New Beginnings....

Agni Natchathiram...

The month of May in Chennai... strikes fear in the hearts of everyone who lives there... When you drive, you can actually see blurry mirages on the road... Every living thing droops in the heat... Kathir who has not experienced this much heat for the past 8 years of his life, swears to his colleagues that he feels like the boy in that Gulcon D ad, where the Sun sucks all the energy out of him with a straw.

He hates that he is constantly sweating... And why oh why did he promise to his Athai that her plants will live and flourish? They are all shriveled up and look half dead to him...

He dislikes the silence of the house, he can hear the sound of Mahi's feet as she runs to greet him, the smell of his Athai's cooking, all these haunt him..

And he is constantly thinking about Mullai.

Her smile, the way she puts her hair into a bun, the way she studies with utter concentration, the way she takes care of Mahi...

All mundane and ordinary things...

But it is like a broken cassette playing the same song again and again in his head...

Mahi calls him every other day and sometimes when she switches to video call, he yearns for glimpses of Mullai..

The times that Mullai calls him, his pulse race as soon as he sees her name on his phone..

She must be so happy with her family, while here he was languishing in this empty shell of a house..

He even misses his athai...

Mullai would have shrieked with laughter, had he told her this...

Kathir religiously waters the plants everyday...

Cleans the house and tries cooking something from watching YouTube...

Kanna comes and stays with him for some days...

And they have this huge argument about him accepting friend requests from everyone.

Gazala Aunty invites them over for dinner one night..

Mahi sees Kanna on the video call and is so angry that he came when she wasn't there..

If Kathir thinks that the heat can't get any worse, he thought wrong...

Agni natchathiram starts...

And for the first time since he came here, he longs for the cold winters back in Dublin...

The days pass by so damn slowly...

He goes home to Kunnakudi for some days and helps out in the shop and is a little alarmed to realize that Kumeresan Maama has aged a lot, to him his Maama had always been youthful...

One night, way past midnight.... He stares at the phone hoping that Mullai would call him..

He goes to world clock and chooses Qatar and checks the time.. 2 and half hrs behind India...

Just around 11 there...

Why can't she call him?

His heart slowly tries to tell him, what his brain has been denying for so long...

That he is in love...

With Mullai..

There is no rolling thunder, no lightening flashes, a thousand birds don't take to the sky...

It is as silent and as strong as the growth of a banyan tree.

He has been in love with her for awhile.. He has only realized it today...