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If you come to know Sudha Padmaja Francis through her films, you’d still spot the poet in her, helplessly slipping out of the filmmaker. Her documentaries smuggle words off the poems she has yet to write, lyrical even as they are about a walkway in Kochi or the music of the Calicut streets she grew up in. Put to her, Sudha refrains from choosing either title: poet or filmmaker, but shares her aspiration to be the viewer who watches films and gets it, to be the reader who loses herself in what she reads.
Sudha does not carry the sullen air one might associate with a writer whose prose invariably reaches for the melancholy of rainy afternoons and parting trains. After making an award-winning short film, four documentaries and scripting an upcoming feature film, Sudha felt emboldened to bring out her first book of poems, The History of Red Hibiscus Trees – scribblings gathered from a decade and a half.
“The oldest in the collection, ‘My Bathroom’, dates back to 2009, when I was 19,” she says, in a conversation with TNM. That is the age she lost her mother, who left behind memories that smelt of starched sarees in her bathroom and who planted many trees in all the places she lived.
My father continues to water her plants, long after she has gone, Sudha writes in ‘Dreaming of Flowers’. When pressed, she reluctantly chooses ‘The Blue Women’ and ‘Breaking-up Love’ as her favourites; they still manage to evoke the distant emotion she’d felt when she wrote them, she says.
Most people don’t understand how the rescuer and the one that needs rescue occupy this very same body – from ‘Breaking-up Love’.
“My twenties were a difficult time, dealing with death, shame and morality. But those are the things that shaped me, made me what I am now,” she says.
In a note at the end of her book, Sudha writes, “When I now read a 22-year-old me writing about myself and love, I remember I lived through all that to be the person who thinks about the Mathanga Sambhar she makes now.” A reference to her poem ‘Mathanga Sambar’, one of the more recent ones from her book.
The title of the book comes from a poem about those difficult years, in which Sudha brings alive bewitching imagery of red hibiscus flowers printed on her skirt, laughing and flying away, to circle the heads of lovers. “That time is still important to me, in the way I understood the ways of the world, of women, of feminism. We did not have the kind of discussion on mental health as we do now. There were no tools to understand what we were going through. And chemaparathi or red hibiscus, which had always been a symbol of madness in Kerala, seemed fascinating to me,” she says.
On the cover of her book is a plum brown kitten that has the looks of a maine coon, holding a red hibiscus in her mouth. But it must be a street cat; Sudha has had a few she’d look for in the neighbourhood, and who come and go in her poems like uninterested visitors.
The drawing on the cover is also Sudha’s. So are the charcoal sketches scattered across the book, a habit that grew in the COVID-19 years. Something, she says, she did only for herself, for everything else came with expectations. She hesitates to call herself an artist, much the same way she stops short of writer. A filmmaker, perhaps, is a term she will allow herself to identify with after much deliberation.
She has just tested uncharted territory with a script for a feature film being made by her partner and acclaimed filmmaker, Kamal KM. Other than a vague description of the script dealing with female friendships, she can’t say much more, except that Divya Prabha, the actor who won worldwide recognition for All We Imagine As Light, plays the lead.
“Perhaps it is this academic bent of mind and a desire to explore certain areas that made me sway to documentaries more than fiction. But I have always liked fiction. My first short made for film school, called Eye Test, was fiction. Then I veered off to documentaries as an excuse to indulge in areas I have always been interested in.”
Her love for the music and bakeries of Kozhikode resulted in Ormajeevikall Memory Beings (2019) and Ginger Biscuit (2024). Her fascination with watching people create led to Oru Nool Viral Charitham (A Tale of Threads and Fingers), and the story of a walkway far from home became a video essay called Walkway (2022).
Sudha, the poet, surfaces in the films.
“Memories are attempts at preservation
I feel making a memory is like making an image
Or making an image is like making a memory
All of us make memories
All of us make images,” begins her voiceover in Memory Beings.
In line with her academic ways, she did a Master’s in Films at the University of Reading in London, and in a poem, imagines how Mrs Dalloway must have walked through the city like her – the Virginia Woolf character she likes to keep revisiting. Her tastes are a little ‘old’, she says, glued as she was to the black and white films on Doordarshan in her childhood because her mother would not allow a cable connection. She is close to Bhargavi Nilayam in a way others in her generation may not be, and the man on the beach in love with a ghost emerges in another of her poems.
She hadn’t begun writing in those days, except for scribbling her dreams in a diary, but she grew up among the many books her father had filled the house with – “the day he got his salary, he headed to Current Books,” she says with a laugh. The music from her father’s phone also reaches into her poems, with the trees her mother planted. Friendships linger with kind looks and memories of dripping salted fruits. “They are women who reminded me to be a better person,” she says, slipping into an emotion of a faraway day.
Sudha may not realise it, but her eyes stray everywhere, her poems capture long-lost days, and her films become enchanting studies of the everyday and the ordinary.