It's a jolly holiday with death.

Yama, god of death, is a stock comic figure in Indian cinema.  He's a stout, jolly fellow with distinctive headgear and spectacular facial hair, and he lives in a magical realm with his helpers and a large buffalo.  He's like Santa Claus bringing the gift of passage to the next life to . . . everybody, really.  And that is why we have Yamaleela (1994).

As the movie opens Yama (Kaikala Satyanarayana) and his assistant Chitragupta (Bramhanandam) are hanging out in the afterlife doing vaudeville bits, but on Earth, Suraj (Ali) is having a much harder time.  He's a carefree scamp who owes money to a lot of people, but while leading his debtors on a Benny Hillesque chase through town doesn't bother him, this time he's also made his mother (Manju Bhargavi) cry.  When the family servant reveals that the family is actually royalty, reduced to Jane Austen poverty because of debt, Suraj vows to make enough money to buy back the family castle.  (Said castle is surprisingly affordable; the specific figure given is one crore rupees, which works out to about 130,000 dollars.  But Suraj is poor enough that it's still an impossible task.)

While trying to earn the needed money, Suraj runs afoul of the local organized crime syndicate.  Syndicate may be a bit too generous, actually; there are two gangs in town.  The "bat batch" are all men who use hockey sticks as weapons and are led by the cartoonishly evil Thota Ramudu (Tanikella Bharani.)  The "chain batch" are young, attractive women who use bicycle chains as weapons and are led by Lilly (Indraja), who isn't as violent as Thota Ramudu but is a terrible, terrible person.  Suraj instantly falls in love with Lilly, and tries to earn money from Thota Ramudu, but he is doubly disappointed and winds up standing in the rain all night only to collapse in the morning.

And that's when his luck changes.  Chitragupta drops the Bhavishyavaani, a book which records the future of every human being, and it falls right on Suraj.  When he opens the book he sees lottery numbers.  The next day, he takes his lottery winnings to the race track, and soon he's rich enough to buy the castle, with enough left over to live in luxury and toss the occasional huge stack of money at nearby gangsters.

Meanwhile, Yama and Chitragupta have been stripped of their divine powers and sent to Earth to retrieve the book.  They have thirty days to find it before they are exiled to Earth forever, and it will not be an easy task, especially since Yama keeps getting distracted by the pleasures of Earthly life, by which I mean ice cream.  And because Yama doesn't have the book, he can't be sure when anyone is supposed to die, so he refuses to take any souls.  That's good news for Suraj, who has the book and therefore knows that his mother is definitely going to die very soon, unless he can find a way to save her.

So, can Suraj save his mother?  Does Yama restore the balance of life and death to the universe?  Will Lilly become at least slightly less terrible?  You already know the  answers.  This is not a deep or complicated movie; it's a fluffy and comfortable and very silly movie about death.