Gulmohar

Gulmohar maps the lives of the Batra family as they pack up their belongings and move out of their thirty-one year old family home. While all the family members, including the house help, must find their way outside of the only home they have ever known, the matriarch of the family, Kusum, suddenly announces that she is moving to Pondicherry soon after packing this house. But before that, in four days, she wants to celebrate Holi with her family. Kusum and her late husband, Prabhakar, bought the bungalow and named it Gulmohar when they moved out of their own family home because of familial tensions around their adopted son, Arun. When we meet Arun, he is married to Indira, the father of three children and runs the family business. He is a consistent man, and every day, he drinks tea from one specific stall on the highway, a stall he never goes into. While Arun’s son, Aditya, has created an app and seeks funding for his start-up, his withdrawn daughter, Amrita, questions her sexuality and identity. Indira struggles to manage the changing winds of her family’s lives and the chaotic packing of the home they all live in. Hired to help with the packing is Door2Door moving company, run by Irfan, who is the childhood best friend of the house’s cook, Reshma. The house’s door man, Jeetendra, has been in love with Reshma for many years but hasn’t had the courage to confess his feelings and grows insecure and jealous of Reshma and Irfan’s rekindled friendship. Amidst the chaos of romantic entanglements, personal agendas and the pending timeline of needing to vacate the home in four days, Indira discovers a will for the home that states any profit from it belongs to Kamal, the son of Prabhakar’s brother, Sudhakar. Before his death, Prabhakar had signed a will, in Sudhakar and Kusum’s presence, that states that he is taking the action because Arun is adopted. This news throws Arun into a tailspin and fractures his relationship with the entire family, especially Kusum. Arun is deeply hurt and leaves the house while all the other members begin to question their relationships and personal identities. Daunted by the deposit needed for their new flat, Aditya starts interviewing for a corporate job, behind his wife, Divya’s back. Amrita’s secret relationship threatens to destroy everything she knows and believes about herself. After a fight with Irfan, Jeetendra leaves Gulmohar without a word, and Reshma frantically searches for him. After a long night of introspection, confessions and revelations, all the members of the family are curious to choose and decide the way forward for themselves.

On Indira’s insistence, Arun finds himself entering the tea stall he visits every day and speaking to the owner - the man who happens to be his biological father. Unbeknownst to his relationship with Arun, the tea stall owner describes the meaning of parenthood, which leads Arun back to his chosen family, accepting his parents as flawed but human.