In ‘Pyre’, an elderly couple face loneliness, the prospect of death – and their love for each other

If things had gone according to plan, Pyre would have starred Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah as an elderly couple in a remote village in the Uttarakhand mountains. But things didn’t go according to plan – until they did.

It was the year 2020. Naseeruddin Shah got Covid, which made it difficult for him to shoot in higher altitudes. So Pyre’s writer-director Vinod Kapri decided to cast non-professional performers who were from Uttarakhand itself. He found the people he needed. Pyre went into production in 2022. It has been travelling to several festivals. Everywhere the movie is shown, audiences fall hard for the very old and very charming Padam Singh and Heera Devi.

Pyre is throbbing romance at its core, Kapri told Scroll. Kapri’s third fiction feature after Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho (2015) and Pihu (2018) revolves around the goat herders Padam and Tulsi. They have been married for over 60 years. Their only son migrated years ago and hasn’t been back since.

Padam and Tulsi are among the last occupants of one of Uttarakhand’s ghost hamlets – villages that have been hollowed out by migration. When Tulsi falls ill, Padam has to summon his faraway neighbours by blowing on a trumpet he keeps specifically for this purpose. The trek to the hospital...

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