By Nisha Susan
A while ago I wrote a short story which had three dancers and a tailor called Blouse Mohan who didn’t measure, only gazed. I had heard about an apocryphal Malayali tailor Blouse Mohan who deployed this scandalous method to create perfect sari blouses and was tickled to include him in the story. After the story was published, I got a call from *namedrop alert* the famous Malayali novelist KR Meera. “Nisha! How did you know about Blouse Mohan?” Mohan was for real? I was even more tickled. Then after we had both giggled for a bit, Meera dropped the bomb. “It’s very sad, you know, what happened to him.” What happened, I asked. “Oh, you didnt’ know? Mohan married one of his clients. And now he is no longer allowed to stitch sari blouses. He does only salwars.”
KR Meera’s unhappy ending to my Mohan story was a bit like what some dude said about Audrey Hepburn – her downs felt like ups. Mumbai filmmaker Vijayeta Kumar’s short film Blouse, on the other hand, is just all delightful ups.
A little bit about the plot here. A young school teacher Shyam has been posted in a village with a famous tailor. His wife asks him to get a blouse made for her which he faithfully agrees to. Only problem? He doesn’t have the measurements.
Blouse is a short film that feels like a familiar folktale (a fun type) but is actually an adaptation of a modern short story called Naap by the Hindi writer Sanjay Kumar. It was shot in Meja, Rajasthan a blazing summer ago and has since travelled all over the world to many international festivals.
You can watch Blouse as part of the short film set Chaar Cutting which is showing this week at all the PVRs in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Bangalore. Don’t miss.
Photo credit: Working still via Taxi Films India