The Forgotten - 2

It is ironic and strangely self-fulfilling that the titular character is relegated to the status of a sub-plot in Mira Nair's The Namesake. Ashok and Ashima Ganguli ensconce themselves very snugly in the familiar designs of a snow globe within the real world existence. Ashima's journey from uninformed naiveté to informed pop-philosopher begins with a glorious Hamsadhwani aalaap we hear her singing in her salad days. Nitin Sawhney, in an under-appreciated musical score, uses this same musical scale to underscore the happier moments of her life as charted out by Mira Nair. Time leaves on her a crust of age but Ashok keeps the crustiness from reaching her being. It only precipitates as the occasional pithy observation after Ashok's death - "I know what he was doing in Cleveland, he was teaching me to live alone" to her coworker at the library, "I think we need to move on" to her son. And her story ends as it once began- tanpura in hand, that same Hamsadhwani escaping her lips as if awaiting another beginning, or another end.

That very same Hamsadhwani dominates the background when Nikhil/Gogol discovers his love for architecture in the grand designs of the Taj. There are strains of other scales that creep in, but the music suggests that the source of his creativity is not far from that of his mother's. But Nikhil/Gogol obviously does not know what Sawhney and Nair do. He spends high-school in secret rebellion and eventually develops a personality that, he believes, is completely independent of his parents. Of course we do not get to see how this personality is designed, shaped and buffed into being - probably over the years away at college and graduate school. But that part of the story is of no consequence to the bigger picture. Nearly anyone with "hands-on" parents who has traversed the years post adolescence to the mid-twenties can attest to myriad situations that produce a similar end result.

You never know where you are going in life until you know where you've been, and in a world that loves circularity the faster and further you run away from something the quicker you find it staring you in the face. Ashok's death gifts Nikhil/Gogol a mirror of origin in which the image he see's is certainly not the fairest of them all. And when Maxine visit's him at the funeral rites he pulls away. Maxine's alienation is reflected in an obvious visual metaphor- where the entire funeral party is dressed in white, she is dressed in black. His inability to see gray results in a few ill-advised turns, but this time around he has learnt to deal, that this too shall pass and that in the words of Gloria Gaynor "He will survive". We leave him reentering from whence his father and Dostoevsky said we all came, Gogol's Overcoat. There is such hopeless beauty in circularity, is there not?

P.S.1: This was prompted by a Saturday afternoon viewing of the movie.
P.S.2: Ashok Ganguli and Irrfan Khan deserve a separate post. Outside of Kannadasan's lines I am yet to see anything more simple yet profound than his character.