“I knew it was ordained that I should never marry an equal. So, I married shame. It is my shame that has kept me alive. My knowing that I am truly not…”
- Sarah Woodruff, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
So I’m back from office.
A particularly inconsequential day. One of those that underline your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. Not tragic, not eventful, just... grey. You know the kind. The sort that makes you wonder if anyone would notice if you quietly folded into the wallpaper.
Usually, I’d just hit the bottle. Let the fog roll in. Drift away.
But not tonight.
Tonight I didn’t want to drift. I didn’t want fog. I wanted clarity, of a specific kind. The kind that hurts a little. The kind that touches a nerve you’ve long made peace with ignoring.
Some aches, when you get over them, leave behind nothing but a vacuum.
And sometimes, that vacuum is far more terrifying than the ache itself.
Wife was out somewhere. Party, friends, I didn’t ask. Kid was out too, finished with exams, celebrating the sweet freedom of teenage evenings.
So, I was alone.
Amazon Prime was doing its usual pushy recommendations, and up popped The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Meryl Streep on the poster. I hadn’t read the book. Knew next to nothing about the movie. But the name had that echo, the kind that tells you it might hurt just right.
I hit play.
I didn’t expect it to take me right back to Clara.
To Thoovanathumbikal.
To the rain. The music. The ache.
There’s something eerily parallel about The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Thoovanathumbikal, though they emerge from different worlds. One’s a postmodern British drama wrapped in Victorian restraint. The other, a lush Malayalam film soaked in rain, longing, and haunting silence.
But at their heart, both stories circle the same storm;
A man meets a woman he cannot quite understand.
And never quite gets over.
Clara and Sarah. Two women, one storm.
Clara, the elusive escort with a name you dare not forget.
Sarah, the 'fallen woman' who walks the windblown coast like a ghost haunting her own choices.
They are both mysterious, and yet not mystical. Both tragic, but never seeking sympathy. The kind of woman men remember more than they ever possess. Neither of them fits into the polite boxes society offers. And that refusal to be understood? That is precisely what makes them unforgettable.
Both Jayakrishnan and Charles begin as men of their world. Men who believe they understand love, women, consequences. But then comes Clara. Then comes Sarah. And everything shifts. Both men meet women who can’t be contained.
Jayakrishnan, with his carefully curated double life, is dismantled not by scandal, but by sincerity.
Charles, the man of science, progress, and Victorian decency, finds himself chasing an irrational ache across England.
They don’t save these women.
They don’t even understand them.
But they’re changed. Bent. Unmoored.
And isn’t that what love sometimes is?
Not an arrival. But a fracture.
Not a story of togetherness, but of the scar it leaves behind.
In Thoovanathumbikal, the rain doesn’t just fall.
It announces Clara.
It clings to Jayakrishnan like a perfume of regret.
It seeps into the music, the memory, the mood.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, it’s the wind, the cliff, the sea spray.
Nature doesn’t offer comfort. It offers contrast. An elemental force against which human frailty looks small, exposed.
Both stories know this;
Sometimes, it’s not about love fulfilled.
It’s about love remembered.
And how it ruins you, gently.
I didn’t expect to feel this much.
Didn’t expect a British film to bring me back to a Malayalam classic.
Didn’t expect Clara to show up in Lyme, through Sarah’s silhouette.
Didn’t expect the rain at the end.
But it did rain.
And I did feel seen, oddly enough, by two women who existed in two languages I speak, sometimes simultaneously, their cadences overlapping like shared memories of rain and wind that never quite leave, echoing each other across the ache. That night, on my couch, nursing a dry throat and a full ache.
I wasn’t drifting anymore.
I was anchored. In longing.
"Evidunno vannu engoto poya oru penkutti. Njangal thammil evideyo vachu bandhikkapettavaranannu enikku verute thonuka... eto janmathil..."
- Jayakrishnan, Thoovanathumbikal (1987)
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