Synopsis
The story takes place during one evening in Aruna Chaturvedi and Dolon Sen’s attractive apartment in an up-market Mumbai suburb. The two women have lived together for many years and have made a comfortable if not exciting life for themselves, even though they are temperamentally very different.
Aurna is a professor of Indology and Sanskrit. She is highly educated, and has traveled to several international seminars and conferences. She is still rather beautiful, but a bit of a prude according to her friends. Aruna is actually a bit austere and conservative. Though capable of deep affection, she cannot show her feelings easily. Unlike her, Dolon, who has a highly paid job in a bank, is bubbly, affectionate, and demonstrative. She tends to be plump and is always trying unsuccessfully, to lose weight. Dolon shows her love by touching, hugging and kissing her friends. At one point, this even leads to a misunderstanding between the two women. When Aruna gets an award for a short story she has written about a lesbian, Dolon feels that it is her that Aruna is targeting!
They have another friend, Subhadra Parekh. Subhadra is a journalist. She lives life to the hilt and is almost ageless, or pretends to be. She wears jazzy clothes, showing off her figure, and lives with her boyfriend with whom she has a stormy and abusive relationship. She seems to be living at a high all the time, but when asked if she is happy, Subhadra is at a loss to answer. Subhadra walks into Dolon and Aruna’s apartment one evening with an overnight bag after she has had one of her perennial quarrels with her boyfriend who has abused her physically. Aruna was trying to decipher some old texts for a book that she is writing, while Dolon was at a bit of a loose end and was trying to draw her friend into a conversation. Both were waiting for their fourth friend Meera Rao, who is coming from Taj mahal Hotel along with her boyfriend Peter, to join them on her birthday.
However, the one topic that they avoid, as if by tacit agreement, is old age – what is going to happen to them, who is going to look after them, and where their life is going to go after this. On the surface, they seem like young girls – gay, and without a care in the world. Dolon and Subhadra drink wine, a little too much of it, and try to persuade Aruna to have some as well. But, what comes through in spite of the laughter and the chatter, is their deep-down desperation and loneliness.
What unfolds before the two friends hitherto wrapped up in their own personal histories of loneliness and betrayal, is the horrific terrorist attack that took place at Tajmahal Hotel and other places in South Mumbai on the night of 26th November, 2008. As they watch in stunned silence, the TV anchor’s voice fades out and gives way to Moonlight Sonata, which is heard playing softly in the background. The two friends are united once again, this time in a shared grief that engulfs them both.