Director: Pushan Kripalani
Writers: Pushan Kripalani, Arghya Lahiri
Cast: Deepti Naval, Kalki, Bharti Patel, Rajit Kapur, Gordon Warnecke, Shanaya Rafaat, Ravin J Ganatra
Duration: 102 minutes
Available in: Theatres
Goldfish opens with a 30-something Anamika (Kalki Koechlin) storming back into her childhood home. “Let’s just get through this, shall we?” she hisses. The recipient of her curt greeting is Sadhana Tripathi (Deepti Naval), her mother. The older woman, who lives alone, is in the early stages of dementia; she is no longer as self-sufficient as she’d like. A kitchen fire forces Anamika to return after what seems like years of estrangement. Like most people of her age, Sadhana is in denial; she claims her new dictaphone is for the music she teaches, and that her notepad is a calendar. The mother and daughter never got along. Anamika misses her father, an Englishman who died when she was 10. She resents her mother, a former Hindustani classical vocalist who was never prepared for the life she chose – a love marriage, an alien country, loneliness, and (single) parenthood.
Kalki Koechlin as ‘Ana’ and ‘Miku’
At the onset of the pandemic, Anamika finds herself stranded between not only the past and the future, but also Western pragmatism and Indian idealism. For ‘Ana’ Fields, the British-born academic with financial problems, there is no time for sentimentality – she plans to mortgage the house, put her mother in specialized care and take a job in Basel. But for ‘Miku,’ the second-generation immigrant with unresolved trauma, perhaps Sadhana is better off in the extended joint family that is her ethnic London neighbourhood. The prodigal daughter senses that, for the South Asian community that has protected and sustained Sadhana, she is a foreign villain who has no qualms abandoning a parent. She is here to “wrap things up,” a term that reduces the plurality of baggage to the singularity of a suitcase.