Purushartham (1987)

After his directorial debut with Ashwathama (1978), Mohanan had to wait almost a decade for his 2nd feature to be finished. It tells of an upper-class widow, Bhadra Vasudev (Mehta), who, with her son (George), returns to her dead husband’s village to perform the ritual that will free her from the turbulent corpse that seems to persecute her and whose death she may have caused. The husband was an urban middle-class executive. The story unfolds from her son Vineet’s point-of-view as he becomes progressively estranged from his mother, ending up throwing sacrificial rice balls at her and her new friend Ninan (Muttalali). The title refers to the four purusharthas, the goals of mankind according to Hindu ethical philosophy.