All three women though get their much-deserved happy endings.

Ira on the other hand has her set of tragedies too. Anna does have nightmare fueled 6 years, but even then, she manages to fall in love and grows up to be an alluring and charming girl. It maintains a level of happiness and hope about it. While that premise may seem like it leads to some high drama and thrills, Dear Maya never gets dark or grim. Anna has a panic attack of sorts, but all her innocent guilt can’t stop Maya from disappearing into obscurity. But their seemingly harmless idea of fun, goes wrong, when Maya get convinced by her paramour to the extent that she decides to go meet him in Delhi. So the girls decide they’ll write hopelessly romantic letters to the lady in black just add colour to all their lives. Anna’s mother informs them of Maya’s tragic past. She has two huge dogs as company and a local help that looks like the female version of Igor from the Dracula stories. Maya’s the dark, shady figure who lives in a dilapidated old house. The story starts off in the quaint environs of Shimla where school girls Anna (Madiha Imam) and Ira (Shreya Chaudhary) decide the only way to get rid of their listless feelings was to write prank letters to their mysterious neighbor Maya Devi. But they do spin an interesting yarn, like an old granny tale. You know love letters, dolls and bird cages aren’t going to change the world. Just a plain vanilla story of three women reclaiming their lives and finding out the world isn’t all that bad.

The story is pure fluff, there’s no womb trembling insights in here. Two seemingly naïve girls in Shimla write letters to their reclusive neighbor Maya Devi (Koirala) in an attempt to stir some Shah Rukh Khan type love in her life. Manisha Koirala’s new film, Dear Maya builds on these jaded but engaging ideas. Once you see them, you appreciate the charm and candour associated with them. But that’s exactly the charm of these old-world ideas. We live in an age when concepts like love, letters and innocence seem like old library nostalgia rather than real-life facts. Quick take: Happy and fluffy film on love and letters

Maya 2017 review