Script
Title: The Painting
Idea: Dissociative Amnesia
Genre:
Romance
Script
Regn No (SWA): 42053 Synopsis
Script
Regn No (SWA): 35034 Script
Membership
No: 49484
The Idea:
Dissociative Amnesia – a disorder that allows a person to live a normal life all faculties functioning but the past is a complete blank. It is caused by a traumatic situation in life and the cure too is another traumatic situation.
The Plot:
A traumatic situation leads to the main protagonists suffering a double whammy: they are separated from each other and are also struck with the disorder ‘dissociative amnesia’. Circumstances once again brings them together without either of them recognizing the other as their spouse. The interplay of knowing-and-yet-not-knowing is played out in the dialogue. Other situations follow that leads to resolution.
Main Protagonists Background
Mahesh and Priya are the protagonists in the story. Theirs is an upscale family with rare art collection. Their house is in a picturesque locale. Mahesh’s mother is an accomplished painter. Mahesh and Priya have two children, Rohan and Sneha, aged 4 and 6, They both study in a residential international school not too far from their home. By profession, Mahesh and Priya are both chartered accountants. This is pre-mobile days – early 1995.
The Synopsis
Seg I
Mahesh and Priya head out of town for a financial audit. They tell their kids that they will be back home after five days. The road that they head out on is a narrow one with a river running on one side and a deep ravine on the other.
Seg 2
On the way they crash into a truck that is parked awkwardly on the narrow road with the left wheel missing.
Seg 3
Mahesh who was not wearing his seat belt is thrown out when the door flies open with the impact. He rolls down the slope and lands in the flowing river. The current carries him some distance as he hangs on to a tree trunk. He is rescued in a deep jungle area by tribals of the area.
Seg 4
Priya is taken to a hospital far from the accident site by a truck driver – Michael. He relieves Priya of her expensive jewellery and leaves her on a wheeled stretcher lying near the hospital door and leaves.
Seg 5
When the driver of the awkwardly parked truck returns with the cleaner with the fixed tyre, they see the car crashed into the truck. They panic. Look around. With no one in sight they push the vehicle down the ravine. They dust up the place of glass shrapnel and oil spill and depart from the site. All evidence of the crash is now eliminated. There is no police report or any attempt to trace the protagonists
Seg 6
Much later a missing person(s) report is filed by the family, after Mahesh’s mother suffers an untimely death due to tension of her missing son and daughter-in-law, conflated with stormy weather that uprooted communication lines blocking all forms of contact from their isolated home in the hills. Investigations follow but reaches a dead end.
Seg 7
With demise of their grandmother the two children become boarders in their residential school.
Seg 8
Mahesh is pulled out of the river by local tribals isolated from civilization. He is treated for his wounds over a week or so. Later he treks back to civilization on to a highway where he is given a lift by none other than Michael who rushed Priya to the hospital but left her at the gates not wanting to be identified.
Seg 9
During the ride Mahesh discloses to Michael that he has apparently been in some kind of accident but he has no recollection of it. Michael takes Mahesh to his nephew’s home who is done well in life and is a young practising neurologist.
Seg I0
Priya recovers in the hospital and is ‘adopted’ by the owner doctor couple.
Seg 11
Both, Mahesh and Priya, have an opportunity to discover their CA skills as they help out their respective patrons with their tax returns etc. And soon end up running their independent CA practice in the town with partners.
Seg 12
Sunil is Priya’s partner in the CA firm. He is smitten by Priya. But Priya wants to draw a line between business and personal relationship. To complicate matters, Sunil’s sister Anu is infatuated with Mahesh when they eventually meet up.
Seg 13
Mahesh and Priya fondness for art brings them together at an auction. They bid for the painting of two children painted by Mahesh’s mother. The bid is inconclusive. Each one’s desire to own the painting takes the bid to astronomical levels.
Seg 14
The auctioneer stops the bidding and asks for a closed-door discussion. He suggests that Mahesh and Priya jointly own the painting which is agreeable to both.
Seg 15
Priya asks the auctioneer about the background to the painting. The auctioneer explains how the painting landed in the auction house. He tells them that the painting, as well as, many other artefacts had to be sold, when the parents of the two children in the painting went missing and were untraceable.
Seg 16
The auctioneer elaborates that the children had to be put under the guardianship of the headmistress of the international residential school with their expenses funded by sale of the movable property like paintings, vases, chandeliers etc to the auction house.
Seg 17
The immovable property is under court mandated receivership until the children become adults to take ownership of the property.
Seg 18
Mahesh and Priya leave with the painting with Priya has the first go at hanging the painting in her home with intent to rotate it on a monthly basis between them.
Seg 19
Mahesh drops Priya home and has a déjà vu moment of familiarity with everything in her home.
Seg 20
This incident sets up their relationship which has several moments and situations which neither of them is able to explain that they have been through the interaction before because they in a sense complete each other’s sentences. Their discovery of each other and their interaction has a certain familiarity. They begin to spend every free moment with each other. However, nothing in their interaction provides any clue to the reality of their past life.
Seg 21
There is also the tension of Sunil’s relationship with Priya and Anu’s with Mahesh.
Seg 22
There is an audit call from the international school that comes to Sunil who is terribly tied up with year-end tax returns pressure. He asks Mahesh if he can help out Priya with the audit.
Seg 23
Mahesh and Priya head out for the audit retracing the path back to their home with the school a detour away from their ancestral home. They don’t know they are traversing what should have been a familiar path to them. Even though each one has a sense that the path is very familiar to them.
Seg 24
On the way they stopover at a Dhaba where Michael spots Mahesh and almost calls out to him until he sees Priya following behind. Flashback of stripping her of her jewellery comes to his mind and he retreats. He however guesses that they are headed out to the school. There is very little else in the hill town.
Seg 25
At the school when Mahesh and Priya are on a jog. A cricket ball smashed by Rohan, their son, who is 13 now, hits Mahesh on his head. He undergoes surgery and is temporarily bandaged covering his eyes.
Seg 26
Priya is mad at Rohan. She gets mad at Sneha too when she learns they are brother and sister. She cannot seem to forgive them for inflicting injury on Mahesh. By now Priya is terribly in love with Mahesh but unexpressed. There is the parallel relationship with Sunil, and Mahesh with Anu that has not been resolved.
Seg 27
Rohan and Sneha spend time with Mahesh taking care of him when Priya is busy with the school audit.
Seg 28
Mahesh learns that Rohan and Sneha both want to be CAs. He is curious about their motivation. They explain to Mahesh that it is in memory of their parents who disappeared when they were young. They were both CAs. Mahesh probes further and the children relate the story of their tragic childhood.
Seg 29
Mahesh’s memory starts stirring. He feels a certain rush. To an onlooker it would appear that he was having a stroke.
Seg 30
Mahesh tells the children to get hold of Priya and ask her to come to the dispensary / hospital. When Priya comes, Mahesh tells her to show the painting to the children which is still in the car (they had carried along since Priya could not stay without the painting even for a night).
Seg 31
Priya is now feeling the pressure of animosity toward the children for injuring Mahesh and at the same time some stirring of attachment toward them. She also senses her memory coming back.
Seg 32
When Mahesh was taken into surgery, the headmistress had called Sunil, Priya’s partner in the CA firm and informed him of Mahesh’s condition.
Seg 33
When Priya bring the painting and uncovers it in front of the children. They are awestruck. The painting is of them. They still have a print of the painting in their room.
Seg 34
This moment is cathartic to Mahesh and Priya to discover that they are married to each other and that Rohan and Sneha are their children.
Seg 35
This brings about the complete memory redux for both Mahesh and Priya and they are completely cured of their ‘dissociative amnesia’ disorder.
Seg 36
Michael the truck driver whose path
crossed both Priya and Mahesh’s life, arrives at school and fills in the
accident piece of taking Priya to hospital and asks pardon for relieving her of
her jewellery which he hands over to Priya. He wanted to gift it to his wife
Maria but at the last moment changed his mind and kept it hidden in the house
expecting to return it should the occasion arise.
Seg 37
Sunil and Anu drive up to the school only to find Mahesh and Priya sitting hand-in-hand in the school garden around the driveway. They see each other and there is embarrassment all around.
Seg 38
Sunil turns the car around and is about to head back. Priya calls out to him and requests him to come back. Sunil relents. They turn the car around. The children return from the field and join them.
Seg 39
Mahesh and Priya tell the story of their reunification with their children and with each other. Sunil and Anu respond acceptingly.
Seg 40
They all head out to Mahesh’s ancestral home which they had left behind 9 years back.
Curtains.
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