New Delhi, Sept. 29 -- Come Sunday, my mother would never want to miss a show of old-style Malayalam tear-jerkers on TV. Not the New Wave ones from the 1970s and 80s but the older-style weepies with tales of terminal illness, noble suffering and operatic loss that ended sometimes with a suicide or two. She would sit with big, fat tears streaming down her face, framed by the eerie blue light, absently kneading a bowl of roti maavu.

I think now that she may have been doing something more than crying at the screen. The weepies were perhaps providing the only available vessel for the week's accumulation of unnamed pinpricks: the nasty colleague, the interminable commute, the sagging financials, the unwell spouse. A place to put all the small...