Pihu 2017

On the day after Pihu Myra Vishwakarma’s second birthday party, the film follows a uneasy morning inside a small apartment. Pihu wakes up hungry and slowly realizes something is terribly wrong with Puja, her mother, Puja Prerna Sharma who is not waking up. Her father, Gaurav, a presence heard but not seen in this moment, has left for Kolkata for a conference, leaving the young girl to navigate a morning that quickly grows more frightening.

The reality hits hard: Puja has taken her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills after a fight with Gaurav. Puja’s face and hands bear bruises that hint at domestic violence, and a suicide note on the bedroom mirror states that she would have harmed Pihu too, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The shock is compounded by a string of frantic phone calls from Gaurav, who keeps trying Puja’s line without any response. Through the confusion, Pihu manages to answer the phone, but her father cannot understand her, mistakenly thinking Puja is simply asleep. He pleads with her to turn off the iron he imagines she might touch, a misunderstanding that underscores the growing tension.

Soon, the day spirals into a series of dangerous misadventures for the small child. Pihu burns her fingers, and she nearly electrocutes herself with exposed wires. In her hunger and determination to make food, she burns two rotis on the microwave and the stove. She even turns on the geyser, a choice that will ripple through the night. After hours, the geyser explodes with a loud bang that alarms the other tenants in the building, and Pihu clings to the balcony railing in a desperate bid to rescue her fallen doll. A nearby woman intervenes, coaxing her to come down and promising to fetch the doll.

Meanwhile, the apartment behaves unpredictably: electricity fluctuates, water streams out of taps and spills from the main door, and neighbors look on, assuming the owners are away on holiday. Gaurav continues to call from Kolkata, trying to reconcile and apologize for the fight, but his efforts are hampered by the absence of Puja and by the chaos Pihu creates in their home.

As the day wears on, Pihu secretly consumes leftovers from the party along with a few of her mother’s sleeping pills that lie nearby, and she drifts into sleep. The night atmosphere grows tenser as neighbors are shown attempting to break in, drawn by smoke that seems to emanate from inside the apartment. When Gaurav finally returns home, he discovers a scene of ruin: the apartment is burned and overturned, Puja is gone, and Pihu sits still and emotionless, playing with her blocks beneath the cot.

The film closes on a note of raw, consuming grief as Gaurav faces the weight of what has happened, mourning in shock and guilt for a tragedy that has unfolded around his family.