Maara 2021

Paaru, Shraddha Srinath a restoration architect, travels to a small coastal village in Kerala for a project while avoiding an arranged marriage back home. She discovers a fairy-tale painted across the village and, with the help of a friend, rents a house cluttered with art and artefacts that once belonged to a roaming artist named Maara, R. Madhavan.

Maara is a free‑spirited traveler who drifts in and out of the village, returning as he pleases. As Paaru begins cleaning, she finds Maara’s photo and a sketchbook. The drawings recount a New Year’s Eve when a small-time thief, Alexander Babu, attempted to rob Maara, and Maara ends up joining the thief on a rooftop where they witness a woman about to shoot herself. The sketch ends abruptly, leaving Paaru curious about the rest of the tale and about Maara himself.

Intrigued, Paaru starts tracing the people in Maara’s drawings. She encounters an antique dealer and Usman Bhai, M. S. Bhaskar, and learns about Selvi, Abhirami, a woman Maara knew. Maara and Chokku, Guru Somasundaram, had taken Selvi out to sea on her birthday, an evening that momentarily eases her sorrows before she dies by suicide. Maara then ensures her daughter Rani goes to school. When Paaru learns that Rani has gone missing from her school, she traces her to her father’s lodge. Meanwhile, Maara, who has returned to the village, tracks Rani down to the lodge and rescues her from her abuser. Paaru gets a glimpse of Maara but misses an encounter.

One day, she meets the thief from the sketches and learns that Maara stopped the woman from shooting herself and followed her as she ran away. They locate the house and identify the woman as Doctor Kani, Sshivada Nair. Paaru tracks her to a mountain village where Kani explains that, during her first independent operation, a surgical error led to the death of a 10-year-old girl. Plagued by media backlash, she was desperate and about to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve when Maara intervened and brought her to his mountain refuge, overseen by Velaiya, Mouli, a retired postmaster and hopeless romantic who has spent nearly fifty years searching for his teenage love Meenakshi. He tells the story through a personal play, hoping to convey his love even as time and tide pull them apart.

Velaiya shows Paaru a photo of Meenakshi and she notices that the Meenakshi in the picture wears the same conch pendant as her aunt, Mary, a nurse at a convent. Padmavati Rao as Aunt Mary joins them in the mountain village for Velaiya’s birthday, revealing that the fairy-tale Paaru heard in childhood is really the tale of an immortal soldier searching for his beloved mystical fish. The old man, moved by Paaru’s persistence, seems to find a final sense of peace. Paaru, who has chased one story after another in her quest to find Maara, finally meets him in person. They introduce themselves and hold hands as the sun sets.