Chaar is seventeen and has spent her whole life learning a melody. She makes music in what used to be her father's study, chasing the notes Kabir played the night he left. A physicist who walked into the Himalayas fifteen years ago and never came back.
A song samples the melody in reverse. An old tape winds itself the wrong way. Out of it comes something close to a prophecy.
Yudhisthir swarg ki seedhion par so raha hai.
Use Pratah Kaal se pehle utha do. Yudhisthir is asleep on the stairs of heaven. Wake him before dawn.
Chaar, her brother Saahir, and their mother Vasudha drive nine hours into the mountains. Each of them carries a different version of the same absence. At the end of the road is a lake called Chandrataal, and an answer none of them is prepared for.
A family drama with a mythic and speculative spine. About fathers who choose ideas over their children, mothers who give up entire worlds to hold what remains together, and children who have to decide, eventually, who their parents actually are. Drawn from the Mahabharata, speculative physics, and the particular grief of growing up in the wake of someone you never really knew.
The full pitch deck is available on the Decks page.
Screen age 17 to 19. Sharp, quick-witted, and good with improv. Chaar is the kind of person who has been living inside her own head her whole life and has just figured out why. We are looking for someone who can carry stillness and sarcasm in the same breath.
Truth be told, I don't remember shit about dad. What I do remember is the music. The melody. And as long as I've been playing, it's the only thing I keep going back to.
Mom never said much about dad. He was like Voldemort, you know? You say his name and boy, you're a goner. So everything I knew came from books, papers, photographs. It's not like I cared about any of this. It was just always in my face.
But my brother was different, y'know. Like the curious wimp in horror films that gets killed first. That's Saahir note for note. He always had questions. Questions that only dad could answer. And Mom didn't exactly dig that. She gave dad hell.
And soon, the tears dried up.
I kept practicing. Trying to play it just like dad used to. The intonations, the sustains. And for the longest time I never thought I'd nail it.
Until now.