up and stretching, “Yabbah, how nice it was to sit and have a drink, but now I really must be going.”

* * *

For seven years my aunt kept herself buoyed on a fitful sea of satisfaction by asking Mariamma’s daughters the same questions every afternoon. Just under the surface of that sea lurked the despair of the seven years before I’d arrived: the sleepless nights, the uncombed mornings, the long days awash in aimless tears. Once my presence had been sufficient to keep all these at bay; now she needed her small spurts of revenge, and these filled me with a sulfurous pity. I could not bear to look at my aunt anymore; when Mariamma’s daughters came to the door I looked only at them, at their round, fragile shoulders and their ill-fitting clothes, at the way they held each other’s hands to butt up against a cruelty they could only sense. And so I began to save the small treats I bought myself at school, and to slip them into one or the other’s hand when my aunt wasn’t looking. Once, when the oldest girl was gathering fallen mangoes in the dusk and I happened to be sitting on the porch swing, I walked across the garden, plucked a fresh, perfect fruit off the tree, and handed it to her. And always, when my aunt kept them at the door with her needling, I lowered my eyes and listened with burning ears and loved her still less.

We grew older. I entered secondary school and wore a new uniform. Streaks of silver began to show in my aunt’s hair, and lines spread around her mouth like cracks in parched earth. My uncle acquired reading glasses and—because he sometimes stayed away from home for days—bought a second car and engaged a driver to chauffeur me to and from school in it. Cook developed arthritis and had to resort to buying coconut milk from the market for our morning appams. Mariamma’s many babies thickened her waist and left dark circles under her bright green eyes.

Then, after five girls, Mariamma’s son was born. Perhaps because he was born during another long, furious rainy season, I half expected Batu Pahat Uncle to turn up on the morning of his birth. But when Ponniah brought his happy news to our house with a tray of celebratory sweetmeats, only Cook and my aunt and I were at home. His thick mustache bristled with pride as he smiled at us through his crooked teeth. “A boy,” he said. “My wife has given birth to a boy.”

“Look at that!” exclaimed Cook, clutching the tray of sweets after he’d left. “How much money they must’ve spent on ghee and sugar to make all these! They’ll have to survive on bats and rotten mangoes for five months just to pay their sundry shop bill.”

A week went by before we saw anyone in Mariamma’s family. Then one Saturday morning the five girls, filthy as ever, trooped to our back door in a little procession. The oldest girl carried the baby, who was freshly bathed and talcum-powdered. He wore only a cloth nappy, and on his forehead his mother had daubed a large, black pottu to protect him from the evil eye.

Close on their heels came Batu Pahat Uncle, wiping his brow with his Good Morning towel, for the sun was already scorching.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Cook when she saw him. “Come in and sit down. These are the girls from that hut over there. Their father asked permission—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Batu Pahat Uncle. “I know the whole story about that hut. And what is this now? A new baby?”

Mariamma’s daughters smiled diffidently, and one was so overcome that she hid her face in the neck of the girl standing next to her.

The girls—all five of them—looked nothing like Mariamma; this had always been the one fragment of truth in the terrible story my aunt had invented about them. They had flat noses and thin, unexpressive lips. Two of them had sallow, blotchy skin, and the oldest was as dark as a mangosteen. But the boy she now held had his mother’s pure skin and red mouth, and his eyes, though still an indeterminate colour, would clearly be light. In his sister’s arms the boy seemed almost incandescent, like the butter-stealing baby Krishna or the doomed baby Jesus.

“Aunty?” said Mariamma’s oldest daughter. “Aunty enggai?” Aunty, Aunty, echoed her sisters. Where is Aunty? They clustered around the baby, giggling, jostling each other like puppies.

“Aunty is in the living room,” I said. “I’ll go and fetch her.” I turned and walked into the house, and Batu Pahat Uncle sank with a sigh into his red armchair.

When my aunt came to the back door, the girl held the baby aloft as if he were an offering and my aunt a goddess. “Aunty,” she said, “my new little brother. My father said to come and show you.”

But my aunt did not take the baby then. “What a handsome boy,” she said, “so fair and chubby.” Her voice was cool and crisp, a voice paddling in the shallows of laughter, the same voice she had always used to ask the girls who their father was or what their mother did for a living. She reached out and stroked the baby’s foot lightly. “What’s his name?”

“His name?” said the oldest girl. “We just call him Thambi, because he’s our only little brother. He doesn’t have a name yet. My father says we should wait until we can take him to the temple.”

“Your Thambi,” said my aunt, “is the only one who looks like your mother, lucky boy.”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” said one of the other girls.

“Isn’t he just like a doll?” said another. “My mother says, if he sat still and didn’t cry or move, everyone would think he was a doll.”

“A little English doll,” said my aunt, “with his pink cheeks and his green eyes. When you pick him up he’ll open his eyes and when you lie him down he’ll close them.”

The girls giggled, even though none of them had ever seen such a doll.

That day my aunt gave Mariamma’s oldest daughter a clean green five-ringgit note from the jam jar, even though it was the one time she hadn’t asked for anything. “Here,” she said, “tell your father and your mother congratulations, and take good care of the boy.” Your father. Not the man in the hut. Not your mother’s husband. But if the girls noticed this change they said nothing about it. They fell, one after the other, at my aunt’s feet, and then trooped back to their hut.

“That was good,” said Batu Pahat Uncle after the girls had left, “it is good to do charity.”

This small act of compassion seemed to undo my aunt, to snap the wire skeleton her spite had been. Every time she opened her mouth to speak that afternoon, her voice cracked and wobbled so much that Cook, fearing an attack of bronchitis, made her a special pot of ginger tea and added extra black pepper to the day’s rasam. But when she tried to lift her cup her hands shook. She started at the slightest sound, and looked about her as if she were alone in an unfamiliar room. As dusk fell she began to pace the length of the house, stopping every now and then to peer out of the window at Mariamma’s hut.

“So nice for them,” she said each time. “A boy at last.”

“Well,” said Batu Pahat Uncle after an hour or so, “I just came to say that Ranjana’s husband has finally got a permanent job with the Electricity Board. Now I really must be going.” No one pressed him to stay for a meal, and since my uncle was not home, he walked to the bus station, calling out his congratulations to Mariamma’s husband as he passed the hut.

When I went upstairs to bed that night my aunt was still pacing; I could hear her slippers dragging on the marble floors.

She did not go to bed for another two days, and then, at last, she collapsed into the red armchair from exhaustion, and Cook helped her to her bed. My uncle came home that afternoon to find her watching the ceiling fan turn in a stupor, smiling at cobwebs and beams of light, then whimpering for no apparent reason. He ordered Cook to make her oats porridge and to wash her hair that evening.

“Well,” said Cook to the stove, “at least I remember how to do all this from when I first came to work here.”

But this time my aunt only stayed in bed for a week, sipping her oats porridge from a spoon and letting Cook oil and wash her hair every evening. At the end of that week she got out of bed, washed her face, and came downstairs, though she was greatly changed. She’d lost weight, and her eyes darted and flickered like a madwoman’s. Tiny capillaries in her cheeks had burst, leaving bruises and red patches. She spoke fast and threw sudden tantrums: when Cook put too much sugar in her tea; when the fan blew away a page of the newspaper she was reading; when I tuned the radio to a different channel without asking her. She accused the new driver of siphoning petrol out of the Toyota to sell on the street. She counted the eggs in the fridge every night. She eavesdropped when Cook bargained with the vegetable vendor.

That was why, when Batu Pahat Uncle insisted one afternoon that I go and pay for Mariamma’s baby’s milk, I balked. My aunt was asleep upstairs, and Cook was dozing in a chair a few feet away when he called to me.

“Take five ringgit from that jar,” he said, pointing to the jam jar on the kitchen counter, “and go to the cornershop. Mariamma’s oldest daughter is there, begging the shop man to give her a tin of milk powder for her baby brother. Go and pay for the milk powder and take the girl back to her hut.”

“But you’ve been sitting in that chair all day,” I argued. “How you know who is doing what in the shop?”

“Don’t ask questions,” he said. “Go and pay for the milk.”

“But,” I protested, “I can’t simply-simply steal Periamma’s money.” I knew my aunt kept small bills in the jar to pay the newspaper man and the roti man; she would fly into a rage when her accounts didn’t tally.

“Go,” he said again. “Your Periamma won’t notice that five dollars is missing, and one day she herself will be thankful you did this simple thing.”

And so I went, and found Mariamma’s daughter, barefoot, uncombed, and snotfaced, pleading with the shop man for a tin of Dutch Baby milk powder. I paid for the milk and walked the little girl back to the hut her father had built in a corner of my uncle’s land. My aunt never noticed the missing money until the girl turned up at our back door three weeks later to ask if we would buy her another tin of milk.

“Please, Aunty,” she said to my aunt, “two days already my baby brother got no milk.”

“You think what?” my aunt said. “You think I am sitting here waiting to hand out tins of milk to anyone who comes asking, is it? You think Uncle is saving his hard-earned money for you and your brothers and sisters, so that your own father can sit in the toddy shop and your own mother can walk the streets all day with no worries?”

Mariamma’s daughter twisted her right leg around her left and pushed with her tongue at the new front teeth cutting through her gums. “But Aunty,” she said with a small sniff, “how come last time Nirmala-Akka came to cornershop and bought milk for my brother, and now you saying cannot?”

My aunt blinked, twisted her mouth to one side, and turned to me. “Oh I see,” she said. “Wah wah, I did not know we were so rich. Good lah, we got money to give away. Then what for you’re acting so shy now, Nirmala? If you got enough kolupu to distribute my money without even asking me, why don’t you go and get the jam jar now? Go. Go and get it.”

I knew I’d hear more about the matter when the girl was gone. My heart racing, my lips cursing Batu Pahat Uncle, I ran and got the jar and handed it to my aunt. She unscrewed the top and took out a single scarlet ten-ringgit note, crisp and still redolent of the bank. She held it just above the girl’s round eyes, rubbing it several times between her thumb and index finger. “Very nice,” she said, “now milk coming free so you’ll simply-simply give your brother milk for everything, four-five times a day also can, I know you. Yes or not?”

“No, Aunty,” said the girl.

“Passersby on the road also you’ll call into your house and give them Dutch Baby milk. Yes or not?”

“No, Aunty.”

“Hmm. Take and go then. I don’t want to hear you asking for milk money for at least five weeks, understand? Your brother is old enough now to eat other things. Give him rice. Give him greens cooked soft.”

“Yes, Aunty. Thank you Aunty. Romba thanks.” She took the money with both hands, fell perfunctorily at my aunt’s feet, and then fled to her father’s hut at the bottom of the garden.

For a few moments my aunt stood watching Mariamma’s daughter’s thin, swift figure recede across the garden, past the African daisies that came up to her waist, under the papaya trees that dwarfed her. The sun was white in a cloudless sky, and the girl’s feet so light that they seemed not to touch the ground: like a tiny, black butterfly, she flitted from flower bed to flower bed until she reached and was swallowed by the open door of the hut.

When my aunt turned at last from the back door, she did not meet my eyes. “How generous one’s wife is with the neighbor’s ghee,” she said under her breath, and though I braced myself for a hearty scolding and two tight slaps, that Tamil proverb was all she ever said about the liberty I’d taken with her housekeeping money.

* * *

Inexplicably, with no tantrums or accusations, it became the practice in our house to pay for Mariamma’s son’s milk after that. In gratitude, Mariamma and her husband had one of the girls bring the baby to our house every Saturday, to show us how strong he was growing, how quick his smile, how full his cheeks, all thanks to the milk we provided. The girls were always dirty and dressed in rags; the boy invariably fresh from his bath and dusted with powder.

“Thank you for the milk, Aunty,” the girls were taught to say. “My father says thank you. My mother says thank you.”

And my aunt no longer asked them which father they meant, or where their mother was, but slowly, as the weeks went by, allowed her longing for the baby to show itself. In between his visits she no longer counted the eggs, or threw tantrums when her tea was too sweet. One Saturday she grabbed the baby’s big toe and did not let go until it was time for his sister to leave. The following week she planted a kiss on his forehead. And on the third week the girl who’d brought him—Mariamma’s second daughter, who was bowlegged and had a beetle-shaped birthmark on her left cheek—said, “Please carry him, Aunty. My father says you must carry him. My father says it will bring us blessings.” My aunt took the baby in her arms, and her eyes flashed and burned so bright I had to squint to meet them. She smiled then, and though I knew she was not smiling at me—though her bright eyes did not even see me—the old love flickered in my veins, waiting to be relit. I wanted to buy that pink-skinned baby for my Aunt with five ringgit from the jam jar, for ten ringgit I saved up from my pocket money, for however much he cost.

From then on my aunt held the baby whenever he was brought to our house, until the day he fell, his green eyes blinking furiously, his sparse-toothed smile surprising us all. Five pairs of eyes were riveted to him when he fell, and yet I suspect that neither my aunt not Batu Pahat Uncle nor the baby’s sister nor Cook would be able to say, any better than I can, why or how he fell. Perhaps he slipped from my aunt’s hands because his skin was slick with traces of coconut oil from his morning massage. Perhaps he was bothered by a new tooth, or an attack of wind, or an itch, or any of the various things that make babies struggle and squirm. Perhaps my aunt had a dizzy spell because she’d skipped breakfast and lunch that day.

Amma pullai, amma pullai, amma pullai, she whispered.

And the boy’s sister’s scream, a siren in the afternoon stillness. Each time it began to die down it gathered new energy from somewhere in her throat and rose once more towards the white ceiling.

They locked into place like two voices in a round, my aunt’s words and the girl’s scream. The ceiling fan whirled a third part. Everything turned in frantic circles; time was stuck in a loop.

“God works in mysterious ways,” said Batu Pahat Uncle. “God knows everything.” He smiled at my aunt and drank his coconut water.

It was as if someone had snapped their fingers to bring us to our senses. Mariamma’s daughter stopped screaming and went to squat by her brother, sobbing quietly. My aunt turned to Cook and said, “Tell Driver we must take the baby to the hospital now.” I slipped my shoes on and sprinted to Mariamma’s hut to tell them what had happened.

Ponniah was asleep on the mud floor of the hut, on an old sarong he’d laid out. Three of the girls were stirring seeds and tamarind pods in a cracked clay pot on the floor, pretending to taste their curry and add the spices it lacked.

“I think so it needs more chilli,” said one.

“Too much salt already,” said another.

The fourth girl was mending an old cotton petticoat in a corner.

“Didn’t you hear your sister scream?” I said. “Are you all deaf? The baby—your Thambi—he fell on the floor—wake up your father.”

They looked up at me all at once, their eyes like lamps in the dark.

When I came out of the hut into the light, Ponniah wiping the tears from his cheeks and muttering his sorrow beside me, my uncle’s car pulled into the driveway.

My uncle and aunt and Ponniah took the baby to the hospital. I stayed home with Cook and Batu Pahat Uncle, the one sitting bolt upright at the dining table, clutching the edges of her chair, the other dozing in his red armchair. At six o’clock the Ford Escort pulled once more into the driveway, and the small group trooped into the kitchen. The baby was not with them. Cook stood up.

My uncle cleared his throat. “The boy will have to stay in hospital for now,” he said. “No injuries as far as they can see, but still something is wrong. They’ll have to do some tests.”

“Tests?” said Batu Pahat Uncle. “Hospital? But how can the family afford—”

“Of course we’ll pay for it,” snapped my uncle, “What do you think?”

“Ah, well, then, that’s as it should be. Everything is as it should be.” Batu Pahat Uncle smiled peaceably around the room.

* * *

Mariamma’s baby was in the hospital for six weeks. Every evening my uncle and aunt and Mariamma and her husband went to visit him together; every night when they came back my aunt told Cook that he lay in his little cot and stared up at them, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a dog’s. At the end of those six weeks two things happened: the doctors gave up, said they could not determine what was wrong with the boy, much less fix the problem, and discharged him; and Batu Pahat Uncle came shuffling down the driveway, mopping his brow with his Good Morning towel.

My aunt was carrying the baby when they came back from the hospital on that day. He stared up at her; she smiled down at him, and in one hand she held a small cloth with which she dabbed every so often at his drool.

“The doctor says he might improve, anyway, with weekly-weekly treatments and therapy and all that,” she said.

“The doctor says,” echoed my uncle, “that as he grows older he might even be able to move around the house with a few adjustments here and here. A wheelchair and all that. Ramps and a special toilet and bathtub in the bathroom.”

“Wheelchair?” said Batu Pahat Uncle. “Toilet? Bathtub? But in their hut they don’t even have a floor. Hanh?” He leaned forward in his armchair and turned to Mariamma and her husband, who had huddled close together and silent all this while, like two wet birds. “How will you take care of your son? Did you hear everything the doctor said?”

“That’s the thing....” murmured Mariamma’s husband. “The only thing we can do is to leave him at the orphanage. There is a good Christian one in town, they say the nuns are kind—”

“Orphanage? But I think so,” said Batu Pahat Uncle, “that there is a much better solution. You know this house has no sons; these people will give you a small offering in exchange for the gift of your son. Then the boy can live here. He can have his weekly-weekly therapy and his special bathtub and all that. And you yourselves will know how he is. No need to take a bus to town to visit him.”

“Otherwise,” my uncle began, “we could always pay for—”

“We could always, we could always.” Batu Pahat Uncle stood up, and perhaps because I had so rarely seen him standing indoors, he suddenly seemed much taller than I’d remembered. “What is all this we could always? This,” he said, with another gentle smile around the room, “is the best thing for everybody. It is always good to take other people’s children into your house. It is always a blessing. Is it not, Madhavi?”

My aunt started and looked at him. It was the first time I’d heard anyone call her by her name; she’d always been Maddam or Aunty or Maniam Saar’s wife.

“It would give you great peace of mind,” persisted Batu Pahat Uncle, “to have this boy in your house, to raise him as your own son, wouldn’t it, Madhavi?”

My aunt bobbed her head from side to side. “Why not?” she said softly. “He is like this because of me only. Shouldn’t I take responsibility for it?”

And that was how Thambi came to live with us.

He doesn’t talk, and the doctors were wrong about him: though my uncle paid to have ramps and special furniture built into the house, he never learned to walk. My aunt bathes him and dresses him and sings old Hindi songs to him. Cook makes him a porridge of rice and chicken and vegetables every day, and my aunt feeds it to him with a teaspoon. In the mornings she sits him in his wheelchair and puts him outside in the sunlight to enjoy the view. The sparrows and the mynah birds, the newspaper man making his rounds. But mostly he stares up at the blue sky, squinting in the sunlight, drooling onto his shirt front. Sometimes he smiles and stretches his arms out towards the sky as if he were trying to touch it. Sometimes I touch the tips of my ten fingers to the tips of his, and his eyes latch onto my mine. Thambi, I tell him then, Thambi, you’re our good luck, you’re our lucky gecko, you’re a white puppy that showed up in our backyard. I don’t have to say it out loud for him to hear me: he holds my gaze and smiles.

And that same sweet smile colors my aunt’s face whenever she looks at him. She sings him old Hindi songs even when he isn’t listening. When she has bathed him and put him outside for the morning, she sits at the kitchen table combing her hair and singing softly:

Kitna haseen hai yeh ek sapna

Phoolon ke shaher mein hai ghar apna

Kya sama hai, tu kahan hai?

Mariamma and her husband and daughters come to see Thambi every afternoon, though soon the oldest daughter will be getting married and moving to Penang. After my uncle paid them for Thambi, Ponniah bought a trishaw and began to take passengers around town. Mariamma no longer goes out at night. They managed to scrape together a small dowry for the oldest girl, though the other four might have to find factory jobs and boys who’ll marry them for love. When the family comes to see Thambi they all cluster around his wheelchair, and Mariamma, plump and weather-beaten now but still pretty, says, “Look at him, isn’t he just like a doll?” She beams at him and then at each of us in turn, but when her gaze meets my aunt’s they both quickly lower their eyelids to look once again at Thambi. Their smiles tremble and turn shy, nervous, perhaps even grateful. “Look at him,” Mariamma says more softly then, “Isn’t he still just like a doll? Nothing can spoil him. After everything, he’s still as beautiful and as good as a doll.”

And it’s true, when my aunt lays him down in his bed at night, he closes his eyes just like a doll. But when she turns the light out he opens them again, because he knows what’s in store. She sits on the edge of his bed and makes shadows with her hands, and tells him stories:

Look, she says, here is Krishna playing his flute.

Here is Yama the Demon with his scary eyes.

Look, here are Rama and Sita dancing.

Here is Ravana the evil king kidnapping Sita.

I don’t think Thambi understands any of her complicated tales, but I can see him trying to keep track of the shadows with his eyes, frowning, just like I used to, from the effort to tell the gods from the demons.

Tenet Explained

Who is the hero? 

The hero is a young CIA agent who is never referred to by name. Let's just call him The Protagonist since that is how he identifies himself in the final scene. During the undercover operation at the Kiev opera house at the beginning of the film, he, along with a mysterious masked soldier with a strange looking red trinket, fail to retrieve an artifact. However, the Protagonist witnesses this masked soldier inverting a bullet as if it was travelling backwards. The Protagonist is captured by Russian mercenaries who torture him, but he does not expose his team. Impressed by his loyalty, he is saved and recruited by Tenet.

What is Tenet? 

Tenet is a mysterious organisation that aims to prevent the creation of a machine that could lead to the end of the world. The Protagonist is sent to a scientist named Barbara, who is studying a strange set of weapons with "inverted" entropy, similar to the bullet The Protagonist witnessed in Kiev. This allows them to move backwards through time, such as having the ability to enter The Protagonist's grasp even before he grabs them. Barbara believes they are able to move like this because they were made in the future. The Protagonist traces the materials used to manufacture the weapons to an arms dealer in Mumbai.The Protagonist teams up with another Tenet member, Neil, to confront the dealer. It is then revealed that the dealer's wife, Priya Singh, is a senior member of Tenet. She explains that she sold her weapons to one Andrei Sator, a wealthy Russian oligarch who not only has the ability to invert time, but can communicate with the future. When she sold him the weapons, they were not yet time-inversed. 

The time inversion machine

In the distant future, a scientist has invented a time inversion machine. However, fearing that it will be used for evil, she divides its algorithm into nine components and hides them in the past. She achieves this by time-inverting herself and then re-inverting herself to align with whatever time period she is in over and over again until she manages to hide all nine components in different nuclear locations across the world where the components will be safely hidden away. Unfortunately, in present day, Sator has uncovered all nine components, including the final one which The Protagonist was out to get in Kiev. 

Sator’s evil plan

Initially, we are led to believe that Sator is working for terrorists from the future who have lost all hope in humanity and blame the present generation for all its problems such as climate change and social disparity. Since they no longer have the algorithm to create a time inversion machine, they are paying Sator in time-reversed gold bars so that he can piece together the components to ensure the machine is eventually built. Sator pieces together the algorithm and drops the components into an underground vault in his nuked hometown, where the future terrorists will find it centuries from now.

However, Sator soon learns that he has terminal pancreatic cancer, and believes if he dies, then the whole world should die with him. After the algorithm is completed, Sator  link his time inversion machine to a dead-switch activated by his fitness tracker. Kat, Sator's estranged wife, is convinced Sator will carry out his plan in the past during their holiday to Vietnam, which was the final time Sator felt genuinely happy. After that day, Sator disappeared for awhile and reemerged out of nowhere with his plan to destroy the world. 

Tenet’s plan

With Priya's time inversion machine, Tenet members are able to travel back to the 14th of the month. They then travel to Sator’s hometown to stop his evil plan. Once there, Tenet splits into two teams; red team moves forward through time as normal, while blue team is time-inverted. This tactic is what is referred to as a ‘temporal pincer movement’. This creates a distraction battle that allows a splinter cell of led by The Protagonist to get hold of the algorithm. In the underground vault, the Protagonist finds Sador's henchman burring the algorithm with the dead body of a blue team Tenet member on the ground with the same red trinket that the Protagonist saw earlier in Kiev. As the henchman prepares to kill The Protagonist, the dead Tenet member is revived as he is time inversion and takes the shot instead. Now resurrected, the time-inverted Tenet member helps The Protagonist take the algorithm.

Sator’s fate

At the same time, Kat, now re-inverted, travels back to Vietnam with Mahir. Once there, she pretends to be her younger self while being with Sator to make sure he stays distracted while Tenet deals with his men. She shoots him and pushes him off his yacht, killing him right before the explosion at Sador's hometown. This means Sator never disappeared after their holiday in Vietnam, he was actually killed by Kat. The Protagonist, Neil and the head of Tenet's armed forces split the algorithm into three pieces, and promise to hide them away. As Neil turns and walks away, The Protagonist sees the red trinket on him, revealing him to be the masked gunman in Kiev and the dead time-inversed dead body that saved his life earlier that day. 

The truth about Neil

Neil reveals that he is actually a Tenet member from the future, who was recruited by The Protagonist himself. Although The Protagonist has only known Neil for a few days, Neil has known him for years. This means, Neil is moving backwards while The Protagonist is moving forward in time. Neil walks back into the time inversion machine to invert himself so that he can save The Protagonist's life, which means he knows this is his end. Before doing that, he leaves his piece of the algorithm with The Protagonist before time-inverting himself.

The truth about The Protagonist

In the last scene, Priya is shown trying to assassinate Kat since it is Tenet's objective to destroy any trace of time inversion knowledge. However, The Protagonist shows up and reveals that he will be the one to set up Tenet in the future, meaning he will be the one to recruit not only Neil but Priya and himself too. He then kills Priya, but lets Kat live.

Top 5 Slytherins Who Actually Turned Out To Be Good Wizards

It seems almost like Slytherin's reputation as a Hogwarts house will forever be scared by the fact it produced the most Dark wizards when compared to the other three houses. Not to mention its founder, Salazar Slytherin desired pure blood supremacy at the school, so much so that he kept a giant serpent to kill Muggle-born students. It does not help that his direct descendant the deadliest Dark wizard to have ever lived, Tom Riddle a.k.a Voldemort, wished to uphold this perverted ideology. Despite its dark history, Slytherin has produced good wizards. For instance:

1) Merlin

Yes. Apparently, writer JK Rowling made one of the most famous wizards of all time, Merlin, a member of Slytherin. In fact, in the Potter Universe, Merlin is so revered and respected that the Ministry for Magic awards something called The Order of Merlin to deserving wizards and witches to celebrate an outstanding achievement.

2) Severus Snape

This man may have started out as a Dark wizard, but he changed for the woman he loved. While for most pure blood supremacists, nothing else matters more than lineage. But Professor Snape, despite knowing that he can never be with the one he loves, sacrifices his own life to ensure the downfall of his former master so that goodness will prevail.

3) Regulus Black

Unlike his older brother Sirius, Regulus lived up to the family's legacy by believing in pure blood supremacy and eventually became a Death Eater at just sixteen. But after witnessing how his Dark Lord tortured Kreacher in order to secure the safekeeping of one of his Hocruxes, Regulus had a change of hearts and betrayed Voldemort. While most Death Eaters think human wizards such as themselves are supreme to all other living creatures, Regulus actually cared for the loyal house-elf who served his family for years. This proves Regulus was merely conforming to his upbringing and is not actually evil. During the Battle of Hogwarts, Kreacher, rallied the other elves working at the school to fight in honour of Regulus.

4) Andromeda Tonks

Like her cousin Sirius, Andromeda defied their family's pure-blood traditions in almost every way she could. She married a Muggle-born, something that pure blood Slytherins almost never do. Unlike her sisters Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy who joined Voldemort's Death Eaters, Andromeda aligned with Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix. Leading up to the Battle of Hofwarts, Andromeda and her husband were tortured by Death Eaters for information on Harry Potter and the Order but she resisted, proving her loyalty to her loved ones.

5) Horace Slughorn

Professor Slughorn is not exactly a model citizen, but compared to other Slytherins, he is surely way better. Yes, he displayed high favouritism with his Slug Club, but its members were chosen not based on lineage but rather their own merits and talents. As Potions Master, he was a much friendlier and motivating than his predecessor and former student, Snape. Although he loved aligning himself with powerful people, he knew where to draw the line. When he first learned Voldemort was actually Tom Riddle and that he might have created Hocruxes thanks to the information he shared with him, Slughorn felt deeply embarrassed and guilty, going as far as to hide away from public and even tampering with his own memory. Also, he showed he too has high morals when he battled his former favourite student, Voldemort during the Battle of Hogwarts.