Right off the mark, let's get one thing out of the way. Nishabd is not Lolita. Make sure that you've got that salient point etched into the very fibre of your being. Unfortunately, no one shared this nugget of information with us before we watched the film, and we went in expecting a Lolita.
Nishabd is not Lolita, and indeed, Ram Gopal Varma never claimed that it was. What is it then? Very briefly, at the beginning, Varma appears to be headed down the same highway as Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne. In the galaxy of human obsessions and perversities, only Nabokov....