92 C. S. BHAGYA
a great part of the film focuses on laying out individual portraits through fleshed out
story arcs that present each character as inexorably moulded by the travails of their
particular social context. None of them has had it easy. Frieda’s personal struggle
with her sexuality, which results in her coming out of the closet leading her family to
immediately disown her, seems commensurate with the struggles of Nargis against
the faceless corporations bent on trampling the powerless. On the other face of the
coin to Nargis – who protests from the grassroots – Suranjana’s personal life suffers
under the onslaught of her ever-more demanding career, as she tries to straddle her
roles as a ruthlessly ambitious professional figure and a responsible mother in the
absence of her husband.
Her daughter Maya suffers the brunt of the fallout of her ambitions; the film depicts
this emotional distance between the two as physical distance – a difference of
verticality and depth. Suranjana climbs greater heights – in a consciously ironic riff
on the phrase – while staying at Frieda’s mansion: unable to access a stable zone of
connectivity for her mobile network in order to smoothly continue her professional
communications, she is found atop a tree in the garden cradled dangerously between
two branches while she finishes a business call. Her daughter, on the other hand, finds
her way to a small basement space beneath the wooden platforms that lead into the
house, where she draws with exuberance on the dirty stretches of wall, colourful
chalk sketches of unfulfilled childhood desires – not only the desire to be reunited
with her father who is constantly airborne, but also her mother, who is nearly always
inaccessible even when physically present.
Lakshmi, when not at the chores around the big house, appears to spend her spare
time trashing bars – one bar in particular, belonging to a local goon responsible for
killing her brother eight years ago. Despite the years, the wound is still fresh.
Lakshmi has sworn not to rest until she has avenged her dead brother whose murder
she witnessed. In one heart-stopping moment in the film, Maya, a budding
photographer, while looking for new objects to capture through her personal mobilephone lens, stumbles across a loaded gun wrapped in newspaper tucked away behind
steel jars in the kitchen. It transpires that Lakshmi has concealed it there in