Do you go back to the song, that specific song… which makes you feel like you are carrying a stone on your chest? a solid lump on your throat? That makes you feel like choking you with sadness… or are you normal?

I did speak about Sapta Sagaradaache Ello – Side A on Podcast. But, Side B slapped me real hard. The movie and the album. Especially this song… “USIRE” sung by Sanjith Hegde, with Dhananjay Ranjan’s lyrics adding pain to the genius composition of Charanraj M R. It’s not just a background song. It’s a confrontation… between what you lost and what you never got to say.

Charan Raj didn’t compose Usire like a song; he builds it like a wound. The arrangement is minimal… feels like pieces of a broken mirror. Every beat, every pause, feels calculated to remind you of absence. There’s a moment where the percussion disappears entirely and you realize silence itself is part of the rhythm. That’s the genius of Charan Raj. He understands that grief doesn’t need orchestration; it needs space. The strings swell only to retreat. The song sounds exactly like someone who wants to cry but can’t afford to anymore.

The instrumentation in Usire is heartbreak made audible through restraint. Charan Raj builds the song around a soft, hesitant, almost afraid to take space. Subtle string layers in the interlude breathe in and out like sighs, with the voice that drags sorrow across every bar. There’s no heavy percussion, no grand buildup… just textures that feel like thoughts echoing in an empty room. Even the ambient reverb feels intentional, stretching silence into sound. Every note weighed down by emotion. Perfectly mirroring Rakshit Shetty’s emptiness or heavy heart in the visuals.

Hemanth M Rao (Director of SSE) split this story into two halves for a meaning. Side A is a promise and in Blue; Side B is the post-mortem and in red, raw, real like how life is. When the film begins again, it feels like revisiting a dream after it’s already burned down. Usire arrives right at that intersection… where guilt, grief, and love collapse into one indistinguishable feeling. Manu comes out of Prison and goes in search of Priya – his lost love. He finds her… Married and as a Mom to a son. Manu burns in heart-break… One part, he lost her. Another part, to see the kind of life she’s leading. She wanted a house near a beach, where the sounds of waves crashing and the sea breeze are constant around. But, she’s stuck in a miserably small house, where there’s no fresh air or light. It pains extra for him to see her rot infront of his eyes.

Dhananjay Ranjan’s lyrics are deceptively simple. But they’re written in the language of heartbreak… quiet, unadorned, unpretentious. “Usire… nee illa andre, nan yenu?” (“My breath… what am I without you?”); it’s not poetry trying to impress you. It’s a man gasping for meaning. The lyrics, though difficult to find a full, translated version for, convey a sense of love lost and the pain of separation, with “Usire” meaning “breath” or “life,” symbolizing the lead’s emotional state. It can be understood as a plea to a lost love and a reflection on how the absence of that person has become a source of immense pain and sadness. Every word feels handpicked to echo the emotional decay of the film’s protagonist. The writing screams and trembles. And that trembling is what makes it hurt more.

There’s something painfully beautiful about Sanjith Hegde’s voice in Usire. He doesn’t sing like a playback singer, he sings like someone reading a letter they shouldn’t have kept. His vocal texture is yearning, grainy, fragile, too human. You can hear the tremor, the hesitation, the breath that doesn’t fully make it to the next line. He never oversings… that restraint is what kills you. In every “Usire…” you can hear the exhaustion of a man still carrying love like a punishment. The song becomes the unspoken dialogue between two people separated not by distance, but by time itself.

I absolutely love the way the song ends. With train sounds overlapping Priya’s words. Like it’s a mix-tape of emotions what Manu has in habd right now. It’s all that he has! In an interview, Hemanth told that the cassette is the only thing that keeps him out in jail and after coming out the cassette is his jail. Big ups to the crazy synth on this song, by Charanraj and Gautham Hebbar – who programmed the song and the guitar on the postlude by Sunil Silvester.

The cruel trick Usire plays on you is that it ends… but it doesn’t feel like it ended. You’re left with that stone still sitting on your chest, that unexhaled breath. The song lingers like a phantom limb. You can’t touch it, but you can still feel it.

Some songs heal. Usire doesn’t. It just reminds you what being human costs.

See you soon on another blog post 🙂
Your’s truly,
Pattukkaaran <3