..Point of View..
Synopsis: How to deal with a marriage arranged when one was a child of twelve? What are the answers to the whys and what-ifs of one personal history in a context of general female disempowerment? How to resolve the key conflict of a displaced life after years of nomadic life abroad? Chandra Siddan, a Canadian immigrant, returns to Bangalore, India after 12 years' absence with these questions. Long divorced and newly remarried, she enquires into the reasons for her early first marriage arranged in the mid 70s by her Hindu urban middle-class family and confronts her parents and relatives with her lost childhood, while also presenting them her new husband. Reuniting with her daughter, Smruthi (now in her twenties), Chandra finds her refreshingly liberated. But the life of her parents’ teenage servant, Sudha, shows that that the past is anything but over. Simultaneously a family drama and a social history, "Remembrance of Things Present" rejects a reactionary notion of "home" and theorizes global female migrant labour as an anti-odyssey, a journey without a return.
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