This is an amazingly woven together tale of four generations of women, that looks to begin with as if it were stories barely connected together via characters, but comes together surprisingly towards the end, surprisingly not only in the way it does after meandering all around like a river in no hurry to flow to the ocean and takes its time turning around every which way, but also because by then one had given up on almost the most endearing character - and too, the way it becomes suddenly the story of four generations of women intertwined not only by their mother to daughter links but also by their individual struggles suddenly linked in a whole.
More surprising, and satisfying, than anything at this coming together of the generations is how the great grandmother suddenly is a personality of her own again, rather than a pathetic poor woman in a village who managed to send her daughter to city to college - albeit a huge part of the satisfaction is the letter the grandmother wrote to her granddaughter being not lost after all, but read by bother mother and daughter, bringing them together as never before, and more than the two at that. This letter uniting the four generations, and making the younger two aware of the older two left behind in India, as part of their own selves, is perhaps the gem that sets the piece off in its finale.
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April 24, 2016.
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