GOLDFISH: An Intimate Exploration of Family, Dementia, and Dysfunction
Observed from a lens of progressing dementia, Goldfish (2023) is a complex story of a mother and daughter’s emotional conflict, of diaspora and community, of music and joy.
From the start of the film Goldfish, one is presented with a feeling of a great distance between mother Sadhana (Deepti Naval) and daughter Anamika (Kalki Koechlin), though it’s unclear how long they have been separated. The daughter arrives in London with her luggage and goes straight up the stairs to her room—which, through the course of the film, is shown in blue gloom. As she climbs, her mother asks if she will have tea. Tea becomes a continuing motif in the film: despite the underlying atmosphere of emotional conflict, tea symbolizes a practice followed with timely regularity, a time for contemplation, for meaningful talk, and as something brewed exactly to taste.
In her room, Anamika starts a conversation with her dead father. This is the start of more conversations interspersed throughout the film, with voiceovers over a dark screen. These conversations convey the unresolved grief of a daughter who must cling to the memory of one parent to confront the rocky relationship she faces with the other.
We learn that Anamika has only come to London as response to neighbour Lakshmi’s (Bharti Patel) alarm call, who had noted signs of forgetfulness in Sadhana, which culminated in a fire in the kitchen due to gas leak. Anamika’s investigation into the incident leads to a serious discussion of the problem with Lakshmi. Sadhna admits her dementia with a tone of dismissal, claiming that it’s an issue she can manage on her own, mitigating her need for her daughter. The conflict is exposed when Sadhana accuses Anamika of returning home because she was jobless and had no money, revealing how they had hated each other for years.
In the screenplay by writer/director Pushan Kripalani and co-writer Arghya Lahiri, this jarring note is deliberately struck quite early in the film. Sadhana remains distant from her daughter, as if distance is the stance she must take through her life. When fraught with stress, Sadhana reveals further secrets in bits and pieces, sometimes with reminiscent calm, other times with anguished stress: how she had never wished to be married; how her marriage compelled her to migrate to England, a foreign country, foreign to her beloved traditions of Indian classical music; how she wished to abandon Anamika as a baby by leaving her in a pram on Clifton Downs; how painful to her was the father-daughter alliance which isolated her, filling her with antagonism, and the wish to hurt back. It is these outbursts of confused hurt and spite that compel Anamika to take from Lakshmi (a retired NHS nurse) a bottle of tranquillising drops which she uses, not only for emergencies as cautioned by Lakshmi, but to “make her mother less like she really is.”
There is a sad serenity in her movements as she walks early mornings through the house to the rhythm of a classical raga, reaches up to touch a sacred object, looks out at her garden, makes tea. She invokes a centeredness which appears to come from her love, practice, and the teaching of music—as if music has been her only saviour.
Despite her torment as wife and mother, Naval allows the character of Sadhana to exude moments of gentle calm and an impassive distance. There is a sad serenity in her movements as she walks early mornings through the house to the rhythm of a classical raga, reaches up to touch a sacred object, looks out at her garden, makes tea. She invokes a centeredness which appears to come from her love, practice, and the teaching of music—as if music has been her only saviour. The music is natural and unobtrusive, drawing the viewer into its rhythm, much like Naval’s naturalness as an actor, who appears to have been left free to evolve her role according to her own understanding of the situation.
Anamika is alert to this music and to her mother’s movements in her blue-gloom bedroom, tensely wondering if this is calm or a pause that will end in forgetfulness.
Anamika is ubiquitous through the film in her search for answers. She rummages feverishly through her mother’s personal belongings, looking for her will. When she finds it, Anamika sees with dismay that their house has been willed to a stranger. Anamika tracks down this stranger, feeling an imminent sense of danger, only to discover him to be their street’s grocery shop owner, Ashwin Rana (Rajit Kapur). As a delivery man, Rana knows the householders, and has developed an affection for Sadhana over time.
Calmly, Rana offers to notarize the transfer of the house back in Anamika name. Through a simple detail of sensitive caring, Rana also teaches her how to make light tea for her mother in the way that she likes it best.
While this transfer of claim may seem too easily done, Rana represents a silent presence and support a diasporic community, who can know and understand things without intruding. He extends this understanding from Sadhana to Anamika as well.
It is through neighbours such as Lakshmi and others that Anamika discovers the understated affection her mother enjoys from other Indian immigrants in the vicinity. A subtle element of atithi devo bhava—the guest is equivalent to god—underlies Sadhana’s dealings with these friends as they come and go. Her tea tray, her warm smile and her well-draped saris become a familiar sight throughout the film.
Kripalani uses both humour and intensity to explore these neighbourly relationships. It is through Lakshmi that Anamika understands Sadhana’s deteriorating condition, and considers Lakshmi’s suggestion of staying with her mother for a few months. It is through her mother’s empathetic narration that Anamika learns of the difficulties faced by Lakshmi as an immigrant from Kerala: how she was sold to an Indian family who were slave-drivers, till she walked out one night in the middle of a large party hosted by her owners. It was the NHS that saved her, Sadhana declares. Yet, in an interesting twist, when Anamika finds her mother secreting away her valuables, Sadhana’s dementia comes through in her bipolar response when she proclaims: Lakshmi is a thief.
In a climactic moment, sounds of distress lead Anamika to her mother’s toilet where she finds her sitting naked, unable to move her arm. Realizing her inability to help, Anamika runs down the street, alerting her mother’s friends. There is a tender moment when Lakshmi wraps a sheet around Sadhana’s naked shoulders and gives her alcohol in a glass to accelerate blood circulation. The bottle of alcohol is then passed around and each of the neighbours has a swig, including a disoriented Anamika, too. This is a deciding moment pointing towards the need for institutional care, handled with deft lightness.
Under Kripalani’s direction, there is a slow and languorous quality to the camera when it hovers over Sadhana, highlighting the beats of her life: the silences, her music, her moments in the garden with her plants and a visitor fox which she feeds, her ritual tea timings, her independence yet blithe dependence on people as they unobtrusively watch over her life. The camera also focuses unflinchingly on the mother-daughter relationship as it moves from venting old hostilities to moments of tenderness. This shift is not possible without the venting, for the poisons must be out before dementia sets in, before her daughter’s own life can take a turn with an offer for employment in a foreign country. The movement from hostility to venting; from venting to absorbing, sharing, clarity and compassion are brought on rapidly through the enormity of problems faced and the onset of dementia.
The camera lingers on the two as Anamika goes through word association with her mother, both sitting on the grass in their garden. There is a tender moment as Anamika pleats her mother’s sari for her before tucking it into her petticoat.
In Goldish, Kripalani confronts the oncoming reality of a disease and a preparedness for it, and the complexity of inner realities that need freedom for articulation, unshackled by societal roles and expectations.
Perhaps the most poignant moment in the film is when Anamika riffles through her mother’s saris, by an open suitcase on her bed. As she parts the hangers, she finds pasted behind on the cupboard wall photos of herself and her mother’s friends. Each is denoted by name and relationship: Miku (her mother’s pet name for her) is marked ‘Daughter’, Lakshmi is marked ‘Friend’. Ashwin has no marking.
In one touching fragment of memory, Sadhana narrates an incident to Anamika when she heard the sitar maestro Ravi Shankar play in India. Dissatisfied with a full-scale concert hall, Shankar had moved to a small school auditorium to play for a limited audience, a performance that continued through the night, so that the audience scarcely knew when dawn came. By this point in the film, the viewer also notes that Anamika’s crackling blank screen voice-overs with her father have ceased.
So sensitive is Naval’s performance in Goldfish that she conveys the arrival of full-blown dementia through her eyes and body alone. Instead of the earlier sad serenity, there is now a new inertness. Her previously aware eyes turn blank. She spits out ugly truths when she must, yet can return to a placid calm, unruffled by all that life has revealed.
Koechlin, meanwhile, moves rapidly through situations that could be overwhelming for a young person. But her character has been hardened by poverty and other struggles in her life. Anamika’s hard edge is reflected in her feverish search for Sadhana’s will, or when she medicates her mother, even when the situation does not demand it. And yet, because of this hardened edge, the film demands and presents an emotional understatement in Koechlin’s performance.
In an interview with Radio Nasha, Naval spoke of her role as Sadhana as difficult, layered, intense and complex—but as just the opportunity she had been waiting for. Naval’s own mother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and she had her opportunity to care for her. Theirs was a close relationship, yet there was a phase when she saw her mother as alien, as someone whose thoughts, perceptions, and decisions she could no longer understand. While the phase passed and mother and daughter could bond again like never before, the situation offered Naval a glimpse of what alienation and distance felt like.
The film’s metaphor of the goldfish brings out the hardened positions and the distance both Sadhana and Anamika must travel to bridge the gap. Anamika had wanted a pup as a pet. Her mother bought her a goldfish instead. One day, Sadhana, in full view of her daughter, flushes the goldfish down the commode. The goldfish had died, but Sadhana told Anamika that it had still been alive. Now, closeted together in the present, the mother finally confesses that the goldfish had actually died; she had only lied to hurt her daughter.
Kripalani also explained in the interview above, “Many things can happen in an instant, both in the mother and daughter, that are based on fear, cruelty or love. This film takes the position that love is a considered response, not an instinctive one.”
“With dementia,” Kripalani adds, “it is not simply an issue of disappearing memory. In fact, your identity lives with the people you have connected with, with the people you have collided with. In a way your identity is held in trust with these very people. A part is held by your lover, a part by your daughter, a part with other relationships that are created around you. Somehow even while you disappear, even while you are ephemeral, those parts are held concretely by others.
Goldfish helps to stir up a larger, important conversation about dementia. Earlier identified with senility, it is now clear that the condition is the result of changes in certain regions of the brain, which cause nerve cells and their connections to stop working properly. In most cases, the underlying causes are unknown. According to WHO figures, currently there are more than 55 million people with dementia worldwide, with nearly 10 million new cases added every year. It is also one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people globally, with women bearing the major burden of caregiving. Awareness about a disease helps both caregivers and the affected know more about it, articulate their needs, seek help when required.
In Goldish, Kripalani confronts the oncoming reality of a disease and a preparedness for it, and the complexity of inner realities that need freedom for articulation, unshackled by societal roles and expectations. This is a complex story of mother and daughter, of diaspora and community, of music and joy. It explores the raw and vulnerable ruthlessness, as well as the compassion of love, that can cleanse, heal, and transform that which has been ripped bare.
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Neera Kashyap has published a book of short stories for young adults, Daring to Dream (Rupa & Co.) and contributed to several prize-winning children’s anthologies. As a writer of poetry, haikai, short fiction and book reviews, her work has appeared in Kitaab, Mad in Asia Pacific, Spillwords, Papercuts & Setu Mag; the Indian journals include Indian Quarterly, Out of Print Magazine & Blog, RIC Journal (Indo-French), Guftugu, Teesta Review, Usawa Literary Review, Muse India, The Bombay Literary Magazine and Yugen Quest Review. She lives in Delhi. You can find her on Twitter: @NeeraK7 and Instagram: @neerakashyap.
