Kaya Taran is an adaptation of a Malayalam short story by N S Madhavan, When Big Trees Fall, The Earth Is Bound To Shake. The name of the story was from what Rajiv Gandhi had said that a day after his mother former prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination on October 31, 1984 .
The movie starts in the backdrop of the Gujarat riots of 2002. The story is about Preet -- a journalist who has been assigned a story on missionaries and their conversions -- who has a past that torments him.
Preet (debutant Angad Bedi, son of former cricketer Bishen Singh Bedi) meets Sister Agatha (Seema Biswas) in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, and re-lives suffocating old memories. He asks her about a Sikh boy and his mother who were given shelter during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Agatha narrates how the father and brother of the little boy were murdered, and how the mother escaped with the little boy, without realising Preet is the boy, now a man.
Agatha tells Preet how he and his mother fled from the bloodthirsty rioters after he got a haircut, and was hidden in a coffin. His mother dressed up like a nun.
Angad Bedi has done well. Seema Biswas too does an excellent job, and modulates her voice to give a distinct feel. The movie is slow, and more of a documentary.
Director Sashi Kumar (who was a print journalist and a television news anchor) has used flashbacks to tell us the story of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, without actually showing any riot scenes. The movie deals more with the interaction between the nun and the child.
