Zerifa Wahid, 36, a popular actor in Assam, has never had the chance to play the role of a typical mother, let alone a devilish psychopathic step-mother writhing in murderous jealousy. When Wahid read the script of Kothanodi (The River of Fables), a multi-narrative film which knits together four shades of motherhood derived from Assam's most beloved compendium of children's tales Burhi Aai'r Xaadhu (Grandma's Tales), she instinctively set her heart on Senehi from the frighteningly tragic story of Tejimola—Senehi, the evil stepmother who, while her merchant husband is called away to a distant village on business, gruesomely impales her blooming young stepdaughter Tejimola to death beneath the pestle of a wooden rice pounder.

In Kothanodi, Senehi is exquisitely alluring and full of youthful fervor—she yearns for greater attention from her old and wayfaring husband. To prepare for the climactic scene where Senehi is completely drunk on impotent rage and frustration, ready to kill Tejimola, Wahid duly instructed her make-up artist to not let anyone disturb her while she quietly drained her energy in an all-consuming meditation of pure, unadulterated pessimism. She could have simply liquored up to look worn out—to attain that hunted look of a murderer with bloodshot eyes. Instead, for the three days it took to complete shooting that nerve-shredding scene, " I used to sit quiet and somewhere alone. I wanted to go into that intoxicated state. It really does tire you—when you deliberately fill your yourself with so much negativity. This technique helped me prepare for that scene," says Wahid. The result is a butchery so slickly hammered out in terms of technical finesse and emotional judder that you suddenly know why Tejimola is perhaps the most dreaded name in the annals of Assamese folklore and why no parent in the state has ever dared to name her daughter so.

But this isn't the only inspired scene in the Assamese film Kothanodi, debut feature of independent filmmaker Bhaskar Hazarika, set to release early next year. The three other tales besiege us with enough phantasm, psychological complexity and edge-of-the-seat moments to make Kothanodi one of the most interesting re-tellings of popular folk tales on Indian celluloid. Previous notable cinematic iterations of folk tales have either struck a scornful note, as in Satyajit Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), or have been imbued with an elegiac tone like Mani Kaul's Duvidha (1973), which was again revived for contemporary audiences in Amol Palekar's Paheli (2005). But Kothanodi follows in the international tradition of alternative adaptations of evergreen stories like Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and Maleficent (a 2014 interpretation of Sleeping Beauty). It employs elements of dark magic realism and brings to sinister life tales from Assam's bestselling children's book written in 1911 by the state's master of satire, Lakshminath Bezbaruah. In The Outenga Maiden, a woman is abandoned by her husband and driven out of her village when she gives birth to an elephant apple, which diligently follows her wherever she goes. In The Story of Tawoi, Malati decides to save her newborn from the clutches of her husband and his uncle, both of whom have buried her previous three newborns deep in the forest. In her maternal anguish, she is made to confront the most horrendous truth. And in another village, a rich and proud Dhoneswari, consumed by inveterate greed, marries her daughter to a python in Champawati. Along with Tejimola, these three stories seamlessly alternate and intersect with smart pacing and technique, with a gradual build-up of dread and unease. Shadows, perversion of human emotions, heart-rending cries of dying children, the dazzling menace of grieving mothers, the deathly stillness of the mundane, and the mournful beauty of the ever-shifting sand-banks of the Majuli river island—where the film seeks to evoke the unvarnished idyll of a rural Assam—all play into each other and culminate in a spine-chilling climax.

Majuli

Defusing the Demographic Bomb

Once upon a Time in Assam